You can for example help to operate networks: http://www.opennms.com/415 .
Communication networks are critical for operations in deseaster-struck areas, and making sure they run is something which does not really come to your mind straight away if you think of “helping”.
Yesterday I, along with a large number of other people, watched the New Orleans Saints win their first Super Bowl.
Last year I watched the game in a hotel room in Milan (when my Steelers won their sixth championship – number 43 we miss you) but this year I was able to hold a little party.
Now, like hot dogs go with baseball, pizza is fast becoming the food of choice for football, and no Super Bowl party would be complete without some Papa John’s.
Of course, my Mom also showed up (that’s her behind the pies – “Hi mom”) and she brought enough food to feed an army. I think everyone left stuffed.
Anyway, Denise Dubie at Network World wrote an article about how Papa John’s uses OpenNMS, and how they delivered 6 million slices of pizza yesterday.
They worked so we didn’t have to (well, except for Mom. Thanks Mom).
When I started my first company in 2002, I had a lot of previous employers to provide examples, both positive and negative, of how to run a business. At the time IBM and Hewlett-Packard were leaders in network management, so I could have modeled my business on them.
Instead I modeled it on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.
Many might think it was a strange choice, but it seems to have worked out well, at least for us.
First, they make a good product. This is of paramount importance in any business.
Second, they limited the amount of money the highest paid people could earn in salary. In their case, the highest paid person could not make more than seven times the lowest paid person.
I am constantly disgusted by executive salaries these days. Being a previous employee of NORTEL, now in bankruptcy, I find it highly ironic that the executives responsible for driving the company into the ground received huge retention bonus to keep them from leaving. In a just world they would have had no where to go, and particularly they would not be financially rewarded for poor performance.
To me a salary should exist to cover the basic necessities of living, but the real compensation should be based on the performance of the company. Let me stress that I want there to be no limits on overall compensation – if the company is doing well I want everyone’s “upside” to be unlimited. But getting a huge salary just for showing up feels wrong, especially if the company is doing poorly.
Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs ever, takes home a salary of just $1.
Back to Ben and Jerry’s. The one other thing they did that I admired was to donate a certain percentage of pre-tax profits to charity.
I like donating to charity, but I find that I am most eager to give to those organizations that are a) small and b) concerned directly with something I care about. Thus each year I give to the EFF, the FSF and the SFLC, plus a number of local charities.
When the earthquake in Haiti happened, we were shocked and saddened like most of the world. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure how. Luckily, the opportunity came in a most unexpected way.
Matt and Jeff (along with Alex) were hanging out in the OpenNMS IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net) when a man named Andris Bjornson joined and started asking questions about OpenNMS. It turns out that he works for an organization called Inveneo that supplies bandwidth in rural and under-served areas in the developing world. Haiti was the perfect example of a place that needed their services, since a lot of the relief effort is run by non-government organizations (NGOs), and they rely on communications in order to maximize the good they can do.
Haiti’s communications infrastructure, such as it was, was destroyed by the earthquake, and Inveneo is using wireless technology to provide a timely replacement. Of course they need some way to manage this infrastructure (as you can imagine, it is in high demand) and they chose OpenNMS.
Andris has been using OpenNMS for awhile, but he had some questions and there were some issues in managing the radios they were using. The guys in the channel were more than happy to help out, but we wanted to be involved in a more formal way.
We decided to donate a commercial support contract to Inveneo to help them out in Haiti.
It’s pretty cool to be involved, at least in some small way, with getting Haiti back on its feet. It was also cool to have OpenNMS chosen from all possible apps out there to play a role.
You can read more about Inveneo and OpenNMS in this press release, and please consider donating to their efforts.
Open source has a large social component, and I have a theory that being involved in open source software makes one generally more interested in social issues. I want to hear from others about their experiences with social causes tied to open source. Jon “Maddog” Hall is also a fan of Inveneo, and I’d love to have more examples.
UPDATE: Here’s a network diagram of the Inveneo network, and the “How to Deploy” document mentions us by name.
Details of Rural Life – genevainformation::pictures.
Details of rural life, well, sort of the “pictures with the small things in them”, though you might want to ask back if a horse is small. But the flies are!
That’s the next Gallery I “collected” on smugmug with their new “collect gallery” feature!
The OpenNMS Group has finally moved into double digit employee numbers with the hiring of Brad Miesner as our Vice President of Sales.
I know what you’re thinking – a sales guy? Earlier you post that you hired some folks to do marketing, and now you hire a sales guy?
First, let me point out that I’ve known Brad for over ten years and he started off in a technical role. So he’s not just some guy with no network management knowledge who’s going to pester people to spend money.
Second, interest in OpenNMS has grown to the point that it can be difficult for us to handle, in a timely manner, requests for information about our services. I always focus on our existing customers first, sometimes to the detriment of potential clients, but Brad will insure that our future clients receive the attention they deserve.
But most importantly Brad will have the role of “customer satisfaction manager”. We tend to build close relationships with our clients, and if we should happen to drop the ball, these clients might be a little hesitant to complain directly to the people at OpenNMS with whom they are working. Brad will proactively be in touch with all of our partners to insure that we’re providing the best service we can, and if there are ways we can improve, it is hoped he will hear about them.
Brad comes to us from Network Appliance, voted by Fortune Magazine as the number one “Best Place to Work” in 2009. He was doing really well there, and I think his decision to join our band of open source revolutionaries speaks well for both the company and our future sales prospects.
We are extremely happy to have Brad join our team.
Oh, at one time he worked for a little software company called Zenoss, but I think he’ll quickly adjust to working in open source.
(grin)
Linuxquestions.org is running a poll on the best open source projects and there is a network monitoring application category.
We launched a new OpenNMS Group website this week and I am having a small problem. On the home page we have a jQuery script called Crossslide that rotates some pictures in the banner:
It works fine on Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE8. It doesn’t work on IE7 and I have absolutely no idea why. I’ve reformatted the code, used both relative and explicit paths, and … nothing. No errors either.
I have no experience debugging Javascript issues within IE, so if you can help I would appreciate it.
Einige haben vielleicht mitbekommen, daß zwei tapfere Streiter und ich gemeinsam ein Buch über OpenNMS schreiben (kommt im April heraus).
Zur Zeit befinden wir uns in der Endphase. Da wir alle drei unterschiedliche Schreibstile haben, stellt sich die Frage wie man die Qualität kontrollieren kann. Eine besonders nervige Sache sind die langen Bandwurmsätze. Die schreibt man meistens dann, wenn man etwas kompliziertes erklären will. Der Nachteil ist allein, daß die komplizierte Erklärung der komplizierten Sache nur noch schwer verständlich ist.
Das Buch ist aber ein wenig umfangreicher – diese Sätze durch “Herauslesen” zu finden geht zwar, kostet aber viel Zeit.
Mit etwas Perl und Liebe kann man sich diese Arbeit allerdings deutlich vereinfachen: Das Perl-Modul Lingua::DE::Sentence zerlegt einen Text unter Berücksichtigung der deutschen Grammatik in Sätze. In diesen Sätzen zähle ich die “,” und die “und”. Das Ergebnis ist dann eine Gewichtung. Ist der Satz zu schwer, wird er auf STDOUT ausgedruckt. Dann kann der Bearbeiter entscheiden, ob etwas geändert werden sollte oder nicht.
Der Teil Code, der die Hauptarbeit erledigt sieht so aus:
my $sentences = get_sentences($text);
foreach (@$sentences) {
&check_sentence($_);
}
sub check_sentence {
my $sentence=$_;
my $length=length($sentence);
my $comma,$und="";
$und= () = $sentence =~ /\ und\ /g;
$comma= () = $sentence =~ /\,\ /g;
my $weight=$und+$comma;
if ($weight > 3) {$counter++;print "Sentence possibly too long, weight $weight.\n$sentence\n\n"};
}
Die regulären Ausdrücke (regular expressions) zählen die Übeltäter. Der Rest ist Perl 101 :)
Menthonnex-en-Bornes – genevainformation::pictures.
I tried the new smart collection feature of smugmug and created a gallery for the place I live in.
Looks as if the smart collection will allow me to create “location”-based base galleries and then “feature”-based collections to show some pictures based on a specific point of view.
To be honest, I don’t know the answer. I bought a shiny little 500 GB Hard drive recently and copied all photos I have in digital format on it. Then I fired off Adobe’s Lightroom and started to add all the pictures to my catalog. I went to work and gave it a day to finish that job. When I came back, my catalog was at around 50k files. Wow.
Ok, there are some double entries, but few – Lightroom is holding an index and probably hashes the pictures, so there are really very few redundant pics in the catalog.
But what do I do now? I started to sight them, first – right now I’m at picture 35′000 or so (duh, there’s some crap, but as well some very good ones). As a next step I will likely start to rate (will probably take a day or two), select the best. At the end, I will probably create a big (really big) photo book as a catalog on paper – blurb goes up to 440 Pages (in large landscape format).
440 Pages means that if I put 4 pictures per page, I can handle 1720 photos..and they still can be viewed. That should probably be a fair selection (knowing that I did not delete as merciless in my early days as I delete today)..but still huge ;)
It's time for This Week in OpenNMS. In the last few weeks, we've been busy with a number of projects, including a funky multiplexing RRD strategy, a rework of our remote poller code, an upgrade to GWT 2.0, and a number of bug fixes.
Stable: Current Release is 1.6.8
1.6.8 is the current stable release, tagged December 10th. It adds a few small features and fixes a few bugs, as well as adding a new web-based "easy installer" UI. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.8 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.8.
Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.8
1.7.8 is the current unstable release, tagged December 8th. Since 1.7.7, there have been quite a few bug fixes. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
Unstable: Reporting
Jason Aras and Jonathan both are in the final stages of getting their reporting branches ready for release.
Unstable: MultiOutputRrdStrategy
Seth has been working on an RRD strategy which will let you write performance data to RRDs as well as a TCP socket, using the Google protobuf format.
Unstable: Remote Poller Updates
The remote poller has gone through a number of changes in the last few weeks. First of all, the build system has been cleaned up to no longer have intermittent issues with unsigned artifacts. Second, the remote poller code no longer requires RMI to phone home to the OpenNMS server, it can now do so over HTTP instead. Support for this still needs to be added to the webstart version of the remote poller, but the command-line jar can do this in current 1.7 snapshots.
Unstable: Dashboard Upgraded to GWT 2.0
The dashboard has been updated to use GWT 2.0, which should provide more speed and better browser support.
While this newsletter is primarily about the project, and not the commercial OpenNMS company, I wanted to add a quick note about the new OpenNMS.com web site, which is purty and has all kinds of enterprise-y features like "case studies" and "graphics." Crazy, I know. ;)
February 11th, 2010: Benjamin Reed will be shaving his head for charity at a Carolina Hurricanes game. Totally off-topic, but you can look forward to amusing pictures.
February 19th-21st, 2010: OpenNMS will be attending the Southern California Linux Expo. Additionally, Tarus Balog will be the keynote speaker.
May 6th-7th, 2010: The second annual OpenNMS Users Conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany, thanks again to Nethinks. The call for papers ends January 31st, if you are interested in presenting.
If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.
As always, if there's anything you'd like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment, criticism, or warm winter hats you'd like to share, don't hesitiate to say hi.
Last year was a pivotal year for the OpenNMS Group. In addition to having our five year anniversary, we finally hit a critical mass of customers that found us with some discretionary income. We used most of it to hire new people, but we felt it was time to actually spend some money on marketing OpenNMS.
In the past I’ve had a personal distaste for marketing. I always saw it as, well, something close to lying. For example, in my last post I talked about a company claiming its web site is “the epicenter of all open source projects that relate to IT monitoring” when it clearly is not.
But that is par for the course for many companies. They don’t have a story to tell so they have to make one up, or at least embellish the news they have. This is because their ultimate goal is to be purchased by a large company, preferably in a short amount of time, and so they have to seem bigger and more popular than they really are. Hence the emphasis on downloads and web site registrations, etc.
I count our success based on happy customers and money in the bank.
To me, a project is more successful that has 50 people who find it valuable versus one million who download it and never use it.
Our mission statement of “Help Customers, Have Fun, Make Money” has produced happy customers, and we’d like to have more. Specifically, we’d like to have more customers for whom OpenNMS is a great solution. As a services company it does us no good to have a client that is a poor fit. We just end up working harder for a client who can’t be made happy. We want to focus on getting the word out about the value of using OpenNMS to those people who most need it.
Enter marketing – a way to focus on introducing the value of our services to those who would truly value it.
Last year I hired two people to help us come up with (gulp) a marketing strategy. I am lucky in that they have turned out to be amazing.
The first was Phil Marsosudiro. I’ve known Phil for over 25 years. We met in high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. NCSSM is a two-year public residential high school for students to focus on mathematics and the sciences at a level not normally available in a public school environment. It was a great experience, and I met some amazing people – Phil being one of them.
Phil and I share the same philosophy when it comes to business. The idea is not to take as much money as you can, as fast as you can, from customers, but to instead create value for them that allows both parties to make money.
He brought Margaret Gifford to our team. Margaret is the first “real” public relations person I have ever worked with, and I am surprised someone of her background happened to be local. She’s been a Senior VP at Ogilvy and worked in corporate communications at Hewlett-Packard, among other things.
Together, they are a marketing dream team.
Since neither of them had a background in open source software, I had to tell them about our business. It was harder than I thought. When you work day in and day out in a particular field, you start making assumptions about what people know. To me using open source software is a no-brainer, but to the majority it is still somewhat of an unknown. Going through the exercise of explaining what we do and why it is valuable to people outside of the field was enlightening.
The first thing we focused on was why the heck would anyone need network management in the first place, much less open source network management. This literally took a couple of weeks.
What we came up with is that network management is a lot like maintaining an automobile. If you buy a brand new car and do little maintenance, it will run fine – for awhile. But without oil changes, new filters and keeping it clean it won’t last nearly as long as it could, and the investment made in buying a new car will yield a lot less than it should.
It’s the same way with computer hardware and software. Companies, at least successful ones, invest in information technology in order to provide some sort of productivity gains that should translate to the bottom line. But unless they have management, it is almost impossible to tell if it is providing value, and without the ability to tune it and detect problems, one can be sure any positive value will be less than what it could be.
Which is why they need OpenNMS. In Phil and Margaret’s words, the OpenNMS Group is there to “Get the Network to Work™”.
I know it sounds a little “sales-y” but that is at the heart of what we do. Papa John’s isn’t in the business of buying servers or building a website – they are in the business of providing quality food to their customers as quickly and easily as possible. The servers and the websites are there to enable that, but they aren’t the reason the company exists.
The next hurdle was to be able to tell people why an open source solution like OpenNMS was better than commercial software. I’ve known for years that OpenNMS was more powerful, scalable and flexible than things like Unicenter, Tivoli and OpenView, but how to get that across to people who haven’t “walked the path”?
Now a lesser marketing person would just put words up on the website claiming to be better. I could imagine seeing something like:
OpenNMS can expedite virtual paradigms and benchmark mission-critical technologies in order to grow ubiquitous solutions and visualize visionary experiences with the final goal to repurpose value-added experiences and harness magnetic relationships.
(I had help with that)
I hate stuff like this. Instead, Margaret insisted that the reasons to use OpenNMS and the OpenNMS Group should come from the people who use it and find it valuable, and not from the people who make it.
After months of hard work, I’d like to present the new OpenNMS Group website. While there is a lot of text describing what we do, the emphasis is on the stories from our customers. At launch we have been able to get two case studies approved, with many more in process.
The first is from New Edge Networks. If I had to pick a company that shared our dedication to helping customers and having fun doing it, New Edge would be at the top of the list. I’ve been able to watch them grow over the years, and OpenNMS has been able to grow along with it. In their environment, OpenNMS gathers data which is presented directly to their end users. At the moment this means data collection on over 160,000 interfaces. This is something that the most expensive commercial products would have trouble doing.
The second is Papa John’s Pizza. They were the first company to allow on-line ordering at 100% of their US stores, and OpenNMS makes sure that billion dollar business is working smoothly. We are now working on a project to extend that to manage all of their 3,400 stores worldwide and not just the data center.
But enough talking from me – read about it in their own words. These are the people that we help, have fun with and together we make money. We want to meet more.
Shouldn’t that really be the role of marketing?
74 – Haute Savoie – genevainformation::pictures
Winter is only “real” if there’s snow and sun. That’s what makes it up and what creates the “oh, wow” when you walk across the fields behind our house.
I’ve taken this picture before (but not with this camera, which makes a good excuse for repeating myself):
When we walked today I saw the paths the kids created with their sledges and the footprints of the animals. The landscape seems to be in a standstill with the solid snow coverage, but that impression does not match reality. There’s plenty of activity above and below the snow cover.
A few months ago I blogged about a new site called “MonitoringForge.org“. It seemed to me to be a thinly veiled marketing attempt with little value, but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and time would tell.
Well, I was reading Coté’s blog today and read a link where they created a press release to trumpet their 2,000th registered member.
This struck me as funny because, in the same sentence, they state that there are “more than 2,000 projects” registered on the site.
Wah?
So, if only one unique member of each project on their site registered, there should be more than 2,000 of them, yet they have less than that, and this is considered news? Heck, we have nearly 1300 people on the opennms discussion list and we’re just one project, but with their site running at an average of less than one person per project I guess we’re doing pretty well. And while I’m sure that 80 or so of our subscribers are directly working on OpenNMS, that still leaves about 1200 end users.
I’ll leave the similar calculation for MonitoringForge as an exercise for the reader.
(sigh)
Now I’m not one to beat a dead horse, but when the “Chief Marketing Officer” is willing to issue a press release on a site she calls “the epicenter of all open source projects that relate to IT monitoring” with such, in my humble opinion, lame numbers, I’m willing to stand by my original impression that this is just a marketing ploy.
Am I wrong? Can anyone comment who found the site valuable? Inquiring minds want to know.
For the first time, I am participating in a St. Baldrick's event for cancer research. It's a great cause; I have family members and friends who are either battling with cancer, or are themselves survivors.
My goal is to reach $1000 in donations towards cancer research through the St. Baldrick's Foundation. If there's anything you can do to help, I would very much appreciate it, and there are many others out there who can benefit from your help.
Comments on this Entry:
Today, the OpenNMS Group joined the ranks of other huge, profitable multi-national companies.
We got us a race car.
My friend Jason Tower has finally decided to get serious about driving, and he’s put together a Spec E30 race car. We were happy to sponsor him and we got the hood spot.
I really like the philosophy behind “specified” racing classes. The rules only allow for a limited number of modifications from stock, so while the car will always play a part in racing success, it is much more about the skills of the driver.
There is an analogy here with commercial vs. open source software. It used to be that just getting started as a software company required a lot of money. At a minimum you had to at least buy a compiler, if not expensive hardware on which to use it. This is similar to Formula 1 or NASCAR where teams require millions just to show up on race day, and the more money you have can directly relate to how successful you are.
Not so with Spec racing. Here all of the drivers are on equal footing and success is measured on merit, not how much money you have.
Open source has helped level the playing field. While having lots of money rarely hurts, today’s market is much more open. A group of people with great ideas and a good product can compete against much larger companies – and often win.
Now the pressure is on Jason – he’d better win. (grin)
UPDATE: This weekend’s race has been cancelled due to the snow storm (sigh).
The domain name opensource.org is owned by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but Red Hat owns opensource.com. In talking to friends of mine involved with the OSI, people have been wondering what Red Hat will do with it.
Now we know. Today they announced that opensource.com has been launched with a new site.
It looks pretty slick and is worth a poke around. As someone who holds open source concepts near and dear to my heart, I am always eager to see how they are promoted. After all, we did register fauxpensource.com as a reaction to the dilution of the term “open source” but at first glance I’m pretty happy with what I see on the new site. Now if I could just find some time to participate.
At OpenNMS we are thankful that we have clients who believe in us and use our services. As a result, we also try to buy from them when we can. Our shirts come from Lands End (since Sears is a client). I always request a USA Today paper when I travel, since they’ve been using OpenNMS for years.
And we luvs us some Papa John’s pizza.
We’ve had three guys up to PJI headquarters in Louisville working on OpenNMS, but I’m the only one who missed out on a tour of the dough room (sigh). I did get to see the famous Camaro that you’ll see featured in some of the ads.
Anyway, this week is a training week, and I am in charge of getting all of the students fed at lunchtime. We don’t have a Papa John’s in town, but Phil was coming down through Chapel Hill and offered to pick up some pies.
I love training week, but man does it take a lot out of me. Yes, even I have a problem talking for eight hours straight. We have eight people in training, which is just one shy of our maximum of nine (we keep our classes small on purpose) so it has been a lot of fun with lots of great questions.
We have two guys up from Honduras, two over from Seattle, two down from Ottawa, one guy from Atlanta and a new hire who is local.
Everyone seemed to like the pizza, and it was fun ordering it on the web especially knowing that OpenNMS was insuring the service was working (and of course, it went flawlessly).
Remember – never re-heat pizza in a microwave as it will destroy the crust. Place it in a hot oven (350F) and wait until the cheese just starts to bubble.
Yum.
I can’t wait for the Super Bowl, as my party will be catered by Papa John’s (grin).
Atlassian is right now giving away licenses for their products for $10 each. For $10 you get a 10-User Jira, Bamboo, Crowd, whatever and Confluence license.
I’ve been a long-term confluence user and came to appreciate the quality, functionality and style of the software. If you’re looking into running a wiki or collaboration platform for your team/company, it’s probably the best choice (if you have a choice).
My confluence is available here Home – Public – Confluence don’t get seasick though ;)
This just in from Gareth:
The schedule of weekend talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized and are posted on the SCALE web site at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org. The topics are interesting and wide-ranging – check them out! The schedule for the Friday specialty sessions (OSSIE, WIOS and the Try-It Lab) will be posted in the next week.
Looks like I have the Sunday morning keynote.
I've been making good progress on getting KDE 4.4 (release candidates) working. It's been quite an interesting ride, in both a good and bad way. =)
First, there's the fun of 10.6 making it even harder to have code that forks without it accidentally exploding on the CoreFoundation fork-without-exec prohibition. I was able to solve this with a combination of fixes from macports' kdelibs4, and some of my own code which changes things to use low-level POSIX APIs instead of Qt APIs for some bounds-checking before execution.
Next, there's the fun of Phonon. KDE 4.4 requires a newer version of Phonon than what ships with Qt (even Qt 4.6). On OSX it gets even hinkier, since the QuickTime plugin for Phonon requires private Qt headers, so the only sane way to build it is to build the Phonon included with Qt, rather than building it as a separate project.
I ended up adapting a patch the Kubuntu folks use to inject a modern Phonon into Qt 4.6. In the process, I finally got around to learning my way around Git (and gitorious), and have set up my own Qt branch which includes my (binary incompatible outside of Fink) patch to Qt to fix plugin-building, Phonon from kdesupport, the kde-qt (formerly qt-copy) changes, and my patches to Qt that splits OSX into two platforms, Q_OS_DARWIN (i.e. use raw UNIX APIs, no Core*), and Q_OS_MAC (standard Qt/Mac).
Long story short, I'm getting there. I've gotten about half of KDE 4.4 RC1 built and apparently running reasonably. RC2 was just released to packagers, and I'm testing out my move to Qt 4.6.1 from 4.6.0, but once I get everything test-built on 10.6, I'll go validate everything on 10.4 and 10.5 (including making some DBus fixes for 10.4).
After that, the next thing to tackle is Mono, and then eventually I'll see if I can get KDE3 building/working on 10.6.
Comments on this Entry:
(Payam Minoofar on Feb 1, 2010 12:44 PM) I would like to let you know that your efforts are greatly appreciated. I will be donating to your charity shortly. I hope the value that you are providing to the community is returned upon you tenfold.
A friend called me up and asked me a quite high-level question about the architecture of network zones..I give a high-level, out-of-the-book reply but can’t really get over the feeling that I just indirectly kicked somebodies butt.
It's time for This Week (Month?) in OpenNMS. In the last month, we've been pretty busy on a number of projects, including reporting and maps. My new year's resolution is to get back on track writing TWiO regularly. =)
Stable: Current Release is 1.6.8
1.6.8 is the current stable release, tagged December 10th. It adds a few small features and fixes a few bugs, as well as adding a new web-based "easy installer" UI. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.8 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.8.
Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.8
1.7.8 is the current unstable release, tagged December 8th. Since 1.7.7, there have been quite a few bug fixes. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
Unstable: Reporting
Jason Aras continued his work on a dynamic reporting engine. Additionally, Jonathan Sartin has been working on the reporting scheduling daemon some more. See below for more on Jonathan's work.
Unstable: Lots of Updates
I've been slack in doing TWiO, and there's been a ton of work going on in unstable since the last post.
The move to Git is complete, and went pretty smoothly. SVN has been marked as read-only, and the new Git repository is available through http://opennms.git.sourceforge.net/ (which provides a web interface).
Full instructions on working with the git repository are available in the OpenNMS wiki.
Jonathan has finished up his work on the report scheduling API, and is ready for code review. Here's what he wrote to me about this new feature:
I have just about completed the initial work on feature-report-api. Features of this branch are:
The old availability reports can now be run on demand (as they always have been), or scheduled to run in the future (no more messing around with cron jobs outside of OpenNMS). You can save these reports as well as mail them, and they can be downloaded on demand.
There is an API in place now that should allow other report engines to use the framework that we've written (it was designed with BIRT and Jasper in mind).
The beginnings of a unified XML config are there to allow report parameters to be entered via the webUI when the report is run (it only accepts integer, string and date parameters at the moment). Multiple report xsl can used to simultaneously support multiple languages.
Next steps are to move the old reports into a new project that reflects the amended structure, and further tidying up of the old code. Demands on my time permitting, this should be in an unstable release soon.
January 25th-29th, 2010: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.
February 19th-21st, 2010: OpenNMS will be attending the Southern California Linux Expo. Additionally, Tarus Balog will be the keynote speaker.
May 6th-7th, 2010: The second annual OpenNMS Users Conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany, thanks again to Nethinks. The call for papers ends January 31st, if you are interested in presenting.
If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.
As always, if there's anything you'd like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment, criticism, or UFO evidence that explains my loss of time you'd like to share, don't hesitiate to say hi.
I just added a section on how to set up Prowl and OpenNMS in the book. The last time I configured something in OpenNMS is a bit away as I’m not using it for production business anymore (though I do have a live instance running), but within an hour or so the integration worked. Probably less if I would not have been chatting in the meantime :)
Prowl Notifications are now one option for my OpenNMS to tell me about bad things (such as if the power at home goes off).
“There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all of your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.”
- Dr. Joe Vigil, quoted in Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
I am reading a book David loaned me called Born to Run. It discusses the Tarahumara people who live in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. The book focuses on the fact that these people can run hundreds of miles without stopping or getting hurt (I also found it interesting that their economy is based, in part, on the trading of favors).
In trying to determine why these people can run so far so fast, it appears that the main reason is that, quite simply, they like to do it.
When I was younger I kept hearing from older people “choose something you like to do for a career” and I kind of ignored them. I wanted money, so I was going to choose the career that provided the best path to financial security.
It was only later that I lucked into doing something that I loved. When I became the OpenNMS admin in 2002, I went from a solid six figure salary to sometimes earning $300 a month. That was way less than minimum wage (and was offset by better months), but at least I enjoyed the work. We made adjustments to our expenses and I was surprised to find that at the end of the first year I had spend only $5000 out of savings.
Things took off from there, and I managed to attract amazing people who also loved what they were doing. We decided on a mission statement of “Help Customers – Have Fun – Make Money” with the emphasis on the first two. The money showed up. While all of us could make higher salaries in a more traditional job, we are content for now to use our profits to build a better company, since that increases our ability to both help customers and have fun doing it.
I can remember bringing up open source software on the OpenView Forum mailing list many years ago and being called a communist. I am far from it, although communist and community do share the same root (and I am very interested in the latter). I just want to create an environment where people are rewarded for doing good work, and the best way to get good work is to find people who enjoy and even look forward to doing it.
Ultimately, I think this is the best way to make money. Provide value and you will become valuable.
I end every employment offer letter I make with the same sentence. It has nothing to do with money or even network management, but it distills into five words why I get out of bed in the morning: Let’s go do great things.
“Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry” – Mark Twain
Well, a couple of hours after taking the nice picture of the snow falling, our power went out. And did not come back until this afternoon. 10.9.0.1 is the tunnel I’m running between my servers, I use that to collect data via snmp from the machine which is standing in the livingroom.
Seems that this is the first trip to germany I took for a long time which did not leave the feeling of deep fulfillment to not live abroad. Might be it was the environments as well – I had an excellent opportunity to learn about how others do a business of a similar style than ours, and when I visited my old colleagues from epost I literally felt as if I had just walked out of the door and came back. Sure, things changed, a lot, but the atmosphere and a lot of people are still the same. And that was nine years ago, that I left that office. You rock :)
And to top it all off, even the security staff at Düsseldorf Airport was friendly..I am still contemplating whether this was a spiel or if they were for real like that (my tip: If you need to take a flight, do it in the off-hours..around noon, everybody is so bored that they become friendly out of boredom ;).
The new year has been no less hectic than the old one, which is actually a good thing, I guess.
Yesterday was my 44th birthday. It was pretty much just another birthday, with the only somewhat interesting thing is that now my age starts and ends with the same numeral. It is also the cost in US cents for a first class postage stamp (which has been the case with my age since 1998).
Anyway, I did get a delightful and unexpected present. The gang at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) issued a press release announcing that I have been named one of the two keynote speakers for the conference in February.
This is pretty cool, and I am both honored and humbled by their decision. I will be presenting a talk about what it is like to start and run a business based on open source software. One reason I write this blog is to both inform, and perhaps inspire, others to take the risk and start their own business, and to be able to talk about this in front of the SCaLE attendees is pretty exciting. It has been one of my favorite shows since we first attended. OpenNMS will also have a booth where you can see the latest stuff we are working on, as well as to meet some of the folks from the community.
This will be my first ever keynote, if you don’t count last year’s inaugural OpenNMS Users Conference in Frankfurt, and speaking of that, we had so much success last year that we are doing again. The 2010 Users Conference will be back in Frankfurt, and we’ve extended it to two days to include a day of workshops. Nethinks is once again a major sponsor along with the OpenNMS Group, and we will hold it on 6-7 May. If you are interested in being a sponsor, please drop me a note.
We’ve had a great response to our Call for Papers, but if you are interested in presenting, there is still time as it doesn’t close until 31 January. Accepted speakers will receive two nights in the hotel and all meals, but you will be responsible for getting there. We are looking for both presentations on any aspect of OpenNMS as well as workshops.
I’ll post more information on attending once we’ve settled on the agenda.
Finally, we’ve added new training dates in April (the January training is booked). If you are finding OpenNMS a little daunting, consider coming to metropolitan Pittsboro for one of our training courses. They’re useful and a whole lot of fun.
Note: My one reader outside of the US might have issues understanding the “purchase” of health care insurance and should probably skip this post.
I can remember how happy we were in March of 2005 to finally be able to offer health care as a benefit.
The OpenNMS Group is a company focused on the happiness of its employees since they are responsible for all of our revenue, and we don’t want anyone worrying about being sick or whether or not they should go to the doctor. We cover 100% of the employee’s insurance premium: medical, dental, disability, etc.
There is also the benefit of having a group plan so that the premiums for family plans (which we don’t cover) can come out of pre-tax dollars.
This has worked fine for over five years, and I’ve been happy with our provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Well, as happy as one can expect to be when dealing with an insurance company (I’m also happy with our lawyer, if you can believe that).
However, this year our premiums went up nearly 27%. This is more than twice what we usually see and it was strange since no one hit an age barrier (30-34, 35-39, 40-44, etc.) or had (as far as I know) a catastrophic illness. Think about it – the premiums would double every four years if this was a constant rate.
That’s about as bad as some of those open core license fees (grin).
Anyway, our options were to either pay more, consider having the employee shoulder some of the burden, or change plans. All of which are a bit of a pain.
But then our broker suggested a Health Savings Account (HSA) combined with a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP).
An HSA is basically a savings plan, similar to a 401(k) retirement plan, that can only be used for health expenses. The HDHP is similar to a standard health plan with one main catch – no co-payments. This means if you go to the doctor, you play the insurance company’s negotiated rate in full. The same thing goes for prescription drugs. You pay everything up to the deductible, and then after that the insurance company covers 100% (or possibly less, but we’re looking at a 100% plan).
The HDHP premiums can be significantly less than the “normal” premiums.
The way this is supposed to work is the higher deductible means lower premiums, for both the company’s individual coverage and the employee’s family coverage. Both the company and the employee can fund the HSA, and the goal would be to put enough in the HSA to cover the deductible.
For example: supposed you have an HDHP with a $2500 deductible for an individual, and the company puts in $200 a month toward that account for $2400 a year. Any expenses up to $2400 are paid for, and the employee would only be responsible for the last $100 up to the deductible. Any expenses after that are fully covered.
Better yet, say you use only $500 of it, then there’d be $1900 left over for the future. And, while it isn’t much these days, these accounts can earn interest.
With families it is a little different, as the deductible tends to be doubled. In this case, the added savings of having a reduced premium can be applied to the HSA to cover that difference.
My favorite part is that there is nothing preventing you from contributing just the amount of your expenses to the HSA at the end of the year and immediately withdrawing it, tax free.
In the short term, an HSA that is funded by the company does not save much, if any, money for the company. But over time, as premiums increase, it could be possible to raise the deductible so that eventually it does, or is at least at parity.
The (small “L”) libertarian in me loves the idea. I like the fact that people can use as much or as little healthcare as they choose. Plus, any funds that have been accrued can be taken out at retirement age similar to an IRA (and also, hardship withdrawals with tax penalties are also available).
We’re still investigating whether this option is for us, but my current take on it is that most of the guys are for it.
Having a decent healthcare plan is important for any business in the United States, so I thought I’d share.
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February 09, 2010 12:00 PM
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