Network Administration Visualized release notes

Please report bugs at https://github.com/uninett/nav/issues/new/choose . To browse existing bug reports, go to https://github.com/uninett/nav/issues .

To see an overview of upcoming release milestones and the issues they resolve, please go to https://github.com/uninett/nav/milestones .

Unreleased

Dependency changes

Important

NAV 5.19 requires PostgreSQL to be at least version 14.

Important

NAV 5.19 no longer supports Python versions older than 3.11.

Python modules with changed version requirements:

• Django (>=5.2,<5.3)

NAV 5.18

Dependency changes

These Python modules are new requirements:

• django-allauth ([mfa,socialaccount])

Python modules with changed version requirements:

• Markdown (3.3.6 → 3.8.1)

• pynetsnmp-2 (>=0.1.10 → >=0.2.0)

• pyjwt (>=2.6.0 → >=2.12,<3)

Two-factor and external authentication via django-allauth

NAV now supports two-factor authentication (TOTP) and external login via OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML, using django-allauth as the underlying framework.

See Authenticating with OIDC/OAuth2 by using a local settings file for details on configuring external identity providers.

Room and location aliases

Rooms and locations can now have multiple aliases (alternative names). Aliases are searchable throughout NAV — in the navbar, device history, maintenance search, network explorer, netmap, the REST API, and status widgets. They are also included in room/location detail pages, SeedDB list views, and the bulk import/export format.

Changes to bulk import formats

The Room and Location bulk import formats have changed. The column aliases has been added to both, so that the formats are now specified as:

roomid[:locationid:descr:aliases:position:attr=value:...]

for rooms and:

locationid[:parent:descr:aliases]

for locations.

Auditlog improvements

Auditlog entries can now be sorted and searched by actor, object, and target columns. Links to detail pages are shown when the referenced object still exists.

NAV 5.17

CSRF protection enabled

This release adds CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) protection to the whole NAV site - i.e. POST requests to the NAV web backend will require a valid CSRF token to be included. This should not be noticable for end-users, but be beware of the unlikely case that some form or front-end feature stops working due to 403 errors. As usual, issues can be reported at https://github.com/Uninett/nav/issues

Viewing DHCP stats

This release adds support for viewing DHCP usage/utilization graphs in the Prefix and Vlan detail pages in the NAV web UI.

See the DHCP stats documentation for information about DHCP stats in NAV.

Warning

To accomodate for this feature, changes have been made to where DHCP stats are stored and read from in the Graphite/Carbon timeseries database. Some manual renaming is necessary if you’ve configured NAV to collect DHCP stats prior to this release, and if you want the stats you’ve collected up until now to show up in the new DHCP usage/utilization graphs. See the DHCP stats migration documentation for more information.

Warning

To accomodate for this feature, changes have been made to the name of a Kea DHCPv4 optional option in dhcpstats.conf and its default value: The option previously called user_context_poolname_key with default value name now goes by user_context_groupname_key with default value group. When this option is unset, this means that NAV looks for user-context objects in Kea DHCPv4 configurations that look like this:

"user-context": {
  "group": "first-floor"
}

as opposed to this:

"user-context": {
  "name": "first-floor"
}

SNMPv3 context support for Cisco switches

NAV now supports SNMPv3 contexts when collecting per-VLAN BRIDGE-MIB data from Cisco switches. Previously, this data collection only worked with SNMP v1/v2c using Cisco’s community string indexing feature.

Cisco switches maintain separate BRIDGE-MIB instances for each active VLAN. With SNMPv3, these are accessed using SNMP contexts (named vlan-1, vlan-2, etc.) rather than modified community strings.

Important

For this to work, your Cisco switches must be configured to allow the SNMPv3 user to query these VLAN contexts. This typically requires a command like:

snmp-server group YOUR-GROUP-NAME v3 auth context vlan- match prefix

Without this configuration, NAV will be unable to collect MAC address tables and switching information, resulting in incomplete machine tracker data and potentially missing network topology information.

See the Management profiles documentation for more details on configuring SNMPv3 profiles.

Stopped testing on Python 3.12

Python 3.12 has been removed from our test matrix because of issues with Python 3.12 and race conditions that affect coverage measurements in our test suite. No tests were failing, but the coverage collection process would fail almost every run on GitHub, causing all our builds to be flagged as failing.

This means that, moving forward, we cannot guarantee NAV is fully compatible with Python 3.12. Additionally, we normally target Debian for production deployments, and Debian has had no releases that provided Python 3.12, which means we will never actually run NAV in production on 3.12 ourselves (Debian 12 provides Python 3.11, Debian 13 provides Python 3.13).

However, our test matrix still includes Python 3.11 and 3.13, which means we can still be reasonably sure things will work on 3.12.

NAV 5.16

Dependency changes

A dependency was added to this Python module:

• distro

NAV 5.15

Dependency changes

Python modules with changed version requirements:

• napalm (>=5.1.0,<5.2.0)

Shareable dashboards

Users can now elect to share their dashboards with other users of the same NAV installation. Instead of relying on exporting a static dashboard definition to JSON and having other users import this definition, users can now subscribe to other users’ shared dashboards.

The active dashboard can be marked as shared by opening the dashboard configuration dialog (the cog icon on the right-hand side of the screen) and click on “Share dashboard”, followed by clicking on the “Save sharing settings” button.

Discovering the shared dashboards of other users is done by clicking the “add dashboard” button (the plus sign next to your dashboard list) and then clicking on “Find shared dashboard”. Search for a dashboard name or another user’s name. Clicking on a shared dashboard name gives you a preview of the dashboard. To keep it permanently in your list of dashboards, you must click on the “Subscribe” button.

When viewing a dashboard, its owner is clearly named in top right corner of the dashboard.

NAV 5.14

Dependency changes

Python modules with changed version requirements:

• djangorestframework (>=3.14)

• napalm (>=5.0.0,<5.1.0)

• twisted (>=24.7)

These Python modules are new requirements:

• django-htmx

IP Device Info refresh

Each IP Device’s IP Device Info page shows an ipdevpoll job status list in the lower right corner. This NAV release finally adds the much-discussed Refresh button to these entries.

The Refresh button will ask the ipdevpoll background process to schedule the selected job for an immediate re-run. Once the refresh is complete, the entire page will reload to show the potentially updated information.

Issuing API JSON Web tokens (JWT)

Since version 5.11, NAV has provided simple support for authorizing access to the API using JSON Web Token signed by authorized third parties. This release adds two new, important features to complement this:

• Signed JWTs can now include claims about read/write-level access and which API endpoints it should be authorized to access

• NAV can now issue its own JSON Web Tokens, through the User and API Administration tool.

More information about creating the necessary keys and configuring NAV to issue JWTs can be found in Configuring local JWT token generation.

We expect to deprecate and remove the old opaque token system in future releases, once JWT support stabilizes.

QR code generation

This release adds two new QR code generation features:

• A new item QR Code has been added to the My stuff dropdown menu present on every NAV page. Clicking this will generate and display a QR code “bookmark” that links back to the URL you are currently viewing.

• The Seed Database IP Device listing tab now has a button to generate a ZIP file archive of QR codes linking back to the selected devices. This can potentially be used to print a bunch of QR codes to glue to your equipment, so they can be easily scanned and found in NAV while on-site.

New API endpoints

Two new API endpoints have been added:

• /api/1/netboxentity/ can be used to list the internal physical entities that NAV has detected in your devices (chassis, modules, ports, fans, PSUs, etc.), as well as their serial numbers.

• /api/1/vendor/ can be used to perform bulk OUI vendor lookups for MAC addresses, based on NAV’s downloaded IEEE OUI registry.

Insecure password warnings

The User and API administration tool account list has for several years included warnings about users with potential password problems. One of the typical problems are passwords that were last changed in very old versions of NAV, which would use password hashing schemes that would no longer be considered secure today.

These warnings seem to be too unobtrusive for administrators to notice; therefore, this NAV release will display a warning banner to all admins on all NAV pages that there are users with potential password problems. The individual users that have these password problems will also be shown a similar banner about their own account.

“Quickselect” form in Maintenance and Device history tools has been replaced

The so-called “quickselect” form, used to find and select components for adding to maintenance tasks, or to search for device history of selected components, was built using ancient Javascript technology about 18 years ago. It had several issues and was really slow on NAV installations with many IP Devices, rooms or locations.

The form has been entirely replaced by a more dynamic search tool, which will dynamically search the NAV database for matching components as you type into the search bar.

Collecting DHCP pool statistics from KEA DHCP servers

This release adds a new program (and cronjob) to collect DHCP pool usage/utilization stats from a KEA DHCP server API (navdhcpstats) every five minutes and store these as time series data in NAV’s associated Graphite server. This program is intended to be extensible, so that implementations for other APIs can be added as plugins.

We are working on graphing these statistics in the Prefix and Vlan detail pages in the NAV web UI, and expect to include this feature in the next release. Until then, the only documentation for this new command is in the comments of its configuration file, dhcpstats.conf.

NAV 5.13

Dependency changes

NAV 5.13 will run properly on Python 3.11.

Dependencies to these Python modules have been added:

pytz

Python modules with changed version requirements:

• Django (>=4.2,<4.3)

• djangorestframework (>=3.12 - in practice, 3.15 at the time of release)

• napalm (>=5.0.0,<5.1.0)

OUI lookup in Machine Tracker searches

The first three octets of a MAC hardware address is considered its OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier), and identifies a vendor, manufacturer or other organization (as assigned by the IEEE).

NAV 5.11 added the navoui program to fetch OUI assignments from IEEE and populate the NAV database with them. NAV 5.13 finally utilizes this information by adding optional vendor lookups to Machine Tracker searches.

A new cron job, navoui, is also added, to update the list of assignments daily. You will not benefit from vendor lookups in Machine Tracker until navoui has been run at least once. If you don’t want to wait for the first run, you can simply run the program manually.

NAV 5.12

Dependency changes

These Python modules are no longer required:

• django-crispy-forms

• crispy-forms-foundation

• libsass

If you want to build NAV from source, you will now need webpack <https://webpack.js.org/> as a replacement for the now defunct libsass. Webpack is used to build many of the static resources (mostly CSS stylesheets from SASS source files) that are to be served by the NAV web GUI.

Deprecation warnings

Warning

The [paloaltoarp] section of ipdevpoll.conf, used for configuring HTTP-based ARP fetching from Palo Alto firewalls, is deprecated and will be ignored in NAV 5.12 and future versions. HTTP-based ARP fetching from Palo Alto firewalls must now be configured using management profiles, analogous to configuration of SNMP-based fetching. See below for more details.

Change ip2mac plugin order in ipdevpoll.conf

The Palo Alto ARP plugin in ipdevpoll had a problem which caused the ARP records it collected from Palo Palo firewalls to be unduly closed by the regular SNMP-based ARP plugin. This release of NAV fixes this by making the SNMP-based ARP plugin a “fallback” mechanism that doesn’t touch ARP collection if another plugin has already collected ARP data.

In order for this fix to work, you must change the order of the plugins in the [job_ip2mac] section of your ipdevpoll.conf file, to ensure that the paloaltoarp plugin is listed before the arp plugin.

New way to configure fetching of Palo Alto firewall ARP cache data

Note

See management profile reference documentation for instructions on how to reconfigure your Palo Alto firewall devices in NAV 5.12 to enable support for fetching of their ARP information.

Starting with NAV 5.12, a new HTTP API management profile type has been added to NAV for configuring HTTP API specific parameters used in fetching of ARP information from Palo Alto firewalls running PAN-OS. Currently, this management profile type is only used to configure Palo Alto firewall devices. If support for other devices that similarly can be managed using a HTTP API is added to NAV in future releases, you can expect to be able to configure API parameters for these devices by using management profiles as well.

NAV 5.11

This is mostly an interim release to shed old dependencies that are ultimately keeping NAV from running on Python 3.11 and newer. While there are some bug fixes, the main new user-facing feature in this release is the completion of the lifecycle events system.

Dependency changes

Important

NAV 5.11 requires PostgreSQL to be at least version 13.

Important

NAV 5.11 no longer supports Python versions older than 3.9.

Python modules with changed version requirements:

• twisted (>=23.8.0<24.0)

• sphinx (==7.4.7)

New Python modules required:

• requests

• pyjwt (>=2.6.0)

These Python modules are no longer required due to support for Python versions older than 3.9 being dropped:

• backports.zoneinfo

• importlib_metadata

• importlib_resources

More lifecycle events

NAV 5.11 adds more lifecycle events that are posted when devices disappear or are removed (i.e. they appear to be taken out of service and put on the shelf), enabling a more complete lifecycle log of individual devices:

• deviceDeletedFan is posted for fan entities that disappear from IP devices.

• deviceDeletedPsu is posted for power supply entities that disappear from IP devices.

• deviceDeletedChassis is posted for a chassis that are forcibly deleted from a stack by a NAV operator (using the status or device history tools).

• deviceDeletedModule is posted for a module that are forcibly deleted from an IP device by a NAV operator (using the status or device history tools).

Features in the making

The changelog references several features that are not yet complete, that will be completed in upcoming feature releases. These include:

• Replacing the existing opaque API token system with self-signed JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). NAV already supports API authentication through JWTs signed by authorized third parties.

• An OUI vendor database is added to NAV, in order to keep track of which MAC address prefixes are assigned to which hardware vendors. This will be utilized for machine tracker searches in a future NAV release.

NAV 5.10 (Unreleased)

Deprecation warnings

Warning

The next feature release of NAV (5.11) will drop support for Python versions older than 3.9.

Dependency changes

Important

NAV 5.10 requires PostgreSQL to be at least version 11.

New dependencies

Dependencies to these Python modules have been added in order to support communicating with Palo Alto firewall APIs:

• PyOpenSSL (==23.3.0)

• service-identity (==21.1.0)

Support for fetching ARP cache data from Palo Alto firewalls

Palo Alto firewalls do support SNMP. They do not, however, support fetching ARP cache data using SNMP. A new ipdevpoll plugin, paloaltoarp, has been added to fetch ARP cache data using the REST API built in to these firewall products.

Access credentials for Palo Alto firewalls need to be configured in ipdevpoll.conf, but a later NAV release should move to providing management profiles also for this.

Please read more in the ipdevpoll reference documentation for configuration details.

Changed names of NAV command line programs

NAV 5.9 changed the names of most of NAV’s command line programs by removing their .py file name extensions. However, the snmptrapd program had a naming conflict with Net-SNMP’s trap daemon, if installed. NAV 5.10.1 renames the NAV trap daemon to navtrapd. Please ensure your daemons.yml configuration file is up to date after an upgrade.

NAV 5.9

Changed names of NAV command line programs

NAV has switched to a more canonical way of installing Python command line scripts, or “binaries”. This means that all NAV command line programs that previously ended with a .py extension now have been stripped of that extension. Any custom cron jobs or scripts you have that may reference these NAV commands must be updated in order to continue working.

It also means that you need to make sure your daemons.yml configuration file is up-to-date after an upgrade, as well as the NAV cronjob snippets in the cron.d/ configuration directory.

These commands are affected and no longer have a .py extension:

• alertengine

• autoenable

• collect_active_ip

• emailreports

• logengine

• macwatch

• mailin

• maintengine

• netbiostracker

• pping

• radiusparser

• servicemon

• smsd

• snmptrapd

• sortedstats_cacher

• start_arnold

• t1000

Web security

While it is only relevant for older browsers, the HTTP header X-XSS-Protection is set to 1; mode=block. It does not affect browsers that do not support it after all.

There’s a new section in webfront/webfront.conf, [security]. When running in production with SSL/TLS turned on, there’s a new flag needs_tls that should also be toggled on. This’ll turn on secure cookies (only sent over SSL/TLS). See also the new howto Securing NAV in production.

NAV 5.8

Dependency changes

Upgrade your pynetsnmp-2 library to at least version 0.1.10 to ensure SNMPv3 compatibility.

SNMPv3

NAV 5.8 finally adds SNMPv3 support, although it is not yet 100% feature-complete. A new management profile type has been added specifically for SNMPv3. SNMPv3 management requires a host of configuration attributes, whereas v1/v2c only requires a community string.

Additionally, if a device only has write-enabled SNMP management profiles attached to it, NAV will now try to use those also for read operations. If your SNMPv3 profile supports both reading and writing, you should be able to get by with a single profile per device.

Missing SNMPv3 features

SNMPv3 traps

SNMPv3 trap support is still being worked on, but no working solution is available in 5.8. See issue #2755 for snmptrapd implementation and progress details <https://github.com/Uninett/nav/issues/2755>.

SNMPv3 contexts

Various vendors use the concept of “community indexing” to fetch multiple logical instances of MIBs. Examples include Cisco switches, where multiple instances of the BRIDGE-MIB are kept, one for each active VLAN. To access the switch forwarding tables of VLAN 12 with an SNMP community of public, the community must be modified to public@12.

Another common example is devices that allow SNMP management of individual VRF instances by modifying the SNMP community.

However, since SNMPv3 does not use community strings, it instead provides the concept of “contexts”, where the default context is typical an empty string.

ipdevpoll does not yet support using SNMPv3 contexts as a replacement for community indexing, so the types of data described above may be missing from some devices if switching them to SNMPv3.

Power-over-Ethernet configuration in PortAdmin

PortAdmin has gained supported for enabling/disabling Power-over-Ethernet on Juniper and Cisco switches. The available configuration options will vary from device to device and vendor to vendor, so the available presets will simply be presented for selection in a dropdown menu if PoE support is detected on a device.

REMOTE_USER autocreate option

The external authentication integration system (popularly named REMOTE_USER) has gained a new toggle autocreate in the [remote-user] section of webfront/webfront.conf. This option is False by default, meaning that externally authenticated users will not be allowed to use NAV unless they have already been pre-created in the user admin panel.

This changes the old behavior, in where any unknown user referenced in the REMOTE_USER header by the web server is automatically created in NAV. If you need the old functionality, you need to set this option to True.

NAV 5.7

Dependency changes

We have removed the upper version bound requirement for the Pillow library.

Detection and alerting of Juniper chassis/system alarms

Juniper devices have a concept of chassis and system alarms (e.g. a failing PSU might trigger such an alert). Alarms are categorized as either yellow or red alarms, depending on the running hardware and operating system.

Juniper provides SNMP MIBs to poll information about the current number of alarms of each category, but does not provide for fetching information about individual active alerts. To get details about ongoing alarms, one usually needs to access the device CLI to get the current status.

NAV 5.7 adds support to poll the number of yellow and red alerts from a Juniper device, and produces its own alerts when any of these counts are non-zero.

Two new event types are introduced, which can be used for subscriptions in Alert Profiles:

• juniperYellowAlarmState

• juniperRedAlarmState

contains_address filter on prefix API endpoint

The prefix API endpoint has been updated to include a new contains_address filter. This can be used to filter prefixes based on whether they contain specific addresses. To search for prefixes that match single IP addresses, a host mask can be used. E.g., to get all prefixes that match a single host 10.0.0.42, query for 10.0.0.42/32, like /api/1/prefix/?contains_address=10.0.0.42%2F32.

Even more flexible configuration of logging

Advanced users will find that we have added more options for configuring NAV’s logging output. The available configuration options are explored in depth in our new logging howto guide.

NAV 5.6

Dependency changes

New dependencies

Dependencies to these Python modules have been added:

• backports.zoneinfo (only necessary when running on Python versions older than 3.9)

• Our own fork of drf-oidc-auth, as found at git+https://github.com/Uninett/drf-oidc-auth@v4.0#egg=drf-oidc-auth

NAV 5.5

Dependency changes

None :-)

API changes

The /netbox/ API endpoint adds a new read-only attribute: mac_addresses. This is a list of MAC addresses associated with an IP Device’s chassis, typically collected from either LLDP-MIB or BRIDGE-MIB. In most cases, devices will only have a single address here, but sometimes, the two MIBs will disagree on what is the main “chassis” address.

The /interface endpoint has gained two new read-only attributes for LAG information:

• aggregator: An interface that is part of an aggregate will have the aggregate interface specified here. The aggregator will be identified by both its id and ifname attributes.

• bundled_interfaces: An interface that aggregates multiple interfaces will have those interfaces listed here. Each interface in the list will be identified by their id and ifname attrbutes.

Software upgrade history

NAV has finally regained the ability to save device software, firmware and/or hardware upgrades as events to their history, as the new deviceSwUpgrade, deviceFwUpgrade and deviceHwUpgrade alert types have been added to the deviceNotice event hierarchy. These alerts can now be subscribed to in Alert Profiles, and will be searchable in the Device History tool. See also Event- and alert type hierarchy for the full list of events/alerts NAV provides.

Juniper BUILTIN devices

Juniper equipment tends to report soldered-on linecards as field-replaceable modules through their implementation of ENTITY-MIB::entPhysicalTable. These modules are also all reported as having the same serial number: BUILTIN.

NAV versions prior to 5.5.1 did not safeguard against this Juniper bug. This would cause NAV installations that monitor Juniper equipment to have a single device with the BUILTIN serial number, which was shared between all monitored Juniper netboxes. The attributes of BUILTIN devices (such as software or firmware revision) would be different across most Juniper netboxes, causing them to compete for updates of the attributes in the NAV database.

This went under the radar until NAV 5.5.0 re-introduced the device*Upgrade set of alerts. Now, every time a Juniper netbox is polleed and the shared BUILTIN device’s software/hardware/firmware revision was changed, an alert would be generated. For those unfortunate enough to subscribe to all NAV alerts, this would lead to a storm of alerts.

Subsequently, NAV 5.5.1 deletes this shared BUILTIN device from the database, and adds functionality to ignore any module or entity that reports this as its serial number.

NAV 5.4

Dependency changes

Changed dependencies

These Python modules have changed version requirements:

• sphinx ==4.4.0

• pynetsnmp-2 >=0.1.8,<0.2.0

• napalm ==3.4.1

New dependencies

Dependencies to these Python modules have been added:

• sphinxcontrib-programoutput ==0.17

Removed dependencies

• The six Python module is no longer required. It was only needed under Python 2 to keep compatibility with both Python 2 and 3, but NAV 5.1 dropped support for Python 2.

NAV 5.3

Changes in governance and code ownership

On January 1st 2022, Uninett, NSD and Unit (all entities owned by the Norwegian government) were merged into the new governmental agency Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research.

This does not change our commitment to develop and provide NAV as free and open source software. We still have the same ownership and the same goals - we’re just doing everything under a new name.

In the coming year, references to Uninett, both in the NAV documentation, code and related web sites will slowly change into Sikt, but for some time going forward, there will be references to both names. For more information about the new organization, we refer you to https://sikt.no/en/about-sikt

Dependency changes

Important

NAV 5.3 requires PostgreSQL to be at least version 9.6.

Furthermore, NAV 5.3 moves to Django 3.2, resulting in several changes in version dependencies of related Python libraries. These changes are normally taken care of for you when using pip and/or virtual environments with the supplied requirements.txt file:

• Django >=3.2,<3.3

• django-filter >=2

• django-crispy-forms >=1.8,<1.9

• crispy-forms-foundation >=0.7,<0.8

• djangorestframework >=3.12,<3.13

• Markdown ==3.3.6

The new Django version also removes support for Python 2, and therefore removed the bundled copy of the six library that NAV utilized for compatibility with both Python versions. Therefore, until Python 2 compatibility code has been removed entirely from NAV, NAV now depends on:

• six

To ensure NAV runs properly on Python 3.9, these dependency changes have also taken place:

• IPy ==1.01

• twisted >=20.0.0,<21

• networkx ==2.6.3

• dnspython <3.0.0,>=2.1.0

To ensure the NAV documentation is built correctly, Sphinx needs an upgrade as well:

• Sphinx ==3.5.4

Backwards incompatible changes

Report configuration files have moved

The report generator in previous versions of NAV read two single configuration files from the report/ configuration directory, in the following order:

1. report.conf

2. report.local.conf

NAV 5.3 replaces these files with a report/report.conf.d/ style directory. Every non-hidden file that matches the *.conf glob pattern will be read from this directory in alphabetical order by filename.

If you have made local changes to your report/report.conf or report/report.local.conf files, please move these configuration files into the new report/report.conf.d/ directory, to ensure you can still generate your reports as expected.

NAV 5.2

Dependency changes

New dependencies

For building the NAV documentation, the Python module sphinxcontrib-django is now required (it is not required for the NAV runtime, though).

Changed versions

NAV 5.2 moved to a newer version of the Python module feedparser, because of Python 3 issues with the old version. The new requirement is:

• feedparser == 6.0.8

Due to recent dependency conflicts with Napalm, NAV also changed the version requirement for the dnspython module. This is the current requirement:

• dnspython <3.0.0,>=2.1.0

Backwards incompatible changes

Changed Alert severity level definitions

While a severity value was always attached to each NAV alert, and could be used for matching in Alert Profiles, these values have always been poorly defined and underused. They were loosely understood to be in the range 0-100, where 100 was the highest severity and 0 was the lowest, but more or less every alert ever issued by NAV was set to a severity value of 50.

NAV 5.2 changes the entire severity scale and its interpretation to be a value in the range of 1 through 5, where 1 is the highest severity and 5 is the lowest. This can be roughly interpreted as:

• 5 = Information

• 4 = Low

• 3 = Moderate

• 2 = High

• 1 = Critical

More importantly, NAV 5.2 adds the ability for you to configure how these values are set. Read more about this in the event engine reference documentation on severity levels.

Changes for developers

NAV 5.2 requires all Python code to be formatted using Black, and introduces Git pre-commit hooks to ensure all Python code is formatted using Black before commits are accepted. Read all about it in Hacker’s guide to NAV.

NAV 5.1

Dependency changes

Changed versions

NAV 5.1 moves to Django 2.2, resulting in several changes in version dependencies of related libraries:

• Django>=2.2,<2.3

• django-filter>=2

• django-crispy-forms>=1.7,<1.8

• crispy-forms-foundation>=0.7,<0.8

• djangorestframework>=3.9,<3.10

Also, the Python library Pillow requirement has been moved to version 8.0 (In reality, NAV is compatible with all versions from 3 through 8, as only the thumbnail API call is used, but the latest version is recommended due to reported security vulnerabilities in the older versions).

New dependencies

For NAPALM management profiles and Juniper support in PortAdmin, a dependency on the NAPALM library has been added:

• napalm version 3.0

Removed dependencies

NAV no longer requires the configparser or py2-ipaddress Python modules. They were only needed under Python 2 to keep compatibility with both Python 2 and 3, but NAV 5.1 drops support for Python 2, as previously announced.

Changed configuration files

These configuration files changed:

• portadmin/portadmin.conf: The option write_mem has been renamed to commit, for the sake of a a more platform and management protocol agnostic view of the world.

• daemons.yml: Daemon entries now support the config option privileged, which defaults to false. A daemon with privileged set to true will be run as root. Only snmptrapd and pping will need to run using privileged: true, as these daemons need to create privileged communication sockets at startup (but they will drop root privileges immediately after the sockets have been created). This means snmptrapd and pping will not start if you keep the old version of this config file unchanged.

Things to be aware of

Note

NAV 5.1 fixes a bug where some NAV daemons were run as root, giving them an unnecessarily high privilege level (never a good idea™). After upgrading, you may find some of these daemons failing to start because their existing log files are only writeable by the root user. You should ensure the NAV log files are all writable by the user NAV runs as (navcron, in most cases).

New features

Juniper support in PortAdmin

PortAdmin has gained the ability to configure Juniper switches. Juniper does not support configuration through SNMP writes, so the new management profile type NAPALM has been introduced, which enables PortAdmin to use Juniper specific NETCONF and RPC calls to get and set switch port configuration.

Please read the management profiles reference docs for more details.

Device filter options for distributed monitoring with pping and ipdevpoll

The pping and ipdevpoll daemons have gained support for device filtering options. Using these options can limit the set of devices a pping or ipdevpoll instance will work with, based on your already configured device groups.

This enables a form of distributed monitoring that wasn’t previously possible: If you have a group of devices that are only accesible from the inside of some VLAN or secure zone, you can install NAV inside this zone and configure pping and ipdevpoll there to only monitor the devices within that zone, while telling other pping/ipdevpoll instances to ignore those device groups.

This can also be used for low-level and manual horizontal scaling of NAV’s monitoring functions.

The new options are documented in the daemons’ example config files, ipdevpoll.conf and pping.conf, respectively.

New type sync script

navsynctypes is a new command line program to dump the NAV IP device type registry as a series of PostgreSQL compatible commands that will update the type registry of another NAV installation. Missing types will be added, while existing types will have their names and descriptions updated to reflect the names and descriptions of the source NAV installation.

Its primary use may be for someone who operates multiple NAV installations to easily synchronize the type registry between those installations.

NAV 5.0

Dependency changes

Warning

Python 2 reaches its end-of-life on January 1, 2020. NAV 5.0 therefore moves to Python 3, and as such, you will need at least Python 3.5 to run NAV.

Most of NAV will still run on Python 2 as of the 5.0 release, but from this point, Python 2 will be deprecated and we will start removing code that exists solely to keep compatibility with Python 2.

• xmpppy is no longer needed.

Upgraded dependencies

The version requirements have changed for these dependencies:

• Django must be any version from the 1.11 series.

• feedparser must be any version from the 5.2 series.

• networkx must be any version from the 2.2 series.

• IPy must be at least version 1.00.

• pynetsnmp-2 must be version 0.1.5.

• psycopg2 must be version 2.8.4.

Removed features

The ability to send Jabber notifications has been removed from the alert profiles system, due to lack of demand and the no-longer maintained xmpppy library.

Backwards incompatible changes

Daemon startup privileges

By accident, some of NAV’s daemons have been running as the privileged root user since NAV 4.9.0, due to changes in the process control system. NAV 5.0.4 introduces the privileged option in the daemons.yml configuration file, to signal which daemons actually need to be started with root privileges.

Only snmptrapd and pping need root privileges on startup, as these daemons create privileged communication sockets, but they will drop root privileges immediately after these sockets are created.

Please ensure your daemon.yml configuration file is updated. Also, be aware that after upgrading to NAV 5.0.4 from any version from 4.9.0 and up, you may have some NAV log files that are owned by root, which will cause some of the daemons to fail on startup. Please ensure all NAV log files are writable for the user defined as NAV_USER in nav.conf.

New features

Management profiles

NAV 5.0 introduces the concept of management profiles to facilitate future support for other management protocols than SNMP. This means that individual devices are no longer configured with read-only and read-write communities directly on their SeedDB entries. Instead, you will need to create one or more management profiles (also in SeedDB), that you assign to each device.

Each profile configures the options needed to communicate with a device using a specific management protocol, such as SNMP. If all your devices use SNMP v2c with a read community of public, you will only need a single profile, and can assign this to all your devices (you will need another profile for read-write access, if applicable). Conversely, if you change the community of all your devices, you only need to change the single profile.

When upgrading from previous NAV versions, all the pre-existing and distinct read-only and read-write communities configured on your IP devices will be automatically converted into management profiles and assigned to those devices that match.

The API has been updated to include an endpoint for management profiles, and the netbox endpoint can be used to manipulate the set of profiles assigned to an IP device.

See the updated Getting Started Guide for a simple introduction to adding a management profile.

Status monitoring of power supplies and fans on Juniper

Power supply and fan units on Juniper devices are now discovered and monitored using the proprietary JUNIPER-MIB.

Support for Alcatel DDM sensors

DDM values collected from ALCATEL-IND1-PORT-MIB are now available as sensors. This includes temperature, bias current, transmit output power and receive optical power values.

The implementation was contributed by Pär Stolpe of Linköping University, and has been specifically tested on Alcatel Lucent Enterprise OmniSwitch AOS 8.

psuwatch ipdevpoll plugin replaces powersupplywatch program

The powersupplywatch program (run periodically in the psuwatch cronjob) has been replaced by the new psuwatch plugin, as part of the ipdevpoll statuscheck job. Please ensure your ipdevpoll.conf is properly updated.

Support for Coriant Groove devices

NAV now supports collecting various optic measurements (as sensors) from Coriant Groove devices, using CORIANT-GROOVE-MIB. These devices are used for disaggregation of DWDM systems. These sensors are registered and polled:

• Optical channels

  • Frequency

  • Power

  • Differential group delay

  • Chromatic dispersion

  • S/N ratio

  • Q-factor

  • PreFEC bit error ratio

• Client ports

  • TX/RX optical power

  • TX/RX lane optical power

• ODU

  • Signal delay

Option to enable CDP on Cisco Voice VLAN ports

PortAdmin can now explicitly enable/disable CDP on ports when configuring/de-configuring Cisco Voice VLANs on them, if instructed to do so by the new cisco_voice_cdp option in portadmin.conf.

External authentication through the REMOTE_USER header

NAV now supports external authentication by honoring the REMOTE_USER HTTP header / environment variable. See the reference documentation for external web authentication for details.

Exporting a continuous stream of NAV alerts to third party software

The Event Engine has gained support for starting an external program and feeding it a continuous stream of JSON-formatted descriptions of every alert it generates. This can be used to aggregate alerts into third party software. More details are available in the Event Engine reference guide.

NAV 4.9

License changes

With the 4.9 release, NAV moves from a GPL v2-only license to a GPL v3 license. This is strictly to remain compatible with the free licenses of third party libraries we wish to utilize in future releases (in particular, Apache 2.0-licensed libraries).

NAV used to have multiple copyright owners, mainly all from the higher education sector of Norway. Uninett was able to negotiate the transfer of these rights before initiating a license switch. To avoid similar issues in the future, if the need to relicense should arise again, we have adopted a contributor license agreement.

Contributor License Agreement

Uninett has adopted the Free Software Foundation’s Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) for NAV. Anyone who contributes code to NAV must sign this license before the contribution can be accepted into NAV.

Our preferred method of receiving contributions is via GitHub pull requests. Therefore, to reduce the overhead of the CLA signing process, we have implemented an digital CLA signing process for GitHub pull requests, by the help of CLA assistant. When submitting your first PR against NAV, the CLA Assistant will automatically comment on the PR, prompting you to sign the FLA digitally using your GitHub account.

We would like to stress that Uninett is a not-for-profit, government-owned limited company. It is our intent to continue to keep NAV free and open for the lifetime of the project. This is why we choose the GPL license, and this is why we choose the FLA. The latter stipulates that our right to use your contribution is void if we should ever attempt to relicense it to a non-open license (ie. one that isn’t approved by FSF or OSI).

Dependency changes

The NAV team is still working on porting the NAV code to Python 3, which includes moving to more current (non-deprecated) versions of the Django framework. This means you will need to upgrade various dependencies when moving to NAV 4.9.

Unfortunately, Django releases have a tendency to drop backwards compatibility with many features, so expect future releases of NAV to move to even more recent versions of Django - we expect to land on Django 1.11, which is the last long-term support release of Django 1. Django 2 drops support for Python 2, as will NAV.

NAV 4.9.4 will require this new dependency for the IPAM subnet suggest function to work also for IPv6:

• py2-ipaddress must be version 3.4.1

Upgraded dependencies

The version requirements have changed for these dependencies:

• django must be any version from the 1.8 series.

• djangorestframework must be any version in either the 3.5 or 3.6 series.

• django-filter must be any version of the 1.0 series.

• django-crispy-forms must be any version of the 1.7 series.

• crispy-forms-foundation must be any version of the 0.6 series.

• python-ldap must be any version of the 3.0 series.

• sphinx must now be at least 1.8.0.

Obsolete dependencies

• django-hstore is no longer needed, as HStore support is included in newer Django versions.

Build system rewrite and source code directory layout

The entire build system has been rewritten, moving from GNU automake to regular Python setuptools (since NAV has been mostly Python for years now). This also means a lot of files in the source code tree have moved around to suit a more Python-centric way of installing things - that is, many “data” files have been moved into suitable Python packages:

templates

The global templates directory was moved to python/nav/web/templates

sql

All the SQL related scripts were moved to python/nav/models/sql

htdocs/sass

All SASS source files have moved to python/nav/web/sass

htdocs/static

All static web documents, including JavaScript sources, have been moved to python/nav/web/static.

Instead of statically configuring filesystem paths and usernames into the NAV code at build time, most of these variables are now configurable from config files at runtime. Building and installing NAV now entails a sequence of:

python ./setup.py build
python ./setup.py install

See the updated installation guides for more detailed instructions.

Backwards incompatible changes

Changed command line options

Some of the NAV programs have changed their command line interface:

• alertengine.py: The nonworking --loglevel option was removed.

• pping.py: The -n/--nofork option was renamed to -f/--foreground.

• servicemon.py: The -n/--nofork option was renamed to -f/--foreground.

• smsd.py: The -n/--nofork option was renamed to -f/--foreground, while the -f/--factor option was renamed to -D/--delayfactor.

• snmptrapd.py: The -d/--daemon option was changed into a -f/--foreground, while daemon mode was made the default.

Changed configuration files

These configuration files changed:

• nav.conf: New options have been added. Some of these will be required, as the new build system will no longer build their values into the NAV binaries and libraries. All of them are present in the new example config file:

  NAV_USER

  REQUIRED: Which user to run NAV processes as.

  PID_DIR

  REQUIRED: Which directory to store process PID files in.

  LOG_DIR

  REQUIRED: Which directory to store log files in.

  UPLOAD_DIR

  Where to store images uploaded through the web interface. This option has a default value based on the system build parameters, but it is recommended to verify its value with your system.

• smsd.conf: The loglevel option is no longer supported. Use logging.conf to configure log levels.

• alertengine.conf: The loglevel option is no longer supported. Use logging.conf to configure log levels.

Changed daemon startup configuration

Each of NAV’s daemons had a corresponding shell script for controlling process start/stop/reload in etc/init.d, which were all invoked by the nav start/stop set of commands. This has been deprecated in favor of a new YAML configuration file, etc/daemons.yml.

It was a common pattern for users to modify ipdevpoll’s startup options inside etc/init.d/ipdevpoll, e.g. to enable multiprocess mode. If you previously did so, please migrate these start options to the appropriate command section of daemons.yml.

News

Interface browser

A new tool for browsing and searching interface information across all devices in NAV has been added to the toolbox. Inspired by the new per-device interface tab in IP Device Info, this more or less supplants the existing interface reports in the report tool with a more dynamic tool based on NAV’s already existing REST API.

Interfaces can be filtered by device name, port type, port names and descriptions, link status or VLAN. Thec olumns of the paged search results can be customized, and can include sparklines of interface traffic counters.

Support for DNOS-SWITCHING MIB in PortAdmin

With great support from Marcus Westin from the Linnaeus University who made available equipment for testing, and Ludovic Vinsonnaud from Institut Optique Graduate School who requested and supplied documentation from Dell, there is now support for the DNOS-SWITCHING-MIB. This means that most Dell-devices now can be configured using PortAdmin.

With Dell devices you can specify three modes for an interface - General, Access and Trunk. NAV uses by default Q-BRIDGE-MIB to configure interfaces, but this does not work for interfaces in Access mode - which is the default mode for the interfaces. Thus to properly interact with Access mode support for Dells DNOS-SWITCHING-MIB was implemented.

Partial support for IT WatchDogs / Geist V4 generation products

The newest environment probes from IT WatchDogs / Geist have moved to new MIB versions. The University of Tromsø has contributed partial support for detecting sensors from these MIBs:

• IT-WATCHDOGS-V4-MIB

• GEIST-V4-MIB

“Partial” here means only internal sensors are supported - external sensors are not, thus far.

Partial support for Powertek PDUs

The University of Tromsø has contributed partial support for collecting inlet sensor data from Powertek PDUs. The implemented proprietary MIB is:

• PWTv1-MIB

Support for HPE metered PDUs

Support for CPQPOWER-MIB has been implemented, so that all sensor readings from HPE metered PDUs will be collected by NAV.

LDAP entitlement verification

NAV 4.9.6 adds entitlement verification as a possible filter step for LDAP-based logins to the web interface. The new options are documented in the LDAP configuration docs.

NAV 4.8

Dependency changes

The NAV team is currently working on removing some bundled libraries and porting the NAV code to Python 3. Some previously bundled libraries have been added to the dependency list, while others have had their required versions changed.

New dependencies

• dnspython == 1.15.0

• asciitree == 0.3.3

• configparser == 3.5.0

Upgraded dependencies

The version requirements have changed for these dependencies:

• IPy == 0.83

• Also, any version of twisted between 14.0.1 and 17.9.0 should work.

• pynetsnmp has been replaced with the pynetsnmp-2 fork, which has better support for Python 3.

Removed dependencies

• The support for the old PySNMP v2 and PySNMP-SE libraries (and consequently, the pure-Python TwistedSNMP library) has been removed, since they are outdated and do not provide the full feature set used by NAV and provided by our preferred library: pynetsnmp-2.

• There is no longer a dependency to the Python module django-oauth2-provider, as NAV’s usage of this non-maintained module was severely limited.

• ipaddr was removed. It was never a direct requirement of NAV. It only mentioned in the requirements list to satisfy a missing dependency of pynetsnmp, which has been rectified upstream, so it is still needed in a complete system.

Other changes

The navclean.py program changed its name to simply navclean. If you were using it in any cron jobs or other scripts, they will need to be updated.

News

Digital Optical Monitoring data

Retrieving data from optical transmit/receive sensors are now supported for Cisco and Juniper devices. The values are graphed on the interface details page for each applicable interface.

Power-over-Ethernet (PoE)

Power-over-Ethernet data is now collected and summarized for devices that support the POWER-ETHERNET-MIB (RFC 3621).

PoE information is found on a separate PoE tab on each device’s IP Device Info page, where an heuristic attempts to map PoE groups to modules within the device.

There is still more work to be done on PoE-reporting, which will likely require use of proprietary MIBs (which are also required for definitive mapping between PoE groups and modules/interfaces, without using heuristics).

Topology improvements

The topology algorithm has been rewritten for improved processing of LLDP and CDP topology information.

The topology detector now also supports detection of unrouted VLAN topologies. One caveat of this, though, is that VLANs are now also discovered on switches, using the VLAN names configured there. If your VLAN names aren’t consistent between your switches and routers, you may find multiple instances of the same VLAN in your NAV (as the names are mapped to netidents in NAV, where differing netidents imply separate broadcast domains).

New port listing in IP Device info

The old “module-matrix” based port layout in IP Device Info has been replaced with a more dynamic table listing of all interfaces. This table can be searched, sorted and filtered dynamically on many interface parameters.

Users who prefer the old layout can choose switch back to it if they want, but it will be removed in a later NAV version. Do not forget to give feedback to you nearest friendly NAV developer :-)

Writable APIs

The API endpoints for netboxes and rooms have been write-enabled. When issuing API tokens through the Useradmin panel, you can select the access level of any token (all pre-existing tokens will be read-only until you say otherwise).

Check out the REST API documentation for more.

Mitigating slow IP Device deletion

It has been a known issue for years that a device that has been monitored by NAV for a long time, will take an equally long time to delete from NAV. Old devices have accrued lots and lots of related data in the PostgreSQL database, and by not deleting old ARP and CAM logs, PostgreSQL essentially needs to remove the IP device relation from all the old log entries, rather than delete the log entries themselves. This gets slower the more data needs to be updated.

Deletion of IP Devices from SeedDB now runs as a background job (the navclean cron job, running by default every 5 minutes). SeedDB will only mark a device as “to be deleted”, meaning it will still be visible in parts of the interface until the PostgreSQL delete transaction has completed in the background.

E-Mail reports

The business reports tool now has the option to add e-mail subscriptions to the available reports. Very good for people wearing neckties (or who need to report to people wearing neckties on a regular basis).

Other improvements

• Locations now have their own details page, with a image upload function, analogous to rooms.

• A new widget for showing active alerts grouped by location, analogous to the room alerts widgets, has been added.

• The source of any ARP record will now be reported in a separate column of Machine Tracker IP search results, if the “source” checkbox was checked. This can be helpful if you are experience “duplicate” entries, such as in HSRP/VRRP LANs.

• Removing a trunk from PortAdmin has been made into a much simpler, one-button operation.

• The HTTP and HTTPS service checkers will accept 401 responses as OK if no authentication credentials were given in the service checker’s configuration.

• Neighboring nodes can now be filtered based on category from the Neighbors tab of IP Device Info.

NAV 4.7

Dependency changes

NAV 4.7 changes the minimum version requirement for three of its dependencies:

• PostgreSQL must now be at least version 9.4.

• psycopg2 must now be at least version 2.4.5.

• twisted must now be at least version 14.0.1.

Support for monitoring BGP sessions

BGP session monitoring has been added as part of ipdevpoll’s statuscheck job. BGP4-MIB (RFC 4273 is supported), as well as the draft versions of BGP4V2-MIB that Cisco and Juniper have implemented in their own enterprise trees (which means IPv6 BGP sessions are supported on Cisco and Juniper).

Please ensure your ipdevpoll.conf is updated to take advantage of the new functionality.

A [bgp] section has been added to ipdevpoll.conf, where the alert_ibgp option can be used to toggle whether BGP events should be generated for iBGP sessions. Its default value is True, but this may not be desirable in a full mesh network.

The new bgpState event includes the bgpDown and bgpEstablished alert types, which can be subscribed to in your alert profile.

There is no bespoke UI for listing known BGP sessions in 4.7.0, but there is a BGP session report in the report tool.

ipdevpoll multiprocess mode rewritten

When monitoring a large enough network, ipdevpoll may not be able to perform all its work using a single process. To take advantage of modern multi-processor and multi-core systems, using ipdevpoll’s multiprocess mode may be an advantage.

The multiprocess mode has been rewritten so that instead of starting a dedicated process for each job type, an arbitratry number of generic worker processes can be started, and jobs are assigned to these in a round-robin fashion.

The multiprocess option -m can be added to the OPTIONS variable of the ipdevpoll startup script (etc/init.d/ipdevpoll).

Support for more infrastructure monitoring

NAV 4.7 adds support for collecting sensor readouts from various data loggers, power distribution units, and cooling devices, used in the latest HPC infrastructure being deployed in the Norwegian research network. Among these are:

• The Comet MS6D data logger

• Eaton Williams Cooling Distribution Units (CDU)

• Lenovo (IBM) power distribution units (PDU)

• Raritan power distribution units (PDU)

• Rittal power distribution units (PDU)

• Rittal liquid cooling package (in-row liquid coolers)

Note

If adding Lenovo PDUs to NAV, please select SNMP v1, as their SNMP v2c GET-BULK implementation is either broken or not implemented. GET-BULK is NAV’s default operation for mass retrieval operations under v2c.

Improved user interfaces for sensor/environment monitoring

Device “Sensors” tab

The ipdevinfo tab previously known as “Power and fans” is now named “Sensors”. The tab now includes a comprehensive listing of all the sensors NAV has discovered on a device, regardless of whether it is able to collect any data from them. Charts and thresholds are available for each one.

Room “Sensors in Racks” tab

The room view now includes the new tab “Sensors in Racks”. In this tab, you can create customized groupings of environment sensors present in a single communications room.

At Uninett, this view is used to get an overview of the power load and cooling water temperature on a per-rack basis in large HPC installations. PDU sensors can nbe added to the left and right side of each “rack”, and arbitrary sensors from other types of devices can be added to the center column.

Avoiding redundant SNMP polling for virtual device contexts

A new feature enables you to use SeedDB to specify that an IP device is a virtual instance of a physical “master” device. This can be useful if you use Cisco VRF or VDC technologies extensively.

NAV will avoid polling interface counters, system and sensor data from the virtual devices, but will instead duplicate the data collected from the master device - thus avoiding overloading the physical device with redundant SNMP requests.

This feature was sponsored by the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Changes to bulk import formats

The IP Device (Netbox) bulk import format has changed. Two new columns have been added, so that the format is now specified as:

roomid:ip:orgid:catid[:snmp_version:ro:rw:master:function:data:netboxgroup:...]

The new columns are:

snmp_version

Selecting an explicit SNMP version was made compulsory in NAV 4.6, but the bulk import format was not updated in the same release, so any device added through the SeedDB bulk import function would default to SNMP v2c. Valid values here are 1 or 2.

master

If this device is a virtual instance on another physical device, specify the sysname or IP address of the master in this column. You may have to bulk import multiple times if the master devices are part of the same bulk import file.

Support for dashboard export/import

Dashboard configurations can now be exported as JSON strings and shared with other NAV users. Want to copy your colleagues fancy dashboard without putting in all the work of setting it up manually? Now you can!

Audit logging

The beginnings of a full fledged audit logging system is included in NAV 4.7. As of NAV 4.7.0, only changes made by users of PortAdmin will be audited. Audit logging from more parts of NAV will follow.

NAV 4.6

Dependency changes

NAV now requires the markdown Python library, to ensure proper rendering of documentation in the browseable API.

The IPy Python library is now required to be at least version 0.81.

IPAM (IP Address Management)

This release introduces the IP Address Management tool, sponsored by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Inspired by the already existing Subnet Matrix tool (reachable from NAV’s Report tool), IPAM was developed to assist in IP address management tasks, using NAV’s existing IP address prefix registry.

NTNU has, like many other higher education institutions in Norway have lately, been merged with several other institutions, vastly increasing the number of assigned IP address blocks to manage.

Whereas the Subnet Matrix can visualize a single network scope at a time, IPAM was built to visualize multiple scopes interactively, and to allow for the visualization of nested scopes. The tool includes search and filtering capabilities, including functions to search for unallocated subnets of specificed sizes and mark them as reserved (via SeedDB).

Static routes

Along with the IPAM tool, comes the new opt-in ipdevpoll plugin staticroutes. This plugin re-implements the static routes plugin from getDeviceData (the pre NAV 3.6 collector), providing you with the option of a more complete IP prefix registry.

If you wish to automatically collect statically configured routes from your routers into NAV’s prefix registry, you can add this plugin to you inventory job - or, since your static route configuration isn’t likely to change very often, configure a separate ipdevpoll job with a much larger interval (e.g. 24 hours).

Collecting a router’s entire routing table via SNMP can be taxing for some routers, which is why this plugin is not enabled by default. The plugin can also be configured to throttle the rate at which it sends SNMP requests to routers.

Prefix information page and usage tags

A new per-prefix information page has been added, complementing the VLAN information page.

As before, NAV will automatically collect the usage category of VLANs/subnets based on the NTNU router port description convention, if this is employed. Now, prefixes can be tagged with additional usage categories manually, through the new prefix information page.

Valid usage categories are, as before, editable through SeedDB

Link aggregation support

Information about any type of aggregated link discoverable through the IEEE8023-LAG-MIB (LACP) is collected and stored in NAV.

A new event type, aggregateLinkState, with the accompanying linkDegraded and linkRestored alerts has been introduced. If link is lost on an interface known to be part of such an aggregate it will cause NAV to generate a linkDegraded alert for the aggregated interface.

Aggregation status of ports is also displayed in each port’s details page.

Multi- and fullscreen dashboards

Users can now have multiple named dashboards. A default dashboard can be selected, which will be the first dashboard loaded when browsing the NAV front page. Any “add graph to dashboard”-type button in NAV will add widgets to your default dashboard, and widgets can easily be moved between dashboards.

A new “Compact dashboard” mode maximizes your screen real estate, by scaling down the content and removing the spacing between widgets, while a new fullscreen mode takes your dashboard and browser into full screen mode, using the browser fullscreen API.

Each dashboard is individually configured using the dashboard menu to the right. This enables you, for instance, to have a different number of columns for each dashboard.

New dashboard widgets

New dashboard widgets are introduced:

Alert

This widget can monitor binary sensor values or arbitrary Graphite metrics of a an otherwise boolean nature, to be used as an alert indicator. Uninett’s use-case for this is showing the status of the server room physical security system on the NOC screens.

PDU load

A very specific plugin to display the power load status of APC power distribution units (these are the only PDU units currently known to be supported by NAV) on a room-by-room basis. Uninett’s use-case for this is planning rack placements based on power consumption.

UPS status

A graphical widget to display the inputs, outputs and status of any NAV-supported UPS.

Rooms with active alerts

A version of the status widget that aggregates and summarizes alerts by room.

Hierarchical locations

Hierarchies of locations can now be defined. SeedDB will now present locations as a tree of entries, and parent locations can be selected from a dropdown when adding a new location.

Selecting a location for a maintenance task, will implicitly include its full sub-hierarchy of locations, as will filtering on locations in the status tool.

Location hierarchies are not yet respected by alert profiles and the Netmap.

Please note that the bulk import format for locations has changed to include the parent location as the second field. Both the parent and the description fields are now optional. This makes it consistent with how organizations are imported.

Business reports

A new “Business reports” tool was added. This tool is meant for more complex reports than the pure SQL tabular reports NAV already sports. Each report must be implemented as Python code.

Currently, two reports are implemented: A monthly device availability report (with selectable months), and a monthly link availability report (with selectable months). Both reports are based on NAV’s alert history.

Juniper EX switch series workaround

If you have Juniper EX switches, you may be interested in the new juniperdot1q ipdevpoll plugin, as a replacement for the regular dot1q plugin.

Juniper’s implementation of Q-BRIDGE-MIB (the main MIB module used to retrieve information about 802.1Q VLAN configuration) has multiple bugs, several of which Juniper will not admit are bugs. The main issue for any NMS using this MIB to get VLAN information is that parts of their implementation uses opaque, internal VLAN IDs instead of public VLAN tags.

You may already have seen that the VLANs NAV has discovered on your EX switches seem wrong. This is due to that implementation bug. The juniperdot1q plugin will use a Juniper proprietary MIB, if supported by the device, to translate internal VLAN ids to public VLAN tags.

This functionality was implemented as a separate plugin, due to the pernicious nature of the Juniper bugs. If you wish to test the plugin, simple replace the reference to the dot1q plugin with juniperdot1q in the ipdevpoll.conf section [job_inventory].

navuser command line

A new command line program, navuser, has been introduced. This program provides some simple means of manipulating NAV (web) accounts from the command line, which can be useful from a configuration management perspective.

NAV 4.5

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 4.5 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/4.5 .

Dependency changes

There are none :-)

Cabling and patches

The cabling and patch registry was introduced originally with NAV 3.0, but never gained widespread usage, and had therefore fallen behind the rest of NAV.

The University of Linköping has graciously sponsored a reworking of the SeedDB cabling and patch forms, so that these are now actually usable in a NAV installation with more than a handful of switches, cables and patches. Information about patch points is now also displayed on each port’s ipdevinfo page.

navstats

NAV 4.5 adds a simple program, navstats, that can be used to periodically extract stats from the NAV database and store those stats as Graphite metrics. To configure your own stats, however, you need to know your way around SQL and the NAV DB schema.

For more information, see the navstats reference documentation.

API changes

API tokens can now be managed more flexibly via the User Admin tool. Multiple tokens can be issued and revoked separately. Each token has its own expiry time and list of authorized API endpoints.

NAV 4.4

Dependency changes

• The Python library django must now be version 1.7.

• The Python library djangorestframework must now be version 2.4.

• The Python Imaging Library (PIL) seems dead and appears to no longer be available in the Python Package Index. We have replaced the dependency with Pillow, which is a fork of PIL. NAV should still work with the old library, though.

Interactive trend graphs

Whereas NAV 4.3 and earlier would call on graphite-web to produce graphs as static PNG images, NAV 4.4 uses the Rickshaw Javascript library to render graphs from the same Graphite data.

These graphs allow for more user interaction, such as zooming and value inspection. The are, however, not as readily re-usable by passing around URLs.

Slack dispatcher

NAV 4.4 adds a Slack dispatcher to the Alert Engine.

To dispatch messages to a Slack channel, you need to create a Slack channel and add an Incoming Webhooks integration. More information about that can be found at https://api.slack.com/incoming-webhooks . You will get an URL to use for posting messages.

Then you need to add a Slack alert address to your alert profile and use this address in an alert subscription. The address is the URL you got when setting up the webhooks integration.

The username, emoji user-icon and channel for the messages are defined when setting up the integration, but if you for some reason want to override this you can do it in alertengine.conf.

Subnet matrix improvements

Various mysterious layout bugs in the subnet matrix have been fixed, by way of a partial rewrite. Utilization data is now retrieve asynchronously, which means that the matrix itself should load a lot faster. More details of each subnet is now available in pop-up menus when clicking on them.

checkService.py has been renamed

If you were using checkService.py to test your servicemon plugins, this command has now been renamed to navcheckservice, and its command line options have slightly changed. Run it with –help for more information.

NAV 4.3

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 4.3 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/4.3 .

Dependency changes

There are none (unless you are a developer, then you should upgrade to the latest version of pylint).

Data model changes (chassis, serial numbers, virtual devices, etc.)

The 4.3 release changes NAV’s data model in a fundamental way. Previously, NAV would equate an IP device (a Netbox) with a piece of physical hardware, a chassis, possibly with a retrievable serial number. This has become a rather antiquated view in modern computer networking, where multiple virtual components can be built from a single hardware unit, or a virtual device can be built by stacking multiple hardware units.

The old data model would require each IP Device to have a unique serial number, and also for any module in any IP Device to have a unique serial number among all modules in all IP Devices.

NAV no longer has these restrictions. The hierarchy of physical entities within an IP Device are collected from the ENTITY-MIB::entPhysicalTable, if available, and all stored in the NAV database. NAV would previously only use parts of this information.

A SNMP-less IP Device will no longer have a corresponding (physical) Device entry, while a multi-chassis stack (like a Cisco VSS) will have all its chassis registered in the database.

A set of Cisco VDCs defined within the same hardware unit will all present themselves as physically identical to the hardware unit. Previously, this would work poorly with NAV, because if its uniqueness requirement on serial numbers.

Next, we aim to write support for collecting this type of hardware information from Juniper devices, which, as of this writing, only support proprietary MIBs to provide this information.

Bulk import format change

Because of the changed data model, the serial number column in the IP Device (Netbox) bulk import/dump format has been removed. If you have old dump files that you want to bulk import into NAV 4.3’s SeedDB, you must remove the serial number field from these files first.

The new chassisState family of alerts

NAV 4.3 introduces the chassisState event type, with chassisDown and chassisUp alerts. These can be subscribed to in Alert Profiles.

In a scenario where an IP Device is a stack of multiple physical chassis, NAV will produce chassisState events if a previously known chassis disappears or reappears in the stack. A chassis that is removed from a stack on purpose must be manually deleted from NAV, just as purposefully removed modules have always needed to be.

The eventengine will further suppress moduleDown alerts for modules that reside within a chassis that has an active chassisDown alert. Previously, a Cisco VSS that broke down would cause NAV to report a slew of moduleDown alerts, one for each of the modules in the lost chassis.

Deleting out of service modules and chassis

When you physically remove a module to take it out of service, NAV will produce a moduleDown alert. To remove the module from NAV’s inventory, you would previously need to go to the Device History tool and remove it from the “Delete module” tab.

In NAV 4.3, deleting modules and (now) chassis, and their corresponding alerts is directly available as one of the bulk actions on the status page.

Link, module and chassis status verification

As part of the ipdevpoll inventory job, the modules and entity plugins (which both collect inventory and performs status check against known inventory) only run every 6 hours. This is not often enough to provide a continuous status verification (and updated alerts).

In response to this, the 5-minute interval ipdevpoll linkcheck job has been renamed to the more generic statuscheck, and the modules and entity plugins now additionally run as part of this job.

NAV 4.2

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 4.2 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/4.2 .

Dependency changes

There are none :-)

Rename some of your Whisper files to keep your statistics

The 4.2.2 release adds commas to the list of characters escaped in Graphite metric names; commas cause problems when constructing target names for graphite-web, when rendering graphs and retrieving metrics. An out-of-place comma will cause Graphite render requests to fail.

If your Graphite storage directory contains Whisper files with commas in their filenames (under the nav hierarchy), and you want to keep your data history, you will need to rename these files by replacing the commas with underscores. Something like this should do the trick:

cd /opt/graphite/storage/whisper/nav
find -name '*,*' | xargs rename --verbose 's/,/_/g'

Multicast listener stats from IGMP snooping

NAV 4.2 will use HP’s STATISTICS-MIB to sum up the number of known multicast group subscribers per HP switch (i.e. from each switch’s IGMP snooping data). Each multicast group address seen is logged to Graphite under the nav.multicast hierarchy.

We wanted to support similar functionality for Cisco devices, but it seems support for Cisco’s own proprietary CISCO-IGMP-SNOOPING-MIB is very poor among Cisco switches.

Graphite storage schema changes

Be aware that the example Graphite storage schema etc/nav/graphite/storage-schema.conf has added a section for multicast statistics. Be sure to update your running Carbon configuration.

Rewritten Status tool

The Status tool has been rewritten from scratch.

The old Status tool hardcoded table listings for specific alert types, and not all alert types were supported - meaning some alerts were never actually displayed in the Status tool. This also made it very difficult to dynamically add new alert types from plugins or third party software, without modifying the Status tool code.

The new tool offers an in-page status filtering form, which can also be saved as your personal status page filter preference.

Any filter configuration can also be saved as a new front-page status filter, meaning you can have multiple status widgets, each with a different configuration. When modifying the default/anonymous user’s front page widgets, this means you can also decide which types of alerts, if any, will be displayed to unauthenticated users.

Alert acknowledgement

With the new Status tool comes the ability to acknowledge open alerts, with comments. An acknowledged alert is not displayed under the default Status tool filter configuration (but can be added by checking the “Acknowledged” checkbox).

Stateless alerts

The Status tool normally displays stateful alerts, i.e. states that have a starting time and, eventually, an ending time. The can be actual problems, or more information states, such as a device being on scheduled maintenance.

However, NAV will at times also issue stateless alerts (warnings). Before, these were normally only accessible in the Device History tool, and through alert subscriptions in Alert Profiles.

The Status page tool can now be configured to include recent stateless alerts, within a set threshold (the default is 24 hours). The default is still to leave them out.

New status widget

A widget version of the new Status tool is also introduced. Users who have the old Status widget on their NAV front pages will see their widgets replaced with a Status tool widget filtering for boxState events.

By default, NAV places a status widget on the front page of anonymous users. With the new widget, you can also control what kind of alerts anonymous users can see on the front page.

Tip

To configure, remove or add more Status widgets to the front page of anonymous users, go to the User Admininstration tool, select the default user and click the button Operate as this user.

While operating as the default user, configure the widgets on the front page to your liking. Click Log back in as … to return to normal operation.

Netmap redesign

There was never time to clean up the Netmap tool’s complicated user interface during the design changes released in NAV 4.0. This has now been rectified.

The map portion of the page has been given more space, and the view options are now contained in a hideable panel above the map. Your saved views should still work.

SeedDB IP device form redesign

The form for adding and editing an IP device has been redesigned. It no longer requires connectivity to add or edit an IP device, but you have the option to verify the connectivity if you want. As a result of this, only one step is required to complete the form. Should you go ahead and save a router with the wrong SNMP community, NAV will shortly raise an snmpAgentAlert for this device.

In addition to this, IP address verification has been added to the form. When adding an IP device by its hostname in NAV versions prior to 4.2, if this hostname resolved to multiple IP addresses, NAV would select an arbitrary IP address from these as its management address for the device. The new form will ask the user to choose one of the resolved IP addresses from a list.

Custom attributes on IP devices and locations

You now have to option to add custom attributes to your IP devices and locations. In NAV 4.1 this was only available for rooms and organizations. The custom attributes are added in the respective SeedDB forms.

The attributes added for IP devices are displayed on the IP Device Info page. The attributes for locations are currently not visible outside of SeedDB, as there are no canonical Location-pages in NAV (yet). The location report can be amended locally to include those attributes you want displayed, in the same way as commented on the organization and room reports.

New command line utilities

NAV 4.2 introduces three new command line utilities for advanced users:

navdf

Usage: navdf [filter]

Lists and filters IP devices monitored by NAV

Options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

The filter expression must be a method call applicable to the Django-based
Netbox model's manager class. Example: "filter(category__id='GSW')"

navoidverify

usage: navoidverify baseoid < sysnames.txt

Verifies SNMP sub-tree support on a set of NAV-monitored devices

positional arguments:
  baseoid     The base OID for which a GETNEXT operation will be performed

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Given the root of an SNMP MIB module, a bunch of devices can be queried in
parallel whether they have any objects below the given BASEOID - effectively
verifying MIB support in these devices.

naventity

usage: naventity device

Outputs entity hierarchy graph from a device's ENTITY-MIB::entPhysicalTable
response

positional arguments:
  device      The NAV-monitored IP device to query. Must be either a sysname
              prefix or an IP address.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Files to remove

Many files have been removed or moved around since NAV 4.0 and 4.1. Unless you upgraded NAV using a package manager (such as APT), you may need/want to remove some obsolete files and directories (here prefixed by /usr/local/nav):

/usr/local/nav/doc/hacking/netmap.rst
/usr/local/nav/doc/hacking/using-vagrant.rst
/usr/local/nav/doc/hacking/vagrant.rst
/usr/local/nav/doc/html/hacking/netmap.html
/usr/local/nav/doc/html/hacking/using-vagrant.html
/usr/local/nav/doc/html/hacking/vagrant.html
/usr/local/nav/doc/html/_sources/hacking/netmap.txt
/usr/local/nav/doc/html/_sources/hacking/using-vagrant.txt
/usr/local/nav/doc/html/_sources/hacking/vagrant.txt
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/web/api/auth.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/web/api/helpers/
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/web/api/serializers.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/web/api/views.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/web/netmap/forms.py
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/app.js
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/collections/
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/main.js
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/models/
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/order.js
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/resource.js
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/router.js
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/templates/
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/static/js/src/netmap/views/
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/netmap/admin_list_mapviews.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/netmap/backbone.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/netmap/graphml.html

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 django-filter >= 0.5.3

• The Python module 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 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 -c option. Typically, if NAV and PostgreSQL are on the same server, navsyncdb is invoked as the postgres user to achieve this (otherwise, use the PGHOST, PGUSER, 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.readthedocs.io/en/latest/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.

NAV 4.0

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 4.0 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/4.0 .

Dependency changes

New dependencies:

• Graphite

• Sass >= 3.2.12 (only required at build time)

• The Python module django-crispy-forms == 1.3.2

• The Python module crispy-forms-foundation == 0.2.3

• The Python module feedparser >=5.1.2,<5.2

Changed version requirements:

• Python >= 2.7.0

Removed dependencies:

• Cricket

• rrdtool

Major changes to statistics collection

NAV 4.0 ditches Cricket for collection and presentation of time-series data. Cricket is great for manually maintaining large configurations, but becomes quite inflexible when integrating with a tool like NAV. Also, Cricket has not been actively developed since 2004.

Collection of time-series data via SNMP has become the responsibility of NAV’s existing SNMP collector engine, ipdevpoll, implemented as new plugins and job configurations.

RRDtool has also been ditched in favor of Graphite, a more flexible and scalable system for storage of time-series data. Graphite provides a networked service for receiving “metrics”, meaning it can be installed on a separate server, if desirable. It will even scale horizontally, if needed.

The parts of NAV that collect or otherwise produce time-series data, such as values collected via SNMP, ping roundtrip times or ipdevpoll job performance metrics, will now send these to a configured Carbon backend (Graphite’s metric-receiving daemon).

Due to this extensive change, the threshold manager interface and the threshold monitor have been rewritten from scratch. The new threshold monitoring system uses “threshold rules”, which leverage functionality built-in to Graphite. It is also essentially independent of NAV, which means it can also monitor thresholds for data that was put into Graphite by 3rd party software.

Migrating existing data

Existing threshold values for RRD-based data sources cannot be consistently migrated to the new threshold rule system, so you will need to configure your threshold rules from scratch.

We do provide a program for migrating time-series data stored in RRD files into Graphite, which will enable you to keep old data when upgrading from an older NAV version. Usage and limitations of this program is documented in a separate howto guide: Migrating RRD data to Graphite (from NAV 3 to NAV 4).

Note

If you wish to migrate time-series data, please read the guide before starting NAV 4.

Files to remove

Many files have been removed or moved around since NAV 3.15. Unless you upgraded NAV using a package manager (such as APT), you may need/want to remove some obsolete files and directories (here prefixed by /usr/local/nav):

/usr/local/nav/bin/cleanrrds.py
/usr/local/nav/bin/extract_cricket_oids.py
/usr/local/nav/bin/fillthresholds.py
/usr/local/nav/bin/getBoksMacs.sh
/usr/local/nav/bin/mcc.py
/usr/local/nav/bin/migrate_cricket.py
/usr/local/nav/bin/networkDiscovery.sh
/usr/local/nav/bin/ping.py
/usr/local/nav/bin/thresholdMon.py
/usr/local/nav/etc/cricket-config/
/usr/local/nav/etc/cricket-views.conf
/usr/local/nav/etc/cron.d/cricket
/usr/local/nav/etc/cron.d/thresholdMon
/usr/local/nav/etc/mcc.conf
/usr/local/nav/etc/subtree-sets
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/activeipcollector/rrdcontroller.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/ipdevpoll/plugins/oidprofiler.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/mcc/
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/netmap/rrd.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/statemon/rrd.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/web/cricket.py
/usr/local/nav/lib/python/nav/web/rrdviewer/
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/cricket/
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/images/
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/js/
/usr/local/nav/share/htdocs/style/
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/alertprofiles/address_tab.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/alertprofiles/filter_group_tab.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/alertprofiles/filter_tab.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/alertprofiles/matchfield_tab.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/alertprofiles/profile_tab.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/devicehistory/history_view_filter.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/devicehistory/paginator.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/ipdevinfo/frag-datasources.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_cabling.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_location.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_netboxgroup.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_netbox.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_organization.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_patch.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_prefix.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_room.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_service.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_type.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_usage.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/seeddb/tabs_vendor.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/bulkset.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/delete.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/edit.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/listall.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/manageinterface.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/managenetbox.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/not-logged-in.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/select.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/threshold/start.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/webfront/preferences_navigation.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/webfront/toolbox_big_frag.html
/usr/local/nav/share/templates/webfront/toolbox_small_frag.html
/usr/local/nav/var/cricket-data/
/usr/local/nav/var/log/cricket/

NAV 3.15

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 3.15 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/3.15 .

Dependency changes

New dependencies:

• mod_wsgi

• The following Python modules:

  • The Python Imaging Library (PIL, aka. python-imaging on Debian).

  • django-oauth2-provider >= 0.2.6

  • djangorestframework >= 2.3.7

  • iso8601

Changed version requirements:

• Django >= 1.4

• PostgreSQL >= 9.1

Removed dependencies:

• mod_python

• Cheetah Templates

Database schema changes

The database schema files have been moved to a new location, and so has the command to synchronize your running PostgreSQL database with changes. The syncing command previously known as syncdb.py is now the navsyncdb program, installed alongside NAV’s other binaries.

Configuration changes

The configuration file nav.conf has gained a new option called SECRET_KEY. NAV’s web interface will not work unless you add this option to nav.conf.

Set it to a string of random characters that should be unique for your NAV installation. This is used by the Django framework for cryptographic signing in various situations. Here are three suggestions for generating a suitable string of random characters, depending on what tools you have available:

1. gpg -a --gen-random 1 51

2. makepasswd --chars 51

3. pwgen -s 51 1

Please see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/ref/settings/#std:setting-SECRET_KEY if you want to know more about this.

mod_python vs. mod_wsgi

NAV no longer depends on mod_python, but instead leverages Django’s ability to serve a NAV web site using its various supported methods (such as WSGI, flup or FastCGI).

This strictly means that NAV no longer is dependent on Apache; you should be able to serve it using any web server that supports any of Django’s methods. However, we still ship with a reasonable Apache configuration file, which now now uses mod_wsgi as a replacement for mod_python.

Warning

If you have taken advantage of NAV’s authentication and authorization system to protect arbitrary Apache resources, such as static documents, CGI scripts or PHP applications, you will still need mod_python. This ability was only there as an upshot of mod_python being Apache specific, whereas WSGI is a portable interface to web applications.

NAV 3.15 still provides a mod_python-compatible module to authenticate and authorize requests for arbitrary Apache resources. To protect any resource, make sure mod_python is still enabled in your Apache and add something like this to your Apache config:

<Location /uri/to/protected-resource>
    PythonHeaderParserHandler nav.web.modpython
</Location>

Access to this resource can now be controlled through the regular authorization configuration of NAV’s Useradmin panel.

REST API

NAV 3.15 also includes the beginnings of a read-only RESTful API. The API is not yet documented, and must be considered an unstable experiment at the moment. API access tokens can only be issued by a NAV administrator.

Write privileges for room image uploads

Uploaded images for rooms are stored in $prefix/var/uploads/images/rooms/. This directory needs to be writable for navcron, assuming you are using the default wsgi setup.

Files to remove

Some files have been moved around. The SQL schema files are no longer installed as part of the documentation, but as data files into a subdirectory of whichever directory is configured as the datadir (the default is $prefix/share). The Django HTML templates have also moved into a subdirectory of datadir. Also, almost all the documentation source files have changed their file name extension from .txt to .rst to properly indicate that they employ reStructuredText markup.

If any of the following files and directories are still in your installation after upgrading to NAV 3.15, they should be safe to remove (installation prefix has been stripped from these file names). If you installed and upgraded NAV using a packaging system, you should be able to safely ignore this section:

bin/navTemplate.py

doc/*.txt
doc/faq/*.txt
doc/intro/*.txt
doc/reference/*.txt

doc/cricket/
doc/mailin/
doc/sql/

etc/cricket-config/router-interfaces/
etc/cricket-config/switch-ports/

lib/python/nav/django/shortcuts.py
lib/python/nav/django/urls/*
lib/python/nav/getstatus.py
lib/python/nav/messages.py
lib/python/nav/report/utils.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/core.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/execute.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/icmp.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/ip.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/mailAlert.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/Socket.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/timeoutsocket.py
lib/python/nav/topology/d3_js
lib/python/nav/topology/d3_js/d3_js.py
lib/python/nav/topology/d3_js/__init__.py
lib/python/nav/web/encoding.py
lib/python/nav/web/noauth.py
lib/python/nav/web/seeddb/page/subcategory.py
lib/python/nav/web/state.py
lib/python/nav/web/templates/__init__.py
lib/python/nav/web/webfront/compability.py

lib/python/nav/web/templates/
lib/templates/

share/htdocs/js/arnold.js
share/htdocs/js/d3.v2.js
share/htdocs/js/default.js
share/htdocs/js/report.js
share/htdocs/js/require_config.test.js
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/templates/algorithm_toggler.html
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/templates/link_info.html
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/templates/list_maps.html
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/templates/map_info.html
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/templates/netbox_info.html
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/templates/searchbox.html
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/views/algorithm_toggler.js
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/views/link_info.js
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/views/list_maps.js
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/views/map_info.js
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/views/netbox_info.js
share/htdocs/js/src/netmap/views/searchbox.js
share/htdocs/js/threshold.js
share/htdocs/style/MatrixScopesTemplate.css
share/htdocs/style/MatrixTemplate.css

NAV 3.14

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 3.14 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/3.14 .

Dependency changes

• The pynetsnmp library is still optional (for the time being) and recommended, but is required if IPv6 SNMP support is needed.

Manual upgrade steps required

In NAV 3.14.1592, the Cricket trees switch-ports and router-interfaces have been consolidated into a single ports tree, where all physical ports’ traffic stats now also are collected. After running the usual syncdb.py command, you should run mcc.py once manually (as the navcron) user to ensure the Cricket config tree is updated.

When everything is up and running again, you can optionally delete the switch-ports and router-interfaces directories from your cricket-config directory, as they are no longer used by NAV.

NAV now supplies its own subtree-sets configuration to Cricket. If you have made manual changes to your Cricket collection setup and/or this file, you may need to update your setup accordingly.

IPv6

NAV 3.14 supports SNMP over IPv6, and most of the service monitors can now also support IP devices with an IPv6 address in NAV. When adding a service monitor in SeedDB, any monitor that doesn’t support IPv6 will be marked as such.

NAV will also properly configure Cricket with IPv6 addresses, but Cricket’s underlying SNMP library needs two optional Perl modules to be installed to enable IPv6. These modules are:

• Socket6

• IO::Socket::INET6

On Debian/Ubuntu these two are already in the Recommends list of the libsnmp-session-perl package (Cricket’s underlying SNMP library); depending on your Apt configuration, they may or may not have been installed automatically when the cricket package was installed.

Files to remove

If any of the following files and directories are still in your installation after upgrading to NAV 3.14, they should be removed (installation prefix has been stripped from these file names). If you installed and upgraded NAV using a packaging system, you should be able to safely ignore this section:

etc/rrdviewer/
lib/python/nav/statemon/checker/*.descr
share/htdocs/js/portadmin.js

NAV 3.13

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 3.13 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/3.13 .

Dependency changes

• NAV no longer requires Java. Consequently, the PostgreSQL JDBC driver is no longer needed either.

• To use the new netbiostracker system, the program nbtscan must be installed.

New eventengine

The eventengine was rewritten in Python. The beta version does not yet support a config file, but this will come.

There is now a single log file for the eventengine, the lower-cased eventengine.log. The eventEngine.log log file and the eventEngine log directory can safely be removed.

New alert message template system

As a consequence of the eventEngine rewrite, alert message templates are no longer stored in the alertmsg.conf file. Instead, Django templates are used as the basis of alert message templates, and each template is stored in an event/alert hierarchy below the alertmsg/ directory.

Also, NAV 3.13 no longer provides Norwegian translations of these templates.

The hierarchy/naming conventions in the alertmsg/ directory are as follows:

<event type>/<alert type>-<medium>.[<language>.]txt

The <event type> is one of the available event types in NAV, whereas <alert type> is one of the alert types associated with the event type. <medium> is one of the supported alert mediums, such as email, sms or jabber. A two letter language code is optional; if omitted, English will be assumed.

To make a Norwegian translation of the boxState/boxDown-email.txt template, copy the file to boxState/boxDown-email.no.txt and translate the text inside the copied file.

Variables available in the template context include:

• source

• device

• netbox

• subid

• time

• event_type

• alert_type

• state

• value

• severity

Some of these, such as the netbox variable, are Django models, and will enable access to query related information in the NAV database. Various attributes accessible through the netbox variable include:

• netbox.sysname

• netbox.room

• netbox.room.location

• netbox.category

• netbox.organization

Also, since Django templates are used, you have the full power of its template tag library to control and customize the appearance of an alert message based on the available variables.

VLANs

It is now possible to search for VLANs in the navbar search. The search triggers on VLAN numbers and netidents.

The VLAN page contains details about the VLAN and its related router ports and prefixes. The information is linked to the more extensive reports for each port and prefix.

The page also contains graphs of the number of hosts on the VLAN over time (both IPv4 and IPv6 hosts, as well as number of unique MAC addresses seen). Historic information is easily accessible by utilizing the buttons next to the graphs.

Bootstrapping host count graphs

Collection of the number of active hosts on each VLAN starts as you upgrade to NAV 3.13. The graphs will therefore have no information prior to this point.

The source information comes from NAV’s logs of ARP and ND caches from your routers. If you upgraded to 3.13 from a previous version, you can bootstrap your graphs with historical information from NAV’s database.

To do this, use the collect_active_ip.py program provided with NAV 3.13:

Usage: collect_active_ip.py [options]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d DAYS, --days=DAYS  Days back in time to start collecting from
  -r, --reset           Delete existing rrd-files. Use it with --days to
                        refill

To bootstrap your graphs with data from the last year (this may take a while), run:

sudo -u navcron collect_active_ip.py -d 365 -r

Note

NAV does not have historical information about prefixes. If your subnet allocations have changed considerably recently, you shouldn’t bootstrap your graphs further back than this if you want your graphs to be as close to the truth as possible.

Arnold

Arnold was rewritten to not use mod_python and to use Django’s ORM for database access. The rewrite has tried to be as transparent as possible and at the same time fix any open bugs reports.

Some changes are introduced:

• The shell script for interacting directly with Arnold is gone. If there is an outcry for it, it will be reintroduced. The other scripts for automatic detentions and pursuit are a part of the core functionality and are of course still present.

• The workflow when manually detaining has been slightly improved.

• The reasons used for automatic detentions are no longer available when manually detaining. This is done to be able to differ between manual and automatic detentions. If you detain for the same reason both manually and automatically, just create two similar reasons.

• Log levels are no longer set in arnold.conf. Use logging.conf to alter loglevels for the scripts and web.

• Some unreported bugs are fixed.

• The “Open on move”-option in a predefined detention was never used. This is fixed.

• Pursuing was not done in some cases.

• Reported bugs that were fixed: - LP#341703 Manual detention does not pursue client - LP#361530 Predefined detention does not exponentially increase detentions - LP#744932 Arnold should give warning if snmp write is not configured

Files to remove

If any of the following files and directories are still in your installation after upgrading to NAV 3.13, they should be removed (installation prefix has been stripped from these file names). If you installed and upgraded NAV using a packaging system, you should be able to safely ignore this section:

bin/arnold.py
bin/eventEngine.sh
etc/alertmsg.conf
etc/eventEngine.conf (new config format in lowercase eventengine.conf)
lib/java/
lib/python/nav/web/arnoldhandler.py
lib/python/nav/web/loggerhandler.py
lib/python/nav/web/radius/radius.py
lib/python/nav/web/report/handler.py
var/log/eventEngine/

NAV 3.12

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 3.12 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/3.12 .

Dependency changes

• Python >= 2.6 is now required. NAV will not work under Python 3.

• Django >= 1.2 is now required. NAV will likely not work under Django 1.4.

Cricket configuration

Your subtree-sets configuration for Cricket must be updated. This file is most likely placed in /etc/cricket/. Compare manually with or copy from doc/cricket/cricket/subtree-sets.

Take note of $(NAV)/etc/mcc.conf. Module interfaces should be there instead of routerinterfaces and switchports.

IPv6 statistics for router interfaces will now be collected. For this to work you need to copy some configuration templates to your cricket-config directory. NB: Make sure the dataDir is the same as the original after copying the Defaults file. If your NAV is installed in /usr/local/nav, run these commands:

sudo cp doc/cricket/cricket-config/Defaults \
           /usr/local/nav/etc/cricket-config/

sudo cp -r doc/cricket/cricket-config/ipv6-interfaces \
           /usr/local/nav/etc/cricket-config/

Room map

If you have registered coordinates (latitude, longitude) on your rooms you may include a geographical map of the rooms on the front page by editing etc/webfront/welcome-registered.txt and/or welcome-anonymous.txt and adding the following HTML:

<div id="mapwrapper">
    <div id="room_map" class="smallmap"></div>
</div>

If you feel like having a bigger map, replace smallmap with bigmap. The markers are clickable and will take you to the new “Room view” for the clicked room.

Toolbar search

The toolbar search now searches for more than IP devices. Try it!

Files to remove

If any of the following files and directories are still in your installation after upgrading to NAV 3.12, they should be removed (installation prefix has been stripped from these file names). If you installed and upgraded NAV using a packaging system, you should be able to safely ignore this section:

doc/getting-started.txt
doc/mailin/README
doc/radius/
etc/apache/subsystems/maintenance.conf
etc/apache/subsystems/messages.conf
etc/apache/subsystems/netmap.conf
lib/python/nav/ipdevpoll/plugins/lastupdated.py
lib/python/nav/web/maintenance/handler.py
lib/python/nav/web/messages/handler.py
lib/python/nav/web/netmap/datacollector.py
share/htdocs/js/DeviceBrowserTemplate.js
share/htdocs/js/devicehistory.js
share/htdocs/js/EditTemplate.js
share/htdocs/js/ipdevinfo.js
share/htdocs/js/jquery-1.4.4.min.js
share/htdocs/js/jquery-json-2.2.min.js
share/htdocs/js/quickselect.js
share/htdocs/js/seeddb.js
share/htdocs/js/seeddbTemplate.js
share/htdocs/netmap/

NAV 3.11

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 3.11 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/3.11 .

Dependency changes

• JavaSNMP is no longer a dependency and can be removed. There is also therefore no longer any need to export a CLASS_PATH variable before building NAV from source.

Topology source data

The getBoksMacs Java program has been replaced by a set of ipdevpoll plugins, configured to run under the topo job in 15 minute intervals. This job will collect switch forwarding tables (CAM), STP blocking status, CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) neighbor information and also LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) neighbor information.

The navtopology program will now prefer LLDP source information over CDP and CDP source information over CAM source information when building NAV’s topology.

Unrecognized neighbors from CDP or LLDP are _not_ stored yet by NAV 3.11.0, but this will be reimplemented in the 3.11 series.

NAV 3.10

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 3.10 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/3.10 .

Cricket configuration changes

NAV 3.10 now configures Cricket to collect a wide range of available sensor data from devices, including temperature sensors. Devices that implement either ENTITY-SENSOR-MIB (RFC 3433), CISCO-ENVMON-MIB or IT-WATCHDOGS-MIB (IT Watchdogs WeatherGoose) are supported.

Your need to copy the baseline Cricket configuration for sensors to your cricket-config directory. Given that your NAV install prefix is /usr/local/nav/:

sudo cp -r doc/cricket/cricket-config/sensors \
           /usr/local/nav/etc/cricket-config/

You also need to add the /sensors tree to your Cricket’s subtree-sets file. See the example file containing all NAV subtrees at doc/cricket/cricket/subtree-sets.

Topology detection

VLAN subtopology detection has now also been rewritten as a separate option to the navtopology program. The old networkDiscovery service has been renamed to topology and now runs physical and vlan topology detection using navtopology once an hour.

If you notice topology problems that weren’t there before the upgrade to 3.10, please report them so that we can fix them.

The old detector code is deprecated, but if you wish to temporarily go back to the old detector code, you can; see the comments in the cron.d/topology file. The old detector will be removed entirely in NAV 3.11.

Link state monitoring

ipdevpoll will now post linkState events when a port’s link state changes, regardless of whether you have configured your devices to send link state traps to NAV.

To avoid a deluge of linkDown or linkUp alerts from all access ports in your network, it is recommended to keep the filter setting in the [linkstate] section of ipdevpoll.conf to the default setting of topology. This means that events will only be posted for ports that have been detected as uplinks or downlinks.

To facilitate faster detection of link state changes, ipdevpoll is now configured with a linkcheck job that runs the linkstate plugin every five minutes. You can adjust this to your own liking in ipdevpoll.conf.

SNMP agent monitoring

An snmpAgentDown alert will now be sent if an IP device with a configured community stops responding to SNMP requests. The ipdevpoll job snmpcheck will check for this every 30 minutes.

To receive alerts about SNMP agent states, please subscribe to snmpAgentState events in your alert profile.

Redundant power supply and fan state monitoring

NAV now finds and stores information about power supply and fan units from Cisco and HP devices, and monitors for any failures in redundant configurations.

For the time being, the monitoring is run by a separate program, powersupplywatch.py, which is by default set up to run as a cron job once an hour. To adjust the monitoring interval, edit cron.d/psuwatch.

IPv6 status monitoring

pping has gained support for pinging IPv6 hosts. _However_, SNMP over IPv6 is not supported quite yet. This means you can add servers with IPv6 addresses using SeedDB, but not with an enabled SNMP community.

Files to remove

If any of the following files and directories are still in your installation after upgrading to NAV 3.10, they should be removed (installation prefix has been stripped from these file names). If you installed and upgraded NAV using a packaging system, you should be able to safely ignore this section:

doc/sql/*.sql
etc/cron.d/networkDiscovery
lib/python/nav/database.py
lib/python/nav/mcc/routers.py
lib/python/nav/mcc/switches.py
lib/python/nav/web/templates/seeddbTemplate.py
lib/python/nav/web/templates/selectTreeTemplate.py
lib/python/nav/web/l2trace.py
lib/python/nav/web/sortedStats.py
lib/python/nav/web/netmap/handler.py
lib/python/nav/web/serviceHelper.py
lib/python/nav/web/ldapAuth.py
lib/python/nav/web/selectTree.py
lib/python/nav/statemon/output.py
lib/templates/geomap/geomap-data-kml.xml
apache/
bin/navschema.py

NAV 3.9

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 3.9 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/3.9 .

Dependency changes

• A dependency to the Python library NetworkX (http://networkx.lanl.gov/), version 1.0 or newer, has been introduced in the new topology detector.

  NetworkX lists a number of optional third party packages that will extend NetworkX’ functionality, but none of these are currently needed by NAV.

• An optional, but recommended, dependency to the pynetsnmp library has been introduced to increase SNMP-related performance in the ipdevpoll daemon. pynetsnmp is a ctypes binding (as opposed to a native C module) enabling integration with the efficient SNMP processing of the mature NetSNMP library.

  pynetsnmp was created for and is distributed with ZenOSS. There doesn’t seem to be a separate tarball for pynetsnmp, but the source code repository is at http://dev.zenoss.com/trac/browser/trunk/pynetsnmp . The library has been packaged for Debian under the name python-pynetsnmp.

NAV 3.8

Source code directory layout

The source code directory layout has changed. All subystems in the subsystems directory were merged in several top-level directories:

python

All the Python libraries have moved here.

java

All the Java code has moved here.

bin

All executables have been moved here.

etc

All initial/example configuration files have been moved here.

media

All static media files to be served by Apache have moved here.

templates

All Django templates used by NAV have moved here.

sql

All the database schema initialization/migration related files have moved here.

Apache configuration

NAV’s preferred way of configuring Apache has changed. The default target directory for an Apache DocumentRoot has therefore also changed, to ${prefix}/share/htdocs.

NAV 3.8 only installs static media files into this directory - all Python code is now kept in NAV’s Python library directory. For Cricket integration, Cricket’s CGI scripts and static media should still be installed in the DocumentRoot under a separate cricket directory (or aliased to the /cricket location).

NAV now provides its own basic Apache configuration file to be included in your VirtualHost setup. This file is installed as ${sysconfdir}/apache/apache.conf. See the Configuring Apache section in the INSTALL file for more details.

Database installation and migration

NAV 3.8 introduces an automatic database schema upgrade program. Every time you upgrade NAV, all you need to do to ensure your database schema is updated is to run the sql/syncdb.py program.

This program will use the settings from db.conf to connect to the NAV database. It can also be used to create a NAV database from scratch.

PortAdmin

NAV can now configure switch port descriptions and native VLANs from the IP Device Info tool, provided that you have set an SNMP write community in SeedDB (which is also necessary for the Arnold tool to work).

This functionality supports Cisco devices through proprietary MIBs. Devices from other vendors are supported as long as they properly implement the Q-BRIDGE-MIB (RFC 2674) - This has been successfully tested on HP switches. Alcatel switches seem to block write access to the necessary Q-BRIDGE objects; we are still looking into this.

Please do not forget to secure your SNMP v2c communications using best practices. Limit SNMP communication with your devices to only the necessary IP addresses or ranges using access lists or similar techniques. You don’t want users on your network to sniff SNMP community strings and start configuring your devices, do you?

Dependency changes

The INSTALL file used to refer to the python package egenix-mxdatetime as a dependency. This has been removed, as NAV stopped using it in version 3.6. You psycopg2 installation may still require it, though.

NAV 3.8 also adds a dependency to the Python library simplejson.

Also, don’t forget: The following dependencies changed from version 3.6 to 3.7:

• Python >= 2.5.0

• PostgreSQL >= 8.3