                    SE 3.3:  Changes since release 3.2.1
	            ------------------------------------

10 July 2002

This release is primarily for supporting Solaris 9. Significant, however,
is that it no longer supports Solaris 2.6 or any x86 release. Since the
remaining systems, Solaris 7 through 9 are all 64 bit OS releases, the
only binaries shipped with SE 3.3 are ELF-64 binaries. If you're running
your system in 32 bit mode and need ELF-32 binaries, you need to use SE 3.2.1.

I fixed a small memory leak that happened when the kstat chain changed
state. An instance$ member is now added to all kstat structures that
repeat. This is in addition to the existing name$ and number$ members.

Adrian added a bigbrother.se script and a workollator script to use the
workload_class include file he had written so long ago.

Rich

                    SE 3.2.1:  Changes since release 3.2
	            ------------------------------------

22 August 2001

This is a bug fix release to 3.2. No real big gotchas, just nice cleanups.

As usual, download the RICHPse.tar.gz file and as root:

# pkgrm RICHPse
# gunzip RICHPse.tar.gz
# tar xf RICHPse.tar
# pkgadd -d . RICHPse

If you have made changes to the se_defines file in /opt/RICHPse/etc, make
sure you save that file before removing the /opt/RICHPse directory. You
otherwise shouldn't be modifying files in /opt/RICHPse.

Once installed, as Joe User (in ksh, for instance):

$ export PATH=$PATH:/opt/RICHPse/bin
$ export SEPATH=/opt/RICHPse/examples:/opt/RICHPse/toptool
$ se toptool.se &

If you haven't checked out darth.se and vader.se, do so. I fixed some
issues with darth for 3.2.1.

/opt/RICHPse/etc/init.d/vader           init.d script to start vader
/opt/RICHPse/examples/vader.se          the "Virtual Adrian Daemon"
/opt/RICHPse/examples/darth.se          the GUI client side of vader

darth.se is intended to be a replacement for zoom.se.

Rich

                     SE 3.2:  Changes since release 3.1
	             ----------------------------------

16 February 2001

I'm not going to release a preFCS version. This is it. If you find bugs,
let me know and I'll fix them. A 3.2.1 version will be forthcoming shortly
thereafter if there are enough bugs.

All the packages are now in RICHPse. I'm sick of pkgadd'ing multiple
packages. The registration bit is also gone. If you're feeling kind,
run the register.se script in the etc directory.

The /etc/rc*.d files are no longer installed by pkgadd. If you want
them, they're in the etc/*.d directories. The old scripts are there
and a new one for vader.se.

Toptool, orcallator and perfmon have their own directories at the
top level signifying their status as useful applications, not just
examples of how to do something. Docs for orcallator can be found at
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~blair/orca. Toptool is self documenting,
as is all of my code ;^>. Perfmon has built in help. Just run it by
running the perfmon shell script. It's really cool. Thanks, Mark.

Many thanks also to Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
for his efforts in making pkgadd work smoother and providing me with diffs
for the qe interface on Solaris 8.

Other acknowledgements for people who have contributed to the toolkit
are in the comments in the code. For a good cross section, see the
netif.se include file. Thank you, everyone for your hard work. I know
it's not easy to learn new languages and especially ones that restrict
you the way SymbEL does. SE has really become a very widespread application
with around 5000 installations in 61 countries.

Rich


                     SE 3.1:  Changes since release 3.0
	             --------------------------------------

1 February 99

Make sure you use pkgrm to remove all the old packages and then
/bin/rm -fr /opt/RICHPse for sanity.  There may be remnants of SE 3.0
patch files hanging around.

This release will only support Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 2.7 for SPARC and
Intel.  If you need a performance product for releases of Solaris older
than 2.6, go to http://www.resolute.com.

Become familiar with the /opt/RICHPse/etc/se_defines file.  It can resolve
a lot of the configuration issues that plagued SE 3.0.

Rich

                     SE 3.0:  Changes since release 2.5.1
	             --------------------------------------

3 December 97

You'll no longer be asked about the architecture neutral option since it
is no longer optional.  It's default.

You *will* be asked if you'd like to send e-mail to the se-support alias
though.  I urge you to do so, it helps validate that the work we're doing
is being used by someone important.  And this justifies to the management
people of the world the rationale for using valuable programming time to
work on a fairly large software package that is given away!  It's in the
install script and only asks you once, and is preferable to just hand-editing
an e-mail message since I can just "grep ORGANIZATION MailFile" to find out
who all our users are when the paycheck writers put my feet on the fire.

Rich

                     SE 2.5:  Additions Since release 2.4
	             ------------------------------------

10 February 96

1) Binaries included:

   SPARC Solaris 2.3
         Solaris 2.4
         Solaris 2.5 (also works on 2.5.1)
         Solaris 2.4
   Intel Solaris 2.5 (hasn't been tested on 2.5.1)

2) When installing, pkgadd will ask:

        Do you want the scripts to be architecture neutral?

   What this means is that SE can now be installed on a server machine
   that serves clients using various releases of Solaris (2.3, 2.4, or 2.5).
   The scripts will evaluate which SE binary to use and invoke it.  If you
   are installing on such a server machine you should answer "y" to this
   question.

   If you are installing SE on a client machine, then answer "n".

3) Addition of the "contrib" directory.  These scripts are unsupported
   by me (you can ask the author to fix something if you like).  They
   are great examples of how to implement performance monitoring/analysis
   tools in SymbEL.  I'm looking for additions to this directory.

4) See the CHANGES file for fixed bugs and minor additions.

Richard Pettit


	README and Installation Instructions for SymbEL release 2.4
	-----------------------------------------------------------

22 May 95

SymbEL (known as SE) is an interpreted language that provides an
extensive toolkit for building performance tools and utilities.  If you
are fed up with the limitations of vmstat, iostat and sar, then this is
the tool for you. We provide trivial scripts that are improved versions
of the basic utilities and build on them to provide powerful rule based
performance monitors and viewers.  The extensions package includes a
Motif based GUI library and the rules package implements the complete
Appendix A ruleset of the bestselling reference book "Sun Performance
and Tuning: SPARC and Solaris" by Adrian Cockcroft, SunSoft
Press/Prentice Hall.

This package is not a Sun supported product. Think of it as a vehicle
for documenting the data sources, processing and behavioural rules of
Solaris 2. All the real work is done in scripts, so you can fix,
maintain and modify the package. If you want to incorporate the scripts
in a product you should recode them in C first, so you do not depend on
the unsupported SymbEL interpreter. If you want support you should buy
one of the many commercial performance management products. If you are
writing such a product we want it to do a good job of collecting data
and monitoring Solaris 2, so use the information provided here and give
us some credit for our efforts.

Adrian Cockcroft
Rich Pettit

				Installation
				------------

There are three packages provided, they are:

RICHPse        The SymbEL Interpreter
RICHPsex       The SE eXtensions Package
ANCrules       Adrian's Rules & Tools

All packages contain support for installation on four OS/hardware
combinations, there are four binaries of the interpreter provided as
part of RICHPse that are selected automatically during install:

Solaris 2.3 on SPARC
Solaris 2.4 on SPARC
Solaris 2.4 on Intel x86
Solaris 2.5beta on SPARC

This stuff will never work on SunOS 4/Solaris 1, so don't ask! The
Intel release doesn't get tested very much, but the SPARC release is
regularly used on everything from a SPARCstation IPX, a 16MB
SPARCstation Voyager, a dual CPU SPARCstation 20, SPARCserver 1000, and
a 20CPU, 1.5GB RAM, SPARCcenter 2000 database server. It should work on
any sun4c, sun4m and sun4d kernel architecture systems.

You may find that the code is provided as compressed tar files, first
uncompress to create the spooled package directories:

# zcat RICHPse.tar.Z | tar xf -
# zcat RICHPsex.tar.Z | tar xf -
# zcat ANCrules.tar.Z | tar xf -

Then install the packages with pkgadd, the postinstall scripts setup
some machine dependent limits so its best to install individually on
every machine you want, you need 2MB in /opt to install all three
packages, you could save 700KB by deleting the three interpreter
binaries you don't need after install if space is tight.  The packages
must be installed in this order, as there are dependencies.

# pkgadd -d . RICHPse RICHPsex ANCrules

At the end of ANCrules installation you are asked if you want to
install startups in /etc/rc2.d. The first time you try this out you
should probably say no. You can then try out the scripts by hand as a
regular user to build up confidence in them then try them as root. If
all seems well, enable the auto-startup next time you pkgadd ANCrules
on a system.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Special installation instructions.

This package includes three scripts that can be started automatically at
boot time from files in /etc/rc2.d. These scripts all use the same basic
rules but have different outputs and update rates.

virtual_adrian does much more than use the basic rules, it checks and tunes
your system before it starts, then monitors every 30 seconds, with output
sent to the console as messages in the form of modified vmstat, iostat
nfsstat or netstat output. Its most useful for detailed diagnosis, and
its output is also logged to /var/adm/sa/monitor.log

monlog runs the basic rules and looks for state changes, these are entered
into syslog, so can be redirected to the loghost system. It runs every
120 seconds and just logs the state and action string.

mon_cm runs the basic rules and logs the state codes only into the local
root calendar. You must run /usr/openwin/bin/cm as root to create the
root@nodename calendar before entries will appear. It runs every 15
minutes and the output can be browsed with cm, and multiple systems can
be multibrowsed to see correlated activity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The reason there are three packages is that we hope that the base level
RICHPse package will remain stable for longer periods than the RICHPsex
and ANCrules packages. Updated rules and extensions may become
available relatively more often.

The whole thing can be removed cleanly by removing the packages in
reverse order. The preremove script kills any monitors via the
/etc/init.d files before removing the package.

# pkgrm ANCrules RICHPsex RICHPse

You can check the version you have installed and who to send neat bits
of code to with pkginfo:

As of May 22 1995 the web pages at http://www.sun.com/smi/performance
are not yet installed. By the time you read this you may get lucky.
Please look there for updates and general FAQ before mailing us
directly with questions. If you just want to say how much you like it,
then send us mail, contribute rules and scripts, and pass it on.

