ZipTie 2008.04b has been unleashed. 2008.04b was originally slated to only to contain bug fixes, but we managed to stick a few "little" but powerful features in there.

Most notably, the Tool Plugin framework for ZipTie has been greatly expanded to promote more community development. The ZipTie team has offered up several new Tool Plugins to demonstrate some of this new power*. Right click on one or more devices and look under the Tools menu for everything below.

• A Tool Plugin's user interface can now be driven by the device's configuration model. This example screenshot shows a new Tool Plugin that lets the user choose one or more switch ports to assign to a VLAN. The user doesn't need to know any commands, they just need to point and click. Also included in this release is a port turn-up/turn-down Tool Plugin.
• Sick of looking at an XML Ziptie-Element-Document? We have provided a few Tool Plugins that offer up a more simple view of ZipTie's extensive configuration model. For example, here is a view of the hardware details (serial numbers, model numbers, etc) of a device. Here is another view that shows the firewall details (ACLs, filters) of a device. Best yet, these views will be the same for all of your devices, no matter what make or model they are.
• One change for all! The ZipTie Adapter framework now supports general change operations that can be extended to do whatever type of change you can think of. This means you can run one change across your network without having to know the different device types. Each Adapter will take care of knowing how to execute the change properly. The Tool Plugins included with ZipTie 2008.04b that use this feature include:
• Login banner change
• SNMP community string add/delete
• Syslog host add/delete
• NTP host add/delete.

In addition to all of the Tool Plugin work, the 2008.04b release now includes the much anticipated Configuration Change Report. It will contain all of the text configuration file differences for a user defined time period. The report can be run on demand through the right-click menu or it can be regularly scheduled with the results being emailed out.

And finally, we now officially support the use of MySQL or PostgreSQL. ZipTie will still come with an embedded database (Derby) by default, but if you would prefer to use another you can now do so. Consult the User's Guide for more details.

*Some tools may not be implemented for all adapter types. If so, you will receive a warning in the output of your tool. This is normal and means that someone, possibly you, should extend that particular Adapter. Consult the ZipTie forums and the IRC channel for help on this.