[Stork-dev] Stork 0.13.0 is now available

Fri Nov 6 19:55:19 UTC 2020

Stork 0.13.0 is a new development release of the Stork monitoring and
configuration dashboard and it can be downloaded from:

   https://www.isc.org/download#Stork

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

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# Stork 0.13.0, November 6th, 2020, Release Notes

Welcome to the Stork 0.13.0 release. This is a development release of
the Stork dashboard.

The changes introduced in this version are:

1. **Better handling for large Kea deployments**. Earlier Stork releases
were unable to effectively monitor large Kea deployments. One specific
failure report mentioned issues with monitoring a Kea installation with
4500 subnets: processing a response to the ``config-get`` command was
very slow, effectively causing the system to hang. This particular
problem has been addressed and Stork can now be connected to
significantly larger Kea deployments. We are aware of other bottlenecks;
in particular, there is one causing high CPU utilization during Kea
status updates (see #421). We are working on addressing these
limitations.

2. **Receiving statistics from Kea 1.8.0**. Some of the DHCPv4 lease
statistics were renamed in Kea 1.8.0 and earlier Stork versions did not
recognize them. Stork can now recognize both the statistics returned by
Kea 1.8.0 and the earlier Kea versions (#413).

3. **Handling IP address changes**. Earlier Stork releases did not
properly handle a situation when an address or port of the Kea Control
Agent changed. As a workaround, it was possible to remove and add a
specific machine again; this is no longer necessary (see #409). Stork
now detects Kea Control Agent's IP address/port change and uses the new
address/port for further communication.

4. **Major testing efforts**. Stork has been in development for over a
year and during that time, we have delivered many new features. To
ensure that the project provides high-quality software that is
maintainable over the long term, we needed to step back and invest some
effort in testing capabilities. Previously we had only backend
unit-tests. With this release, we added two new significant
capabilities. First, we added WebUI unit tests; as of this release, we
have 49 such tests. Those tests are now part of our automated CI system
(#164). Second, we made substantial improvements to the system tests, of
which we now have seven. Although that number is still small, each
system test covers a wide spectrum of features, such as installing or
upgrading packages on CentOS and Ubuntu; testing whether it is possible
to use the UI to add a new user with lower privileges and confirming
that the new user is not allowed to create more users; testing Stork
with a Kea configuration with many subnets; and more (#412). The
Developer's Guide has been extended (#427). Finally, we've improved our
internal building and deployment scripts. This change is invisible to
users, but it improves our development process (#402, #400).

5. **UI improvements**. The "see more" link on the dashboard now leads
to a subnets view and the subnets are filtered appropriately (#389). The
HA status information presented on the dashboard and Kea app view was
corrected for cases when the HA had not been configured or the HA state
had not yet been fetched (#277).

6. **Debian 9 support**. A problem with building on Debian 9 has been
spotted and fixed (#423).

Please see this link for known issues:
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/-/wikis/Known-issues.

## Release Model

Stork has monthly development releases, with some exceptions.

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

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 easiest way to install the software is to use native deb or RPM
packages. They can be downloaded from:

   https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/stork/

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

   https://downloads.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 available on ReadTheDocs.io at
https://stork.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, and in source form in the docs/
directory.

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-users mailing list
(https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users). 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-users list
(https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users). 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 upgrades since the Stork
0.12.0 release.

```
* 115 [func] marcin

    Improved presentation of the HA server scopes. Added a help
    tip describing expected HA scopes in various cases.
    (Gitlab #387)

* 114 [bug] godfryd

    The links on the dashboard to subnets and shared networks have been
    adjusted so they take into account DHCP version. This way subnets and
    shared network pages automatically set filtering by protocol version
    based on parameters provided in URL.
    (Gitlab #389)

* 113 [bug] godfryd

    Fixed handling renamed statistics from Kea. In Kea 1.8 some
    of the statistics have been renamed, e.g. total-addreses
    to total-addresses. Now Stork supports both of the cases.
    (Gitlab #413)

* 112 [bug] godfryd

    Fixed handling situation when IP address of Kea Control Agent has
    changed. Till now Stork was not able to detect this and was still
    communicating to the old address. Now it checks if address has
    changed and updates it in the database.
    (Gitlab #409)

* 111 [bug] marcin

    Corrected presentation of the HA state in the dashboard and
    the HA status panel in cases when HA is enabled for a server
    but the HA state information was not fetched yet. In such
    cases a spinner icon and the 'fetching...' text is now
    presented.
    (Gitlab #277)

* 110 [bug] marcin

    The rake build_agent task now supports building the agent
    using wget versions older than 1.19. Prior to this change,
    the agent build was failing on Debian 9.
    (Gitlab #423)

* 109 [doc] tomek

    Updated Prerequisites section. We now have a single list of
    supported systems.
    (Gitlab #431)

* 108 [test] tomek, marcin

    Corrected and extended existing boilerplate WebUI unit tests.
    (Gitlab #164)

* 107 [bug] godfryd

    Fixed problem of adding Kea with 4500 subnets. Now messages
    with Kea configuration sent from Stork Agent to Stork Server
    are compressed so it is possible to sent huge configurations.
    Added new Kea instance to Stork demo with 7000 subnets.
    (Gitlab #398)

* 106 [doc] godfryd

    Added documentation for Stork system tests. The documentation
    describes how to setup environment for running test tests,
    how to run them and how to develop them.
    (Gitlab #427)
```

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

We look forward to receiving your feedback.