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4.192. virt-who

Updated virt-who packages that fix several bugs and add two enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
The virt-who packages provide an agent that collects information about virtual guests present in the system and reports them to the Red Hat Subscription Manager tool.

Bug Fixes

BZ#806226
Previously, when executing the "service virt-who restart" command on a virtual machine via the secure shell (SSH) network protocol, the security lock prevented the service from reconnecting after the restart. Therefore, when running two virtual machines simultaneously, restarting the first machine reported the following message in the output of the "virt-who service status" command executed on the second machine:
virt-who dead but pid file exists
The bug has been fixed, and the virt-who agent now handles the aforementioned situation properly.
BZ#812736
Prior to this update, the virt-who agent failed to monitor the guest start event after performing a specific set of user operations. Consequently, the virt.uuid of the guest could not be reported. The bug has been fixed, and the virt.uuid identifications are now provided correctly regardless of previous operations.
BZ#848777
Previously, when starting the virt-who service with the "virt-who -d" command, the background loop was created, even though the virt-who agent was not in the background mode. With this update, the background loop is no longer accidentally initiated in the described scenario.
BZ#848788
Previously, when the virt-who agent was started as a service in the background, the debug log appeared in the shell prompt. This behavior has been corrected, and the debug log is no longer displayed in the aforementioned case.
BZ#849921
In the virt-who configuration file, setting the "VIRTWHO_INTERVAL" option to any number enables sending a list of virtual guests to a log file automatically at the given time interval. Due to a bug, this functionality was blocked, therefore the log file was not updated as expected. The bug has been fixed, and now the log file is updated as frequently as set in the "VIRTWHO_INTERVAL" option.
BZ#853371
Previously, when the virt-who agent was running in debug mode, it failed to create or recover a connection to a virtual machine. Consequently, the following message was displayed:
ERROR: Unable to create connection
With this update, the bug has been fixed and the virt-who agent properly connects with the debug mode enabled.
BZ#859841
Previously, when running the virt-who service in vdsm mode, unregistering the system from the SAM (Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager) server caused the service to crash with the following message:
virt-who dead but subsys locked
This bug has been fixed and virt-who now works properly in the described case.
BZ#861563
Previously, when running the "service virt-who restart" command repeatedly in very short time intervals, the command failed to stop the virt-who process, but started a new process successfully. Consequently, many virt-who processes could have ended up running simultaneously. This bug has been fixed, and running "service virt-who restart" repeatedly no longer results in multiple processes being started.

Enhancements

BZ#808061
With this update, the virt-who agent has been modified to start as a foreground process and to print error messages or debugging output (the "-d" command line option) to standard error. Moreover, the following command line options have been enhanced: the "-o" option provides the one-shot mode and exits after sending the list of guests; the "-b" option and the "service virt-who start" command equivalently start on the background and send data to the /var/log/ directory.
BZ#848781
With this update, a man page has been added to the virt-who package. As a result, a proper description of virt-who is provided.
All users of virt-who are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.