Just a quick notice to let everyone know that there is a new version of Kontrollkit available. There are some required bug fixes to the formerly new python backup script and some Solaris compatible changes to the various my.cnf files. You can download the new version here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads, or here: http://code.google.com/p/kontrollkit/

Quick note to let our users know that there was an XML tag closure error on the “alert_22″ subroutine in the “bin/kontroll-reporter-cli.pl” script. This does not affect the webapp portion of Kontrollbase – only reports generated via the command line reporter script. It is not a fatal error but will cause the XML file to not validate – however you’ll still get the information in the report. If you’re interested in the code changes, you can see the diff by clicking here and scrolling to line 3110.

A simple “svn update” will fix this issue or you can wait until the next formal packaged release.

I’ve been wanting to write a backup script for a while now that does the following: reads the partition information for the directory that you are backing up into and computes the used/available/percentage-available space. Then it reads the total data size from the MySQL tables and ensures that you have enough space on disk (for the backup file and the compressed version of the file during processing) before it starts the backup. This allows you to run the backup script without worrying that it will fill up the partition in the middle of the night and trigger a disk space alert on your server (which inevitably gets you woken up with a call or txt from the monitoring team).

So this new script does just that – it makes sure that you have enough room on disk before running the backup. If enabled in the config it will compress the file. It also does file pruning when configured to do so – this lets the script manage how many days of backup files to keep on disk so that the files get rotated out on a daily basis. Email reporting is also included. The script is called kt-backup-ai.py

You can find the script in the newest version of Kontrollkit: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-kontrollkit , or on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/kontrollkit/

If you have been wondering why the overview and graphs pages say “no data to display” on the graphs when you first install Kontrollbase, it’s because there’s no data in the database being returned from the queries that generate the graphs – this is because a new install has no data to graph. This has been fixed for new installs by generating blank data to display so that a new install has regular looking graphs with “.01″ data, instead of blank and confusing squares where graphs should be. You can find this change on revision 296 and up.

If you’ve noticed that your recent upgrade did not go as planned and now the application does not load – please check this page: http://wiki.kontrollsoft.com/wiki/UpgradingReleases for notes on upgrades between versions. Typically you need to execute a SQL file against the current schema to bring it up to date. If you have any questions please contact support.

I’m pleased to announce the first release of Kontrollcomm – “The Server Command Automation Interface” is a web-based application that automates remote command execution on linux and unix based servers. There are three main areas of the application: Hosts, Templates, and Commands. The use is very simple: all of your hosts are setup in the Host Control tab, and they have templates associated with them. Templates are comprised of a list of commands that are to be run. It’s uses range from automating day to day sysadmin work, dba work, system reporting, server deployments, and any server task that benefits from automation. The application comes with default templates for MySQL master/slave servers, Tomcat, Resin, Apache, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and many other server roles. You can add an unlimited number of hosts, templates, and associated commands.

All of the client/server interaction is done over the web, with encryption and authentication (if using HTTPS and Apache AuthType), so no complex setup is needed other than to put the client script on the server. This method allows you to remotely manage command execution from a simple web interface – it automates the process of reporting (and other task executions) so that you no longer have to manually run reports and commands on the local server. Everything is managed in a centralized web based interface. Server administration and reporting is now more efficient.

• You can read more about the application here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-kontrollcomm
• Read the documentation here: http://wiki.kontrollsoft.com
• Screenshots are available here: http://kontrollsoft.com/screenshots
• A live demo available here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-kontrollcomm#demo

This is a small revision and will only be available through SVN. However, it is an important one to speak about as it solves a former issue when running the application on a screen smaller than 1024px wide. While most users may not have noticed this since they have larger monitors it has been noticed on some netbooks or when having the browser run in smaller dimensions than fullscreen. The Analytics tab and the Overview page – particularly the Analytics tab since it has many sub-tabs for navigation, were being cut off with no sideways scroller. This proved to be a simple fix once I was aware of the appropriate option in the ExtJS API. So, consider issue #102 resolved for good!

The changes will, as usual, be included in the next formal package release if you do not want to update via SVN right now.