Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 17:53:22 -0600 (CST)
From: announce-admin@opennms.org
To: announce@www.opennms.org
Subject: [opennms-announce] OpenNMS Update v2.5
OpenNMS Update
Vol 2 Issue 5
Jan. 30, 2001
In this week's installment... * Project Status + Development Continues + 0.6 Targeted + Coding Projects Underway * Upcoming Road Shows * The Presentation That Wasn't * The Wish List
Project Status
Development Continues:
Hopefully, we’re nearing the end of this bug sweeping through
the luxurious OpenNMS office suites…
Sowmya was out for a while, Mike was out for a while–and this
doesn’t include the “outages” looking back 3-4 weeks. All in all,
we haven’t been the healthiest bunch. Then again, a strict diet of
coffee, Mountain Dew, and Crunchy Snickers Bars might be
contributing factor. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the SweetTarts
and Red Licorice, but they’re just there for their dietary
value.
But despite the absences, we trudge forward. Many of the new
features, tweaks, and fixes are close to prime-time, and most are
at least partially available in CVS. Details on those features are
discussed below.
0.6 Targeted:
We are nearing the point where we can put a timeline on the 0.6
release. This is good news.
Anticipating a Valentine’s Day Release (as opposed to massacre),
we are planning a release that addresses bugs and adds several new
features:
* Fix for the ugly right-click bug in Linux.
* Addition of a notification facility that adheres to user
schedules. Supports multiple tools under the covers and is
configurable to allow you to swap in the tool of your choice. Also
includes a graphical configuration interface (extension on the
U/G/V Config interface).
* Re-working of event format to support all fields in a Trap PDU
(how did we miss this? No idea.) as well as some additional parms
for correlation. Expansion of tokens will be included in this
release as well.
* SCM is being converted from JSDT (proving inconsistent) to an
RPC-based mechanism in Java. This will also allow the integration
of C processes as well…
* Performance polling via SNMP.
* The lightweight interface will make its auspicious debut.
Is there more? Sure there is. But you’ll have to wait for all
the juicy details… Aren’t I such the tease?
Coding Projects Underway:
* Solaris Port Postgres Procedures — Underway. Hearing good
reports on initial testing. Apparently discovery is working.
* Postgres for NT — The port is looking good (if building from
CVS), but we need help with the port of the stored procedures
(eventtime and iplike). They aren’t compiling well under Cygwin,
and there are likely those of you that are more familiar with this
us. Also note that these Updates would go much faster if Ben would
stop reading them (and critiquing them) over my shoulder.
* 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 — Just about finalized…
* Tuning — Things are looking up. Weave has the core processes
down to 5 JVMs, starting up much faster, and taking up far fewer
resources. More details as we get this to benchmarking.
* User Interfaces — The lightweight interfaces rock! I saw
early code today and it is phenomenal. God bless Tomcat and
servlets!
* SCM — Gutting and replacing JSDT with an RPC mechanism. ACPL
Tea, for those of you keeping score at home.
* SCM UI — Will have to be re-tooled for the SCM change, but
many of the problems will be avoided, if not eliminated.
* TCP Poller — Still waiting for some of the creative
configurations that I know you all are capable of…
* 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.
* New Rule Builder — In testing. So far, so good.
* Notification Configuration — Panels are built and the
users.xml is being modified. Now we need the scripts to convert the
users.xml to a config file for the underlying paging systems (and a
few more hours in Ben’s day…)
Upcoming Road Shows
LinuxWorldExpo never happened. My wife says that this is a good
thing. Additional presentation comments included at the end…
* February 15th – Utah JUG, Salt Lake City, UT
* May 5th – Twin Cities LUG, Minneapolis, MN
For additional details on these appearances and others, check
out the web site at http://www.opennms.org/sections/opennms/events
The Presentation That Wasn’t
In case you were in the Raleigh airport yesterday around 2:30pm
and saw someone with a laptop running all willy-nilly to their gate
(and yes, I do run “willy-nilly”), that was me.
In case you were in the Philadelphia airport yesterday around
5:15pm and saw someone with a laptop running, again willy-nilly, to
the taxi stand, that too was me.
In case you were in Philadelphia on Market Street and saw
someone on a cell phone bouncing building to building looking for a
JUG meeting, that too was me.
In case you were at Shulas 2 in the Sheraton around 7:15pm
yesterday and saw someone with a table full of comfort foods and
empty pint glasses, guess who.
And in the off chance that you were in a room somewhere in
Philadelphia waiting for the speaker for your JUG meeting, I wasn’t
there.
Obviously.
Two Morals to this story: If you move a meeting and expect me to
find it, leave bread crumbs or something. And if you’re ever stuck
in Philadelphia and can’t find a JUG meeting, the Shulas 2 in the
Sheraton serves Guinness on tap.
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…
* The install.pl script has been updated. Per Ben: “I was
parsing things all wrong. When I fixed that, everything seemed to
clear right up.”
* 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/DataCollection.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 our Postgres stored
procedures and see where we stand?
* 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
For those of you that have jumped to the end, the butler did it.
Now go back to the top and read it in order.
Philadelphia was a frustrating experience. We had confirmation
two weeks ago that the meeting was on, with a time/date/location.
All I really found was a bunch of building security guards that had
heard of the company, but that the company had A) gone out of
business, B) Moved out of the building, C) never had an office
there. A, B, or C is dependent on the particular guard at a
particular building that you might ask.
Things are gearing up around here, with mounting excitement over
the coming 0.6 release. From a guts and functionality perspective,
you’ll see a significantly different product. From the users
interface perspective, we’ve not addressed the issues with the
current RTC, in an effort to get the lightweight interface built.
Then we’ll start setting some priorities.
Had a chance to meet the soon to be infamous Woody Woodring last
week. Thanks for lunch, and moreso, thanks for all your help with
the testing and bug reporting!
And I beg of you, will someone PLEASE tell me how to get off
this damn mailing list…
My parents are coming to visit this weekend, so I’ve got to
clean the house. “Cleaning the house” means put something away and
then get sidetracked on the computer for several hours. Don’t ask
why, it just always seems to work out that way.
Fortunately, my parents know I’m a slob…
Slovenly yours,
Shane O. ======== Shane O'Donnell OpenNMS.org shaneo@opennms.org