[Orca-announce] Much improved Orca 0.24 available

[Blair Zajac]

After many months of improvements, I have finished a new release
of Orca.  This does many of the things people have been requesting,
such as measuring disk space usage and the capability to make
plots with many Ethernet interfaces.  I am including the major
feature release at the end of this message.

To see what Orca can do, check out

http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/4996/orca-example/

To get Orca, go to

http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/4996/pub/

and get orca-0.24.tar.gz.

This version of orca includes the latest version of orcallator, 1.19.

Enjoy,
Blair

PS To continue development of Orca, I'm looking for some people who
would be willing to have a link from my pages to your Orca pages to
show that Orca is being used.



New in Orca version 0.24.
 1) Installation notes.  Due to the way Orca generated image and HTML
    files are named, read the INSTALL file.  Otherwise, you will have
    some left over cruft that will waste disk space and you will have
    to reload all of your source data files.
 2) Orca now runs under older Perls: Perl 5.004_01 or later.
 3) Switch to generate PNGs instead of GIFs.  They take up 1/3 less disk
    space and are created at least 10% faster.  If you want Orca to
    generate GIFs instead of PNGs, give it the -gifs flag.
 4) Read in .gz files using gunzip, .Z files using uncompress, and .bz2
    files with bunzip2.
 5) Add to the plot title the type of the plot (i.e. 'Yearly') in
    every image.
 6) Add a href field for a plot.  This, if defined, appends a HREF to a
    target name letting you point the user to a page to get more
    information.  The default orcallator.cfg has these added to point
    to the new documentation web page
    http://www.geocities.com/~bzking/docs/orcallator.html for all
    orcallator.se recorded data.
 7) Add a new option named base that lets the user specify either a base
    of 1000 or 1024 for autoscaling plots.  This is useful for memory
    (base 1024) vs network (base 1000) measurements and is used in
    generating correctly calculating the base to use in calculating
    the Y axis.
 8) The word logarithmic can now be used for a plot to create a
    logarithmic Y axis scale.
 9) Orca no longer lists all the source files it finds to shorten verbose
    output.  This output is now generated if the verbose level is greater
    than one.
10) Do not overwrite existing HTML files when creating new versions until
    the new version is finished.  This allows people to better view
    existing pages until the new page is completely finished.
11) All generated HTML and image filenames are now created using
    a different set of mappings.  Now
      orcallator -> o
      orca       -> o
      _times_    -> _X_
      _percent_  -> _pct_
      _number_   -> _num_.
    All older installations of Orca will need to be renamed unless you
    want to load in all your data again.  You can perform this renaming
    on your files by running make upgrade, or if you have directories
    that are not normally covered by the Orca install, run
    src/upgrade_installation followed by the list of directories to search
    in.  Pass the -n flag to upgrade_installation if you want to see
    the renames that will be performed without actually performing them.
12) New HTML and image filenames are shorter, which can save 10% in
    disk space on a large installation according to du -k.  Also, now
    plots containing arbitrary many data sources can be plotted without
    exceeding the maximum file lengths.
13) Add locking so that only one Orca can run on a single configuration
    file at one time.
14) Include and require RRDtool 1.0.7.2 and Math::Interpolate 1.05.
    Include Data::Dumper 2.101, Digest::MD5 2.09, Storable 0.6.5, with
    Orca.

    These following changes are what's new in orcallator.se 1.19 since
    version 1.7 which was included with Orca 0.23.  All of the changes
    below are taken advantage of in the included orcallator.cfg and
    start_orcallator files.

15) Orcallator.se now has a web page describing the various measurements
    it makes.  See http://www.geocities.com/~bzking/docs/orcallator.html.
16) If the environmental variable WEB_SERVER is defined, use its value of
    the as the name of the process to count for the number of web
    servers on the system.  If WEB_SERVER is not defined, then count
    number of httpd's.
17) If the COMPRESSOR environmental variable is defined, then when a new
    log file is opened for a new day, the just closed log file is
    compressed using the COMPRESSOR command in the following manner:
    system(sprintf("%s %s &", COMPRESSOR, log_file)
    COMPRESSOR should be set to something like "gzip -9", or "compress",
    or "bzip2 -9".  If the configure script finds both a compressor and
    uncompressor tool, such as both gzip and gunzip, then start_orcallator
    will inform orcallator.se to compress the log files at the end of a
    day.
18) New measurements.  The first column lists the define that must
    be passed to the SE interpreter to obtain the measurement.  If you
    use the WATCH_OS define, then all of these are now measured.
    WATCH_MUTEX  - ncpus - number of CPUs on the system
    WATCH_CPU    - #proc/s - 5 minute average process spawn rate if root
    WATCH_CPU    - #proc/p5s - maximum 5 second process spawn rate if root
    WATCH_CPU    - scanrate - page scan rate in pages per second
    WATCH_DISK   - disk_runp_c\d+t\d+d\d+ - run percent for each disk
    WATCH_DISK   - disk_rd/s - system wide read operations per second
    WATCH_DISK   - disk_wr/s - system wide write operations per second
    WATCH_DISK   - disk_rK/s - system wide kilobytes read per second
    WATCH_DISK   - disk_wK/s - system wide kilobytes written per second
    WATCH_RAM    - freememK - number of free kilobytes of memory on the system
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mntC_* - capacity of disk in kilobytes
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mntc_* - inode capacity of disk
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mntU_* - used capacity of disk in kilobytes
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mntu_* - used inode capacity of disk
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mntA_* - available kilobytes for non-root users
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mnta_* - available inodes for non-root users
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mntP_* - percentage of kilobytes used for non-root users
    WATCH_MOUNTS - mntp_* - percentage of inodes used for non-root users
19) Add some smarts so that if the number of interfaces, physical
    disks, or mounted partitions changes, then a new header is printed.
    This will prevent column name and data mixups when the system
    configuration changes.
20) Prevent a division by zero in calculating the mean_disk_busy if the
    number of disks on the system is 0.
21) Fix a bug in the disk_mean calculation where it was being divided
    by the wrong disk_count.  Now it should be much larger and in scale
    with disk_peak.
22) Increase the number of characters for each network interface from four
    to five.
23) If WATCH_YAHOO is defined, then process the access log as a
    Yahoo! style access log.
24) Restructure the code to handle different web server access log formats
    easier.