Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 22:01:53 -0500 (EST)
From: announce-admin@opennms.org
To: announce@opennms.org
Subject: [OpenNMS-Announce] OpenNMS Update v2.12
OpenNMS Update
Vol 2., Issue 12
March 20, 2001
In this week's installment...
* Project Status
+ A Moving Experience
+ Servers Moved
+ New Build Stuff
+ Event Subsystem: Changes Afoot
+ Coding Projects Underway
* Upcoming Road Shows
* Early Adopter Program Status
* The Wish List
Project Status
A Moving Experience:
Our office move is currently underway, so my apologies in
advance if this is either too brief or late. We’re in that
inevitable limbo where everything we need (except my laptop and
this lamp, and that’s all I need) is on a truck somewhere across
town. With a little luck, that truck will be here sometime this
evening and unpacked in time to still eat dinner tonight.
As you might guess, things are in varying states of disarray
pending our magic arrival at a new location, so our productivity
has been somewhat impacted as well. Best case, we’ve lost a day.
Worst case, well, let’s not think about it.
So as promised/forewarned, this will be brief, taking a
broad-brush approach to some of the more current developments.
Enjoy.
Servers Moved:
Hopefully, some of our server availability problems should be
behind us. Ben successfully migrated our servers over to new
hardware this week, amidst getting things ready for our move as
well.
If you at any point had trouble reaching us over the last week,
this is probably why. If it’s not the real reason, let’s just say
it is and go on with our lives.
Should you have any problem with anything (Bob Tanner already
caught us sleeping at the anonymous CVS wheel), let us know and
we’ll get it fixed.
Thanks for your patience through this often frustrating
process.
New Build Stuff:
Ben has just been the busiest little beaver this week.
Over his eventful weekend, while waiting for DNS changes to
propagate around the world, he converted all of the build stuff
from Ant 1.2 to Ant 1.3, which he says “rocks”.
Developers will now have the ability to specify where the build
gets installed to, which has been a pain up until now.
Documentation building has been impacted as well, since with Ant
1.3, you don’t have to do the XML-to-HTML conversion on a
file-by-file basis, but can specify a whole subset. Maybe this is
really only helpful for us, but it’s cool nonetheless.
And this migration was a win for Ben as well, since his 60K
build.xml file is now only 40K, and should be far more
maintainable.
And God bless maintainability.
Event Subsystem: Changes Afoot:
Earlier today, in a hasty pre-move maneuver, Sowmya announced
that her new code to provide some flexibility and advanced
configuration capabilities for incoming traps/events is now checked
into a testing branch.
These changes include a couple key pieces of functionality that
will be pretty cool, including:
* Unique event configurability based on any combination of UEI,
service, source, host, interface, node id, trap ID, or SNMP
host.
* Rudimentary correlation, including cancelling events and
duplicate suppression (aka: singlification)
* An updated, somewhat-more-intuitive-(or-maybe-not) DTD for
events.
Obviously, this one means some serious changes for us, so give
us some time to get it tested and benchmarked (a little anyway),
and we’ll have it checked into CVS in no time flat.
And in case you have forgotten, Sowmya is the goddess of all
things Java. Thanks for all your efforts on this!
Coding Projects Underway:
* CDP/L2/Mapping — Way too early to tell. Watch this space and
the [discovery] mailing list for updates.
* Snort Integration — Matthew Lehman has got his act together
on this one. Things are progressing nicely and we should have a
detailed story to tell soon. Also received some information from
someone else interested in IDEMF.
* Solaris Port Postgres Procedures — No update.
* Testing of Various Components on NT/2K — This is outside our
current scope, but we’re willing to help out someone out there
wanting to try this.
* SNMP Poller/Data Collection — Recent discussions on
thresholding with the SNMP poller. We’ll see…
* Event DTD — G.S. (Goddess Sowmya) is all over this one.
* User Interfaces — Larry is chock full o’ updates. Jeff is
testing them as fast as Larry can code them.
* New Pollers — Lots of interest in how to write pollers, as
well as CORBA management. Is this of wide-spread interest?
* 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 — Trading emails with a faithful member of the
mailing list interested in perhaps open sourcing some libraries to
aid in our configuration management processes. I’ll keep you
posted.
* Swing Interface — Back-burnered right now.
* Discovery/CAPSD/Database Review — Mike is still championing
this one and finding various “issues”. Jeff also found a bug in how
the ViewCategory Manager was determining group membership and
outages. Sowmya found the culprit and was fixing it.
* Agent Technologies — Progress on the Agent front. Craig
Trader (OpenNMS fellow and all-around good guy) has stripped the
the instant messaging code out of the Jabber server, optimizing it
for our needs. He’s now in the process of architecting the basic
message flows between agent-server-server. Keep on rockin’ in the
free world, Craig!
Upcoming Road Shows
I’m sitting in the new office and still can’t get a DHCP
address.
So, 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
Early Adopter Program Status
Still hearing good reports on 0.7.1, and getting some GREAT
feedback on the Web UI (like where’s the outage information within
the categories?)
Also had an unfortunate withdrawal from the program this week. I
don’t fully understand the situation, but when management marches
in and says the company is defunct, here’s your cardboard box and a
severance package, people don’t seem as interested in the EAP. In
all fairness to the people involved, we wouldn’t wish this on
anyone and we appreciate your participation to date. Keep in touch
and when you land those cushy jobs as e-Consultants, remember all
us little people. All our best wishes go out to you.
The Wish List
A whole lot of email this week (to me) with questions regarding
CORBA management and asking how to write pollers. We’re working on
some poller doc, but I’m still curious as to how many people are
doing CORBA management. Is it a growing area?
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?
Afterthoughts
You have no idea how glad I’ll be to get this move over with.
The movers just left, so Ben and I are here setting stuff up and
writing an Update, respectively–and we’re both a$$ deep in
boxes.
Tomorrow, I’m sleeping in. Definitely. Or maybe not.
Whipped,
Shane O.
========
Shane O’Donnell
OpenNMS.org
shaneo@opennms.org