[Announce] Monit 5.2

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

Hi, everyone!

We have just released Monit 5.2. You can download the new release from:

http://mmonit.com/monit/download/

To simplify things we now also provide prebuilt binaries of Monit. So you can 
either build Monit from source or download a binary for your system. The 
binaries have OpenSSL 1.0.0a static linked and support SSL without OpenSSL 
having to be installed on your system.


Release information:
====================


New features and improvements

* Added support for monitoring processes without pidfile using pattern
  matching. You can use POSIX regular expressions or string matching
  process name with arguments as provided by the 'ps' utility. If the
  pattern matches multiple processes, the first match is used.
  Example:
      check process debian 
            matching "/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx .*deb.vmx"

* Added support for swap monitoring. Example:
      check system myserver
          if swap usage > 25% then alert

* Allow to override the default action when service doesn't exist. The
  default action is restart, it can be customized with following
  statement:
    if [does] not exist [[<x> times within] <y> cycles] then <action1>

* Monit automatically registers credentials with M/Monit now, so it's
  not necessary to set it manually in M/Monit anymore. To disable
  credentials registration:
     set mmonit https://monit:address@hidden:8443/collector
         and register without credentials

* Added memcache protocol test. Thanks to Sébastien Debrard for the
  patch.

* Added openssl FIPS to Monit httpd. Thanks to Lior Okman for the
  patch.

* The 'check system' can now use start/stop program statements too.

* Added the option to set the "Reply-To" mail header in mail-format.

* Display backtrace on error if debug mode is enabled (requires
  backtrace support in libc)


Bug fixes

* Show real process uptime - formerly the presented uptime was based
  on create and modify timestamp of process' pidfile which provides
  invalid uptime if the pidfile is replaced and process keeps running
  with original PID. Thanks to Nima Chavooshi for report.

* When user triggered action for some service (such as stop) and
  before that action completed user triggered another action for the
  same service (such as start), the second action has been ignored.
  Monit will not accept new action and return temporary error until
  the previous action completed.

* If process resource usage gathering failed, retry next cycle as the
  error can be temporary.

* Fixed sporadic failures when SSL was used.

* ICMP echo test (ping):
     - fixed sporadic false positive/negative
     - removed limit of 20 pings per cycle

* DNS test:
     - accept NS root request refusal as correct response because
       server reacts on request
     - accept authority answer as alternative to record. Thanks to
       Nick Osborn for patch

* RADIUS test fix. Thanks to Alan DeKok for patch.

* M/Monit heartbeat is fully independent of testing cycle now to
  prevent false positive when service test blocks.

* Fixed SMTP STARTTLS protocol, required for servers that adhere
  strictly to RFC 3207 4.2. Thanks to Lorenzo A. Sedano Cadinanos for
  patch.

* Service name:
     - allow the service name to start with "/"
     - fixed handling of the service names which contain "/" in the
       name in Monit web interface. Thanks to Artyom Khafizov for
       patch.
  
* When 'check system' is not defined, monit adds it automatically
  using hostname for service name. If existing service was defined
  with the same service name (matching hostname), monit didn't added
  the entry and reported confusing error message pointing to the end
  of configuration file. Thanks to Thorsten Kampe for report and help.

* Remove extra NL characters from message when resource succeeded
  event is sent. The extra NL character may break the mail headers.
  Thanks to Hanno Boeck for patch.

* Fixed display of cpu user/system/wait usage which temporarily
  displayed -1.0% between two monitoring cycles while cpu monitoring
  was initializing. Thanks to Marcus Muelbuesch for report.

* Fixed display of port response time as -1 if 'monit status' was
  called in the middle of service test.

* Fixed display of service initializing state after monit start or
  reload.

* Fixed MONIT_DESCRIPTION environment variable. Thanks to Marco
  Roeland for patch

* AIX:
     - fixed compilation
     - fixed system load average monitoring
     - fixed ICMP echo test

* Mac OS X:
     - allow monitoring of system-wide load average, cpu and memory
       usage even if
       Monit is running as non-root user

* NetBSD:
     - fixed ICMP echo test


Contact:
========

If you have questions, comments or any other feedback about this
release, please reply to this post.


A big thanks to all who have sent us patches and suggestions and helped us make 
this release.


Best regards from the M/Monit team