User-Visible lbcd Changes

lbcd 3.5.2 (2015-04-26)

Port to libsystemd if it exists, preferring it over libsystemd-daemon since systemd upstream has merged the libraries.

Update to rra-c-util 5.7:

Update to C TAP Harness 3.3:

lbcd 3.5.1 (2014-01-03)

Mark lbcd listening sockets as close-on-exec so that they're not inherited by weight commands run via the -c option.

Document the environment variables that trigger systemd socket activation and status notification in the lbcd man page. Add an examples section.

Switch the lbcd systemd unit to Type=simple and add lbcd.socket to Also= and Requires= so that the two are linked. There's no need to use notify for lbcd since the only resource it needs to set up is its socket, which socket activation handles. Also fix a typo in the WantedBy= field.

lbcd 3.5.0 (2013-12-28)

lbcd no longer allows the client to request probes of arbitrary supported services. Instead, specify the services lbcd should allow to be queried with the -a option, which can be given multiple times. Querying any service not listed with an -a option will result in an error reply.

Drop support for lbcd -s, to stop a running daemon, and lbcd -r, to restart a running daemon. This sort of daemon management is best done via a system framework, whether init scripts, upstart, or systemd.

lbcd no longer writes its PID file to /var/run/lbcd.pid by default. The -P option, specifying where to write a PID file, is still supported, but unless it is given, lbcd does not write out a PID file. lbcd also now removes any PID file it creates on exit.

lbcdclient has been rewritten. The output format is now completely different and more human-readable. The timeout and port are configurable on the command line, and the option parsing now supports long options. The command no longer takes a list of multiple servers to query, and exits with an error message if it cannot reach a server within the timeout. lbcdclient supports IPv6 if the IO::Socket::INET6 Perl module is installed.

lbcd supports a new -f option, which runs the daemon in the foreground (as preferred by modern init systems) but still logs to syslog, unlike the existing -d option which also moves logging to standard output and standard error.

Implement lbcd -l, which now logs to syslog each incoming client request and its protocol version.

lbcd now ignores SIGHUP instead of exiting. SIGHUP is conventionally used to tell a daemon to reload its configuration, and lbcd has no configuration and therefore trivially satisfies this, so ignoring the signal seems like the most consistent approach. Use SIGTERM to tell the daemon to exit.

lbcd now supports IPv6. The bind address given with -b may be an IPv6 address, and by default it listens to both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses on hosts that support IPv6. The -b option can now be given multiple times to bind to multiple addresses.

lbcd now considers a user to be on console if any user is logged in from an "address" that starts with ":0". Modern Linux systems with a display manager will show console users this way rather than logins to tty1 or console.

Add support for systemd. If built on a system with systemd installed, lbcd will install (but not enable) systemd units to start lbcd via socket activation. lbcd will also notify systemd when its initialization is complete if started by systemd with service notification enabled. Distributors are encouraged to modify the provided lbcd.service file to set User and Group to a separate user and group created for that purpose, although this is not done in the default unit files due to the difficulty with creating users portably.

Add support for upstart's expect stop daemon synchronization method. When starting lbcd with upstart, pass the new -Z option to lbcd, and it will raise SIGSTOP when ready to accept connections, signaling to upstart that the daemon has fully started.

Fix source typo that prevented compilation on Mac OS X. (It is probably obvious that the developer doesn't have access to Mac OS X systems to test compilation....)

Update to rra-c-util 5.0:

Update to C TAP Harness 2.4:

lbcd 3.4.2 (2013-12-17)

Support getutxent and use it in preference to getutent, falling back on the latter only if getutxent isn't available. Hopefully fixes compilation problems on Mac OS X.

Support FreeBSD (and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD) if /proc is mounted.

Update to rra-c-util 4.12:

Update to C TAP Harness 2.3:

lbcd 3.4.1 (2013-03-28)

If $sysconfdir/nolbcd (/usr/local/etc/nolbcd by default) exists, force the weight of the default service to the maximum regardless of what the normal weight calculation returned. This allows a host to be effectively dropped out of a load-balanced pool by touching this file.

Document the lbcd -t test mode and fix the output to treat the results as unsigned numbers instead of signed numbers.

Stop rewriting maximum weights in the lbcdclient output to -1 and report the actual number that will be used by clients.

Document lbcd handling of /etc/nologin.

Update to rra-c-util 4.8:

Update to C TAP Harness 2.1:

lbcd 3.4.0 (2012-09-20)

Add Mac OS X port from Clif Redding. Tested with Darwin 8.10.1 and Mac OS X 10.4.10, but hopefully will work with other versions.

Update the LDAP check to do something more reasonable. The old LDAP plugin probably never worked, at least with OpenLDAP. Thanks to Quanah Gibson-Mount for the fixes.

Fix the HTTP check to correctly verify that the server returns a 20x or 30x status code. Previously, any status code response would have accidentally been considered a success.

Fix a possible memory overwrite and security issue if there are more than 512 unique users logged on to the system.

Check for inet_aton in libresolv for older versions of Solaris.

Dropped support for NeXTSTEP, ULTRIX, and SunOS. It's unlikely that lbcd still compiled on those platforms and it's too much effort to support pre-ANSI systems that exist only in museums.

lbcd 3.3.0 (2006-10-06)

Add the -S option, which says to return load and user information unmolested when replying to version two queries rather than setting all of the loads to the calculated weight of the first service and zeroing the user information.

Fix user handling on Linux. Due to an invalid utmp path, a logic error in caching user login results, and an incorrect path for the console, all the user numbers on Linux were always zero prior to this fix.

Add considerably better documentation on what weight the default load service calculates, including its various adjustments based on the number of logged-in users.

In lbcdclient, don't send a one-byte packet to the server before sending the real query.

lbcd 3.2.6 (2006-05-16)

When building from a different build directory than the source directory, the makefile built and looked for the man pages in the wrong path. Look for and build man pages in the source directory.

lbcd 3.2.5 (2006-04-10)

Fixed a misuse of the third argument to waitpid that was causing use of a command to generate weights to fail on some platforms.

lbcd 3.2.4 (2006-03-17)

Document lbcd's behavior on hosts with multiple addresses and the use of -b and running multiple instances of lbcd to ensure that replies go out from the right source address. Unfortunately, the design of the Unix UDP API makes it more difficult than it's worth to try to reply to incoming packets with the source address of the interface on which they were received.

lbcd 3.2.3 (2005-02-24)

Added the -b option to lbcd to bind to only the specified address instead of all available addresses.

lbcd 3.2.2 (2004-11-16)

Documentation updates, including adding a README file and reformatting documentation to match other Stanford packages. Added URL information to the manual pages.

lbcd 3.2.1 (2004-09)

Fixed a long-standing bug in round-robin (-R) mode when responding to v2 requests. The response packet was not being correctly changed on Linux and other little-endian systems.

Set the 5 and 15 minute load to a constant value as well as the 1 minute load when using round-robin, just in case.

lbcd 3.2.0 (2004-08)

Added manual pages for both lbcd and lbcdclient.

Changed the default PID file location for lbcd to /var/run/lbcd.pid, which is FHS-compliant and supported on most operating systems now.

Added Debian build rules and Makefile support for building Debian packages, and cleaned up the configure and build system.

lbcd 3.1.2 (2003-07)

Fixed a bug with va_end usage on systems where va_end is not a no-op and fixed some setpgrp portability issues.

Added a make dist target to the Makefile.

lbcd 3.1.1 (2000-01)

Ported to IRIX 6.5. The IRIX support code underwent a general cleanup.

lbcd 3.1.0 (1998-08)

Standardize on 32 bytes for protocol v3 service length and add protocol v3 extensions to the server.

Ported to IRIX 6.x.

Fix protocol v2 conversion handling for little-endian machines.

lbcd 3.0.1 (1998-01)

Fix Solaris utmp gathering mechanism by checking the utmp entry type.

lbcd 3.0.0 (1998-01)

First complete protocol v3 server.

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