Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 10:24:01 -0600 (CST)
From: announce-admin@opennms.org
To: announce@www.opennms.org
Subject: [opennms-announce] OpenNMS Update v2.4
OpenNMS Update
Vol 2. Issue 4
Jan. 23, 2001
In this week’s installment…
* Project Status
+ Partnerships and Integrations
+ The Lightweight Interface
+ Coding Projects Underway
* Upcoming Road Shows
* Ironic? I vote "Yes"
* The Wish List
Project Status
Partnerships and Integrations:
First off, thanks to everyone for the input/comments/reactions
to last week’s announcement of the short-term/long-term plans.
Overall, the feedback was favorable, so now we’re trying to figure
out how we can get the most basic functionality into the product as
quickly as possible without impacting any of the longer-term
development timelines. Surprisingly, we’ve stumbled on something
that just might work.
While we try to avoid the sticky wicket of formalized
partnerships (due to the legal mumbo-jumbo), we’ve “aligned”
ourselves with a couple other open source efforts that we think are
a pretty good match for us. Here’s what they are, who they are, and
how we see things integrating:
* RRDTool – Consider it the guts of the next generation of MRTG.
An efficient means of storing performance data and making it
readily available for building graphs from the data collected.
Written by Tobi Oetiker (all hail Tobi, Father of MRTG), RRDTool
rocks!
Our Twist: We’re building some Java interfaces for RRDTool and
will be documenting our “create” format, so you can use your choice
of RRDTool front-end to represent the data.
Check it out: http://www.rrdtool.org/ (It will
redirect you.)
* ntop – A real-time statistical analyzer of network traffic.
Think RMON, without the vendor-specific crap and exorbitant price
tags. Written by Luca Deri
Our Twist: We’re working with Luca to instrument some remote
accessibility of key information. This “partnership” is a win-win
for everybody–ntop gets an RMON-like “manager-probe” model,
OpenNMS gets traffic analysis data.
Check it out:
http://www.ntop.org/
* Snort – A lightweight network intrusion detection system
(IDS). Traffic analyzer that looks for patterns that match known
hack attempts. It’s rule-based, and new rules are being added all
the time.
Our Twist: We’ll be adding an extension to create OpenNMS native
events directly from the Snort platform. This gives us a
distributed mechanism to get into the IDS space. Pretty nifty.
Check it out:
http://www.snort.org/
The Lightweight Interface:
Larry says: “Give me a week, and I’ll take off the weight!”
While he’s only been here about that long, we’ve already
progressed a long way towards getting our lightweight interface
prototyped.
What is it? Effectively, a way to get a “network at a glance”
view of what’s up, what’s down, and a way to get the details you
might need to fix a problem. All via a browser.
Right now, we’re looking at supporting some of the key pieces of
data you might want: Nodes/services down; Links to performance
reports; Last X events for a given node; etc.
My point (and I do have one): This is progressing nicely, but
we’re rapidly progressing past the point where we need to know what
information you need/want to be included. Obviously, there is a
limitation as to how much information you can put in a single
browser window, so we need to make sure the critical stuff is there
and damn-near critical stuff is only a click away.
Vote early, vote often, and vote for the data you’d like to see
included on the [discuss] list.
Coding Projects Underway:
* Solaris Port Postgres Procedures — Underway. No status since
last week.
* SNMP Poller/Data Collection — We’re collecting data and
sticking into an RRDTool database. Now we’re trying to come up with
appropriate intervals for reporting, etc. Opinions on what should
be collected? Check out http://www.opennms.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi
and click through Data -> Common -> Conf ->
DataCollection.xml and think about it.
* Event DTD — Sowmya’s out sick. Look for an update next
week.
* Tuning — Weave’s still working on it. No quantifiable status
this week.
* User Interfaces — Larry is proto-typing, and Jacinta is
actually writing code (there’s a big difference!) Jacinta is
building the servlets that will support the components that Larry
puts in the interface. Tag-team development at its finest.
* SCM — Continuing to test for reliability, run time, and
working through some JSDT issues.
* SCM UI — Still having some of the known issues with JSDT. We
should be able to address those in the early February
timeframe.
* TCP Poller — Still waiting for some of the creative
configurations that I know you all are capable of…
* Maji Prelim Work — Rick is active on the “events” mailing
list.
* New Rule Builder — In testing.
* Notification Configuration — Jason’s is hurriedly extending
the existing user configuration panel to add fields for
notification information. More details on this when notification
integration rolls in.
Upcoming Road Shows
Had a last minute addition to the calendar, which had us
presenting for the North Carolina Association of Network
Professionals. Good group, good grub, who could ask for anything
more?
Need a speaker? Contact Luke at luke@opennms.org.
Next up on our tour spree…
* January 30th – University City JUG, Philadelphia, PA
* January 30-February 2 – Wandering the halls at
LinuxWorldExpo-New York. Want to hook up? We’re open most of the
time this week, especially if you’re in the Tri-State area.
* February 15th – Utah JUG, Salt Lake City, UT
For additional details on these appearances and others, check
out the web site at http://www.opennms.org/sections/opennms/events
(NOTE: New URL)
Ironic? I vote “Yes”
Dedicate your career and professional existence to building an
open source network management alternative, and what’s the hot
topic on the [discuss] mailing list?
Dry contact monitors.
The Wish List
First, a big thanks to everyone that’s actively working with and
trying out the product. There are a lot of cool innovations
committed recently that you’ll want to take a look at as well.
Again, our thanks to the testers!
Now, on with the list…
* Our SNMP Data Collector will rely on a configuration file,
DataCollection.xml (or something like that). This file will map
what SNMP OIDs we should pull from a device with a given SysOID.
Now the question is, “What should we pull?” Recommendations? Tips?
I figure we’ll pre-populate some canned collections for Cisco
routers, Bay routers, and whatever else can be contributed. All
ideas are appreciated, and especially ideas that come back in the
format of the DataCollection.xml file (available at:
http://www.opennms.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/data/common/conf/DataCol
lection.xml )
* Now that we have a “generic” TCP Poller, we could use some
help in building some configurations to test services that you may
be concerned with. For example, is LDAP do-able? How about
applications like Peoplesoft, SAP, Baan? Remember, you can deploy
multiple of these pollers against multiple ports.
* Testing on new, exciting platforms is always appreciated.
Somebody want to mess with the Cygwin port of Postgres to NT and
see where we stand over there?
* 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!
* Anybody up for a security analysis of OpenNMS? We know we’ve
got a lot of holes, but we’d rather have most of them identified
before we start trying to plug them. Any security folks that are
playing along, feel free to chime in here. Anytime, now. Go on.
Anytime…
Afterthoughts
And again, the Update comes out late. At least I’m
consistent.
Any feedback on the install.pl script?
Local to the Raleigh, NC area and want some free help with
installation and configuration? Drop Luke a line at
luke@opennms.org and ask him about the “Early Adopters”
program.
Still waiting to hear from all of you that have done network
management and SNMP data collection for your entire professional
lives. We need your input on what should get collected from various
different platforms and on what intervals.
Got your own applications/services you’d like monitored? Set up
the TCP poller and send us a config! Need help with that? Post your
questions to the [discuss] list.
Well, that’s the news and I am outta here.
Later,
Shane O.
========
Shane O’Donnell
OpenNMS.org
shaneo@opennms.org