17/08/2009: Mailing List 170809

Dear FreeNATTERS,

I hope this finds you well with your network free of packet loss and servers serving promptly and correctly.

Here in northern Namibia it is sunny (apart from at night) and dusty (even at night). I nearly have a network worth monitoring now… nearly.

The purpose of this update, apart from of course to express my deepest respects to any users, is to pass on two pieces of FreeNATTY news; the amazing and innovative new extras feature (warning: neither amazing nor innovative) and that I’m off on holiday.

= The Extras Package =

In an attempt to provide some additional functionality not catered for by the standard system I am putting together some scripts using the various interfaces to provide some extra features for those slightly more technical users to install and use.

This will primarily consist of some extra tests, alert handlers and API utilities.

These are mostly things which I’ve been asked for in some form and been too scared/incompetent to go about adding them in as core functionality.

The first releases will include things like detailed alerts (full summary of the node and what other alerts are open) and a few alert handlers (such as a syslog one) which are already detailed on the site in the development documentation as examples.

Think Plus Pack but without the plus.

The upside: you can get extra functionality and (I hope) easily tailor the code to your needs.

The downside: they must be manually installed and sometimes configured in code.

The documentation is at http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats/wiki/Extras and they will first appear in the very soon to be released 1.06.0a.

= Holiday =

I’m off on holiday from next week for about a month travelling the highways and byways of Namibia. It should be fun.

This isn’t an invitation to burgle my house rather a warning that bugfixes and support requests may take even longer than usual. Normal haphazard service should resume late September.

For this reason I’m also not merging the new features into beta as promised until after my holiday.

I imagine the forum may also self-destruct with spam.


As always I welcome your comments, suggestions and bugs via the support forum or the feedback link on the website.

Kind regards,

Dave.

FreeNATS Homepage: http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats/
FreeNATS Forum: http://forum.purplepixie.org/
FreeNATS Feedback: http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats/feedback.php
My VSO Blog of Namibia: http://davesboringblog.wordpress.com/

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