OpenNMS Update v2.11

Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 23:19:58 -0600 (CST)
From: announce-admin@opennms.org
To: announce@www.opennms.org
Subject: [OpenNMS-Announce] OpenNMS Update v2.11

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OpenNMS Update

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Vol 2., Issue 11

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March 13, 2001

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   In this week's installment...
     * Project Status
          + Phone Problems Persist
          + 0.7.1 Released
          + OpenNMS: Your Tax Dollars At Work
          + Coding Projects Underway
     * Upcoming Road Shows
     * Early Adopter Program Status
     * The Wish List

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Project Status

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Phone Problems Persist:

First, my apologies for robbing your time last week with my rant
against BellSouth. I’ll try to control myself in the future.

But, for those of you still interested (or perhaps still reading
last weeks Update), the saga continues… I’ll bring you up to date
with a great deal more brevity this time.

First, in my own idiocy, I told you the circuit was actually up
last week when in fact, all I had done was try to ping it. It was
up, but on dial-up, which Ben had set up earlier in the day. So
yes, I could ping it, but BellSouth’s xDSL was still down.

When I get on the phone the next day to my friends at BellSouth
(Sherard wasn’t in), I get the same story from multiple folks
(e.g., need to talk to billing, need to talk to xDSL support, etc.,
ad nauseam). Depending on which call it was, I got varying stories:
it should be working, it will be working later today, we’ll send
somebody out next Monday (5 days), you need to talk to someone
else, etc.

In my frustration (and with something else to do), I check the
xDSL modem, which now shows a sync light (it didn’t before). So I
start messing with it and…nothing. So after hours of screwing
with it and BellSouth, I give up and go to my lunch meeting. I get
back and what do I get? A casual “oh yeah, we’ve been up for a half
hour.”.

Damn. I felt like Moses. Wandered lost for 40 years and don’t
get to be around for the Promised Land. But then again, Moses had
God on his side. And I was stuck with BellSouth.

0.7.1 Released:

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you’ll want to.

Jeff is swearing by it (in contrast to swearing at it), and so
far, most of the feedback has been good.

To clarify a few of the goals for this release: we found that
trying to push in all the new features we are working on currently,
as well as some of the major bug fixes, it was more difficult to
backport changes to the stable tree, so we did some more testing on
0.7.1 and are trying to focus on that for the time being. The “easy
installer”, which we desperately need, is not slated until a later
0.7 release (late April?).

For now, we’ve still got plenty in the works. A drastic re-work
of the event configuration process (which enables some basic event
correlation), some database maintenance utilities, some
command-line interfaces to critical functions (e.g., generating
events, adding/deleting nodes, etc.), more features in the web UI,
including better ad hoc reporting, and with some luck, a
threshold-aware poller, and a reasonable handling of non-IP
addressed interfaces.

Cross your fingers, be patient, and pitch in if you can. And as
always, thank you for your support.

OpenNMS: Your Tax Dollars At Work:

In his recent posting to the [discuss] list, Pete Siemsen was
understating his involvement and interest to a degree. Pete, who is
a very capable network management guy and evidently, a pretty mean
grant writer, has secured some funding to work in tandem on the
OpenNMS effort to add some additional discovery and display
capabilities into the product.

Obviously identifying a niche that we had not yet addressed
(read: actively avoided), Pete has some specific interests in CDP,
Layer 2, and mapping. From notes we’ve received over the last two
years, there should be more than one of you out there interested in
this effort.

NOw you should also be made aware that this money is not
something that goes into Pete’s pocket. This effectively buys him
some time away from his current employer (another government
entity, if I understand correctly) to work on the effort. And since
he can only do it part time, he’ll be bringing on someone else
(likely a local student looking for an interesting project) to fill
out the rest of the grant proposal/dollars.

And a disclaimer on Pete’s behalf: He doesn’t currently “do”
Java, but is willing to learn (insert “Stripes” reference here).
And his project is still, to a degree, being formulated, so we
needn’t expect anything any time soon. But I’m personally confident
that whatever we do get will be well thought out, well implemented,
and a great addition to our functionality set.

A hearty welcome to Pete and here’s looking forward to a
productive year.

Coding Projects Underway:

* CDP/L2/Mapping — Way too early to tell. Watch this space and
the [discovery] mailing list for updates.

* Snort Integration — M.L. (can I use your name?) has got his
act together on this one. Things are progressing nicely and we
should have a detailed story to tell soon. I love vague words like
“soon”.

* Solaris Port Postgres Procedures — Saw a post from Harald G.,
but don’t remember what it said. I think it was in reference to his
Solaris port of icmpd.

* Postgres for NT — Just traded emails with someone earlier
today that is trying OpenNMS on Win32 and has made their way to
portmapper problems, so until we get past that, we can’t vouch for
Postgres. But for now, all signs point to ‘yes’.

* Portmap for NT — See above. There is one that ships with
NT/2000 that _should_ work, but we haven’t tested it. There is
another one referenced at http://www.plt.rwth-aachen.de/ks/english/oncrpc.html
which is basically from the same project as the Java RPC libraries
we are using. This is probably worth a look for those of you
interested in running on NT.

* SNMP Poller/Data Collection — I refuse to believe I’m the
only guy that reads this Update and also uses RRDTool. Hello?
McFly? Anybody home?

* Event DTD — It’s the choice of a new generation.

* User Interfaces — Some questions on the default configuration
that’s currently shipping. The rules are generic at best and faulty
at worst. Make sure you LOOK AT THEM and see if they are right for
your environment.

* New Pollers — The list currently includes LDAP, POP3, and
something else, which I can’t currently remember.i

* Maji Prelim Work — Rick is building Perl code that is
successfully parsing MIB files. Check him out, in all his glory, on
the “events” list.

* Configuration — Ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Jason inherited this one
and is making some progress, but it’s ugly. Additionally, some of
the users/groups stuff is making its way to the Web UI, which will
help matters a bit.

* Swing Interface — Fighting random oddities. Proceed with
caution.

* Discovery/CAPSD/Database Review — Revisiting the way
Discovery and capsd communicate, verifying that stuff is accurately
written to the database, and adding some maintenance functionality
we didn’t have previously. Mike’s the man, and specifically, Mike
is the man that did not break the build this week! Famous last
words…

* Agent Technologies — Big update from Craig this week. Here’s
the highlights. Basing everything on Jabber, with a Jabber server
on the managed system, with Jabber clients that do specific
monitoring. Plans to have something workable in the May timeframe.
The current push is to get some OpenSSL hooks into the
Server-Server communication piece. The OpenNMS-side server will be
C, providing our first known integration point between a C service
and our Java-based SCM. Rock on, Craig!

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Upcoming Road Shows

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Our parent company has provided us with a small tradeshow booth
that we’ll be able to take with when we do our upcoming shows
(e.g., ALS (A != Atlanta), LWE, and other meetings o’ the minds).
We set it up and it looks like a game show set. Now Luke wants to
move it into his living room and interview all of his “guests”.
Perhaps he should also consider doing his apartment in “levels” and
feeding his horse Beef-a-rino…

On with the road shows…

* May 5th – Twin Cities LUG, Minneapolis, MN
* May 10th – Boulder LUG, Boulder, CO
* June 1st – NOVALUG BBQ!! Fire-eaters Unite!!
* June 2nd – Northern Virginia LUG (NOVALUG), Alexandria, VA
* June 11-15 – OpenView Forum 2001, New Orleans, LA
* July 23-27 – O’Reilly Open Source Convention, San Diego, CA

For additional details on these appearances and others, check
out the web site at http://www.opennms.org/sections/opennms/events

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Early Adopter Program Status

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0.7.1 has made Jeff’s life far easier. But then again, without
installation problems to fix, Jeff’s now forced to learn the rest
of the product. Que sera, sera.

Also, a note to all EAP members: We’re doing our best to get to
people and our communication has been poor. Here’s the general
status: everyone is currently on hold pending our ability to get
0.7.1 installed as a common base for everyone, since it rocks. More
details to follow, and if you can’t wait, contact Luke at
luke@opennms.org.

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The Wish List

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With some of the contributors popping up, we’re starting to get
some of our main wishes addressed. Shout outs to our “peeps”: M.L.,
Craig Trader (of Scoreboard fame), Pete Siemsen, Harald Goerl, and
a world of others.

And now, on with the list…

* In the 0.7.x release (and CVS), checkout the TODO file

* More Data Collection configs wanted for the
DataCollection.xml

* Any interest in more TCP pollers? Let us know (or better yet,
build one yourself…)

* LDAP/POP3/nmap Pollers

* Documentation and development your game? How about a white
paper on how to extend OpenNMS with custom pollers, custom configs,
and/or your own scripts/code.

* Any additional help we can get proving our documentation
either right or wrong is appreciated. Thanks.

* Got any creative applications for OpenNMS that we haven’t
considered? Let us know!

* A Security analysis of OpenNMS?

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Afterthoughts

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I am not drunk, but the wine speaks in me.
— Rough translation of ‘Ubriaco non son io’,
from Mozart’s ‘La Finta Semplice’.

I’m tired and it’s my wife’s birthday, so we’re enjoying a nice
evening on the deck, just her, me, two glasses of wine, and my
laptop. Thus, I shall make this brief.

A note to everyone: If you are finding problems and fixing them
of your own accord, please put an entry in the FAQ. The more time
we can spend writing code and the less time answering common
questions, the better off we’ll all be. Note: This doesn’t mean we
don’t like answering questions–just not “common” questions…

The new office is coming along nicely. It’s clean and is almost
wired. And it’s always nice to meet new neighbors who constantly
ask “how do you make any money if you don’t sell your software?”.
Eric Raymond couldn’t pay for better advertisement…

Now, back to my wine. Er, I meant “wife”…

r0ck m3 4m4d3u5,

Shane O.
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Shane O’Donnell
OpenNMS.org
shaneo@opennms.org

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