After years of source-only access to modifications and "private" releases, it is time for a complete public release. Besides a few pure maintainance modifications 1.12 comes with multitenancy support, views, support for Visio designed maps.

Phinex AG and Reto Schaub have sponsored a modern and more professional look for the BigSister project home page. Thanks a lot!

The web site has also been moved to the Phinex web servers in order to increase its availability.

A number of new plugins featuring various SNMP based health checks have been released. They are ready for download/installation from http://www.bigsister.ch/plugins.html .

Many thanks to Niels Baggesen for these contributions!

While Big Sister is and will always be a non-commercial freeware software project it is however linked with non-commercial and commercial real world. The Big Sister project web site tries to feature this links a little bit more than in the past.

You might need help in deploying Big Sister, guaranteed response to problems you get or other external support. In this case you might want to have a look at http://www.bigsister.ch/profis.html, a page listing companies offering professional services around Big Sister.

If you are interested in 3rd party products that work with Big Sister, then http://www.bigsister.ch/3rdprods.html might be worth a look.

Companies providing Big Sister related professional services are invited to have a look at http://www.bigsister.ch/register_prof.html

Support for a specific device, health check or another feature is absolutely crucial for you? Donating a device for the development lab or earmarked money for the development team will change the order on the priority list.

The NetApp plugin now available from the plugins download page (http://www.bigsister.ch/plugins.html) makes the 'disk' health check available for remote NetApp Filer monitoring.

Release 1.02 comes with rather unspectacular new functionality. Besides the new performance data database allowing Big Sister to display more expressive charts (see http://www.bigsister.ch/snapshots.html) and simple statistical analysis of trends, the new SLA report generator does now processcollected availability data into management readable form. A few new health checks have been implemented - such as the new ping test collecting line performance data, a file access performance test, the BT-Ethernetbox test monitoring environmental data (see http://www.messpc.de/) and a new interface for custom-made health checks. Of course, a number of bugs have also been fixed.

The Big Sister Agent MSI package for Windows is now considered stable. Unfortunately, the promised availability of the complete Big Sister suite as an MSI package had to be postponed to release 1.03.

The manual revision 1.9 is included in the released packages and is mostly in sync with Big Sister release 1.02 - the brand new SLA report generator lacks some documentation, though.

Revision 2 of the Big Sister Agent for Windows MSI package fixes an annoying problem: If running as a service the agent stopped whenever a user interactively logged out of the Windows machines console. The agent 1.00rev2 now ignores user logoffs as one would expect from a background service.

The searchable online version of the Big Sister manual 1.9 is available now. Browse through it on http://www.joerg.cc/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BigSister

The official Big Sister manual has been brought up to date. Release 1.9 of the manual is in sync with the development version of Big Sister and the forthcoming 1.01 release. Besides numerous other changes the manual includes a new health check reference section as well as a chapter on the new database backend.

The PDF manual is available from http://www.joerg.cc/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BigSister - the HTML version will follow in a few days.

An up-to-date release of the ".exe"-Version of Big Sister has been promised long ago. Now, we just have made a big step forward to achieving this: a pre-release of the Agent for Windows is ready for download at

http://www.bigsister.ch/unstable.html

Note that we are going to release Big Sister for Windows as MSI package in the future starting from now.

Please have a look at it, test it, comment it. We need your feedback.

Special thanks go to Simon Moser, who dived into MSI packaging, to both Ernesto Haberli and Joaquim Homrighausen for sponsoring development tools, to everyone else that did some sponsoring or at least thought about it.