8.232. sysstat

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

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

Bug Fixes

BZ#921612: When the sysstat utility appended new statistics to the "sa" daily data files, it did not check whether those files existed from the previous month. Under certain circumstances, for example when a month was short, sysstat appended new statistics to the old files. With this update, the utility has been modified to check whether the old files exist and remove them in case they does. As a result, new statistics are not appended to the old "sa" files.
BZ#1088998: Previously, the "sa2" script did not support the xz compression. As a consequence, old daily data files were not deleted. The support for the xz compression has been added to the script and the data is now deleted as expected.
BZ#1124180: The dynamic ticks kernel feature can currently make the /proc/stat file unreliable because a CPU cannot provide reliable statistics if it is stopped. Even though the kernel is trying to provide the best guess, the statistics are not always accurate. As a consequence, some sysstat commands could show overflowed values. This update detects values going backwards in sysstat, and sysstat commands no longer show overflowed values.

In addition, this update adds the following

Enhancements

BZ#1102603: With this update, the user is able to set a compress method in the /etc/sysconfig/sysstat configuration file using the ZIP variable. This enhancement provides an easier configuration of the data file compression method.
BZ#1110851: The sysstat(5) manual page now provides documentation of the /etc/sysconfig/sysstat configuration file as well as detailed description of the HISTORY configuration variable.

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