[Announce] monit 5.0 beta4

[Martin Pala]

Monit 5.0 beta4 is available:

Download from:
http://tildeslash.com/monit/dist/beta/monit-5.0_beta4.tar.gz

MD5 checksum:    e48942eb5a6753400acd5bf42d0486d8
SHA256 checksum: 
b8e790e0a0851a6f2f1cce7fe613a95d8389eec969a396ec70b1d163b9713163
Change log:      http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/dist/beta/CHANGES.txt

This is a new features and bugfix release which has been tested on the
following platforms:

CentOS 4.7             [x86]
CentOS 5.2             [x86]
Debian 4.0             [x86]
Fedora 9               [x86]
FreeBSD 6.3            [x86 + x64]
FreeBSD 7.0            [x86 + x64]
Mac OS X 10.5.4        [x86 + ppc]
NetBSD 4.0             [x86]
OpenBSD 4.1            [x86]
Solaris 10             [sparc]
OpenSolaris            [sparc]
Ubuntu 8.04            [x64]




Version 5.0 beta4:
------------------

NEW FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS:
* Monit keeps the monitoring state even on monit restart.
  Previously monit dropped the state when it was stopped
  correctly. Services in manual monitoring mode will
  remember the monitoring state across monit restarts. If
  monit is used in cluster, it is recommended to place the
  state file to tmp filesystem so if the primary machine
  will crash and the the spare machine will takover the
  services, the state will be dropped on reboot of the
  crashed machine and the services in manual monitoring
  mode won't be started on reboot. For example the
  "set statefile /tmp/monit.state" can be used to place
  the state file to /tmp/ filesystem.

* Added a protocol test for testing the LMTP protocol. Thanks
  to Fco. Javier Felix for patch.

* Added the start delay option for daemon statement which
  allows to pause Monit on its startup for a while. If the
  monitored services are started by init scripts in parallel
  on system boot, Monit may be too fast and detect that the
  service is not running (yet) and restart the service. Note
  that it's still recommended services to be controlled by
  monit only (don't use init for their startup) which will
  ensure correct startup without need for start delay since
  Monit will have full control of the service. Many users
  start the services from init on boot anyway, so in such case
  this option will solve their problems. Default start delay
  is 0 which corresponds to current behavior. Example syntax
  which will wait one minute on monit start before first
  monitoring cycle:
  --8<--
    set daemon 5 with start delay 60
  --8<--
  Thanks to Fco. Javier Felix for patch.

* Added PAM support for monit http interface authentication.
  Note that PAM is supported on some platforms only such as
  Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD. Monit uses PAM service
  "monit", example monit PAM service for Mac OS X which is
  able to authenticate system users for monit access -
  /etc/pam.d/monit:
  --8<--
    # monit: auth account password session
    auth       sufficient     pam_securityserver.so
    auth       sufficient     pam_unix.so
    auth       required       pam_deny.so
    account    required       pam_permit.so
  --8<--
  And configuration for monitrc which allows only group admins
  to access the http interface:
  --8<--
    set httpd port 2812 allow @admin
  --8<--
  See PAM manual page for details how to configure PAM service
  on your system and available PAM plugins. Thanks to Wilhelm
  Meier for patch.

* Monit resource tests on report details about particular parameter
  on service recovery. Thanks to Lars Kotthoff for patch.

* Set locale to C.

BUGFIXES:
* Make unit in size test optional and default to byte unless
  specified. So it is possible to write, if size > 1000 then ..

* Fix the handling of invalid input files in event queue handler.
  Thanks to Fco.Javier Felix for patch.

* Set the content type to text/html for monit web interface POST
  reposponses. Thanks to Rich Drummond for patch.

* Fixed #23530: configure script will return error if no
  bison, byacc or yacc was found during monit compile time.

* Fix CPU and memory monitoring on Solaris (it was disabled on monit
  start)



Finally, a big thanks to ALL who have contributed work and time to
create this release.