Issued:

2013-11-20

Updated:

2013-11-20

RHBA-2013:1663 - sysstat bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

sysstat bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated sysstat packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The sysstat packages provide a set of utilities which enable system monitoring of disks, network, and other I/O activity.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, the sysstat package did not support dynamically attributed major device numbers. Consequently, devices with these numbers were not listed in sar reports under their real names. With this update, support for dynamically attributed major device numbers has been added to sysstat. As a result, all devices now appear with their correct names in sar reports. (BZ#804534)

• The sysstat utility employs cron services to schedule monitoring tasks rather then using a dedicated daemon. After executing the "service sysstat start" command, sysstat marks the time of the counter reset and than it shuts down. Prior to this update, the "service sysstat status" command returned the "0" exit code, which gave the impression that sysstat is running constantly. With this update, the exit code has been changed to "3", which correctly reflects the behavior of sysstat and is compliant with LSB standard. (BZ#820992)

• A previous sysstat update changed binary data files in a backward incompatible way, but the version number of these binary data files remained the same. Consequently, using a later sysstat version to read binary data files created by an earlier version of sysstat could have produced invalid results. The version number of sysstat binary data files has been updated, thus fixing this bug. As a result, the current sysstat version will not read binary data files created by previous versions. For more information, please refer to the description of the "--legacy" option in the sar(1) manual page. (BZ#967386)

• Prior to this update, the umask command was executed too late in the sa1 script. Under certain circumstances, this could have caused incorrect file permissions of newly created files. With this update, executing umask has been moved to the appropriate place in the sa1 script. As a result, newly created files have correct permissions. (BZ#996134)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancements:

• Kernel device names, such as sda or sdb, might point at different devices every boot. To prevent possible confusion, support for persistent device names has been added to the iostat and sar programs. Persistent names can be enabled with the new "-j" command-line option for both iostat and sar. (BZ#826399) (BZ#826403)

• The sysstat package has been modified to store the collected statistics longer. The original period of 7 days has been extended to 28 days, thus allowing for better analysis of more complex performance issues. (BZ#838914)

• With this update, a new "-y" option has been added to the iostat program. This option allows to skip first "since boot" statistics in the report, so there is no longer need to post-process the iostat output in this matter. (BZ#850810)

Users of sysstat are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/11258

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• sysstat-9.0.4-22.el6.x86_64.rpm
• sysstat-debuginfo-9.0.4-22.el6.i686.rpm
• sysstat-9.0.4-22.el6.i686.rpm
• sysstat-9.0.4-22.el6.ppc64.rpm
• sysstat-debuginfo-9.0.4-22.el6.x86_64.rpm
• sysstat-9.0.4-22.el6.src.rpm
• sysstat-debuginfo-9.0.4-22.el6.ppc64.rpm
• sysstat-debuginfo-9.0.4-22.el6.s390x.rpm
• sysstat-9.0.4-22.el6.s390x.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 820992
• This content is not included.BZ - 850810

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.