[Stork-dev] Stork 0.4.0 released

[Tomek Mrugalski]

The Stork project is still very early in its development cycle, but
it has reached a stage, where some of its features could possibly be
useful for end users. As such, we decided to start sending out the
monthly release announcements. Your feedback is much appreciated.

Documentation for Stork is available at https://stork.readthedocs.io.

If you set it up, you're encouraged to take a look at the self guided
demo here: https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/-/wikis/demo


# Stork 0.4.0, February 5th, 2020, Release Notes

Welcome to the Stork 0.4.0 release. This is the fourth development 
release of the Stork project, which aims at providing a modern, 
responsive, and scalable dashboard solution with a well-defined REST 
API interface. The long-term goal of the project is to provide a 
monitoring and management solution for BIND 9, Kea DHCP, and more.

Features introduced in this version:

1. **BIND 9 status**. Getting the configuration of the BIND 9 
application has been improved. Stork now retrieves the control 
address and port from named.conf, as well as the rndc key, and uses 
them to interact with the named daemon.
Stork is now able to report whether BIND 9 service is running, the 
software version, the time when was it last reconfigured, and the 
number of zones that are currently configured. (#131, #140)

2. **IPv4 and IPv6 Subnets**. Stork now retrieves IPv4 and IPv6 
subnets specified in the Kea configuration and is able to display 
them. Several display modes are available. It can show all subnets 
configured by a single Kea server; another view shows all subnets 
configured in the whole monitored network. Filtering and searching 
mechanisms are available. (#47)

3. **Kea configurations are now stored in the Stork database**. Stork 
now has the capability to retrieve and keep Kea's configuration in 
its local database. This is a fundamental piece of groundwork towards 
handling more scalable deployments. It greatly improves Stork's 
responsiveness when there are many servers or several people 
accessing the UI at the same time (#136).

4. **rndc support improvements for BIND 9**. The work to expose some 
rndc capabilities via REST API is moving forward. (#130, #146).

5. **Bug fixes**. Many assorted bugs were fixed and "quality-of-life" 
improvements were implemented. Stork now displays its version and 
build time (#133); the apps running on a machine that was deleted now 
disappear correctly (#123); there's a generic GRPC error handler that 
should be more informative in the event of communication problems 
(#116); and when switching between BIND 9 and Kea views the code no 
longer caches outdated information (#129).

6. **Build improvements**. Problems with automated downloads of 
swagger-codegen have been resolved (#139); the ReST API definition 
for Swagger has been split into several files and thus is more 
maintainable now (#141); and the golang lint tool now has more checks 
enabled (#114).

## Release Model

Stork has monthly development releases on the first Wednesday of each 
month (with some exceptions around holidays). The first major 
release, version 0.8, is planned for the spring of 2020.

We encourage users to test the development releases and report back 
their findings on the stork-dev mailing list, available at 
https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-dev.

This text references issue numbers. For more details, visit the Stork 
GitLab page at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/issues.

## License
This version of Stork is released under the Mozilla Public License, 
version 2.0.

   https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0

## Download
The Stork source and PGP signature for this release may be downloaded 
from:

   https://ftp.isc.org/isc/stork

The signature was generated with the ISC code signing key which is 
available at:

   https://www.isc.org/pgpkey

ISC provides documentation in the Stork Administrator Reference 
Manual. It is currently available only in the source form in the 
docs/ directory. To build it, you need the Sphinx tool. This is 
expected to change in a future release.

We ask users of this software to please let us know how it worked for 
you and what operating system you tested on. Feel free to share your 
feedback on the stork-dev mailing list 
(https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-dev).  We would also 
like to hear whether the documentation is adequate and accurate. 
Please open tickets in the Stork GitLab project for bugs, 
documentation omissions and errors, and enhancement requests. We want 
to hear from you even if everything worked.

## Support
Professional support for Stork will become available once it reaches 
the 1.0 milestone. Existing ISC customers that consider themselves 
*very* early adopters may get involved in the development process, 
including roadmap, features planning, and early testing, but the 
software maturity level does not constitute a typical professional 
service before the 1.0 milestone.

Free best-effort support is provided by our user community via a 
mailing list. Information on all public email lists is available at 
https://www.isc.org/mailinglists/. If you have any comments or 
questions about working with Stork, please share them to the 
Stork-dev List (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-dev). 
Bugs and feature requests may be submitted via GitLab at 
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/issues.

## Changes
The following summarizes changes and important upgrade notes since 
the Stork 0.3.0 release.


* 28 [doc] tomek

    Subnets inspection is now documented.
    (Gitlab #149)

* 27 [func] matthijs

    Show more status information for named: up time, last reloaded,
    number of zones.
    (Gitlab #140)

* 26 [func] godfryd

    Added initial support for DHCP subnets. There are presented
    on dedicated page and on apps' pages. For now only these subnets
    are listed which do not belong to shared networks.
    (Gitlab #47)

* 25 [func] matthijs

    Improve getting configuration of the BIND 9 application.
    Stork now retrieves the control address and port from
    named.conf, as well as the rndc key, and uses this to interact
    with the named daemon.
    (Gitlab #130)

* 24 [bug] godfryd

    Apps are now deleted while the machine is being deleted.
    (Gitlab #123)


Thank you again to everyone who assisted us in making this release 
possible.

We look forward to receiving your feedback.

Tomek Mrugalski
ISC