Network Administration Visualized 4.1.1

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 Network Administration Visualized release notes
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Please report bugs at https://bugs.launchpad.net/nav/+filebug . To browse
existing bug reports, go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/nav .

If you are upgrading from versions of NAV older than 3.7, please refer to the
release notes of the in-between versions before reading any further.

Known problems
==============

The recommended SNMP library for use with ipdevpoll is `pynetsnmp`. If you
choose to go with the original TwistedSNMP, the latest version (0.3.13)
contains a bug that manifests in table retrieval operations. Timeouts and
retries aren't handled properly, and this may cause slow or otherwise busy
devices to be bombarded with requests from NAV. The `contrib/patches`
directory contains a patch for TwistedSNMP that solves this problem. The
patch has been submitted upstream, but not yet accepted into a new release.

NAV 4.1
========

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 4.1 series
of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/4.1 .

Dependency changes
------------------

New dependencies:

- The Python module :mod:`django-filter` >= 0.5.3
- The Python module :mod:`django-hstore` >= 0.2.4
- The PostgreSQL extension ``hstore`` - may or may not be part of your default
  PostgreSQL server installation.

Schema changes and hstore
-------------------------

PostgreSQL's hstore extension has been utilized to implement the new
flexible attribute feature for organization and room records.

The hstore extension has been distributed with PostgreSQL since version 9, but
will on some Linux distros be shipped in a separate package from the
PostgreSQL server package. In Debian, for example, the ``postgresql-contrib``
package must be installed to enable the extension.

The :command:`navsyncdb` command will automatically install the hstore
extension into the NAV database if missing, but the installation requires
superuser access to the database. Normally, this is only required when
initializing the database from scratch, using the :option:`-c` option.
Typically, if NAV and PostgreSQL are on the same server, :command:`navsyncdb`
is invoked as the ``postgres`` user to achieve this (otherwise, use the
:envvar:`PGHOST`, :envvar:`PGUSER`, :envvar:`PGPASSWORD` environment variables
to connect remotely as the ``postgres`` user)::

  sudo -u postgres navsyncdb

Watchdog
--------

NAV 4.1 implements the first version of the Watchdog system, which is
responsible for monitoring NAV's internal affairs. This new tool can be used
to detect problems with NAV's data collection, among other things. Its primary
status matrix is also available as a widget that can be added to your front
page.

A future planned feature is generating NAV alerts based on problems detected
by the watchdog system.

New REST API
------------

NAV 4.0 shipped with some experimental, undocumented API calls. These have
been deprecated, and new API endpoints have been written for NAV 4.1.

Although the API is still in flux, it can be used to retrieve various data
from a NAV installation. See further documentation at
https://nav.uninett.no/doc/dev/howto/using_the_api.html . We know a lot of
people are eager to integrate with NAV to utilize its data in their own
solutions, so any feedback you may have regarding the API is much appreciated
by the developers.