Planet OpenNMS

OTRS package updated

2010-09-02T20:27:38+00:00

Just a quick post to say that I have updated the OTRS package for OpenNMS. It no longer depends on the hard-to-find Perl SOAP::DateTime module and should therefore be a smoother install for new users. No new capabilities are added in this release so you can skip it if you’re already up and running. Thanks to Michiel Beijen of OTRS for the suggestion.

More details can be found in the OpenNMS wiki.

OpenNMS VMWare Appliance

2010-09-02T19:38:17+00:00

Just a short note that Ronny Trommer has modernized the OpenNMS VMWare Appliance.

There is a wiki page with details, and it can be downloaded from both the Virtual Appliance Marketplace as well as Sourceforge.

OpenNMS Patterns and Scripts

2010-09-01T20:12:14+00:00

I just wanted to share a site we came across through a response to our survey (which is still open if you haven’t had a chance to check it out). It is called OpenNMS Patterns and Scripts and it is definitely worth a look. It’s subtitled “Implementing OpenNMS in an enterprise IT environment” and it consists of issues that one might face when deploying OpenNMS along with corresponding solutions. Hat tip to Doug Bakewell for making this happen, and I look forward to his future posts.

Iron Men

2010-09-01T20:07:31+00:00

As I was checking out the OpenNMS iPhone app today, I noticed that it was published on September 1, 2010.

The OpenNMS Group opened for business on September 1, 2004, so happy anniversary to us. We’ve been so busy I almost forgot about it.

One of the traditional gifts for the sixth anniversary is iron, and I have been blessed to work with the best team one could ever hope to put together – they are Iron Men, every one.

For most people, seeing the business behind OpenNMS get another year older is a non-event. But if you had been a part of it, and had to listen to those “in the know” telling you time and time again how you can’t possibly run a business where you give the software away, that you can’t succeed without outside investment and you can’t possibly grow, each year we’re here is more proof that they are wrong.

I love my job, and I just want to thank everyone who makes that possible. Six years down and many more to go.

OpenNMS iPhone App Now Available

2010-09-01T19:10:55+00:00

UPDATE: There have been some people reporting that it does not run on iOS 3. We are working on determining the issue, but it is confirmed to work on iOS 4 devices.

After nearly a year of work, the OpenNMS iPhone App is now available from iTunes.

It costs US$4.99 and folks with commercial OpenNMS support subscriptions should just drop me a note for a free voucher code.

As I know there will be a few questions about this, I’ve tried to anticipate a couple of them.

Q: Hey, OpenNMS is free software. Why you chargin’ me $5?

OpenNMS is 100% free and open source software, and the iPhone app is no exception. The code is hosted in our git repository and there are complete instructions for downloading and building it on your own.

But, it was not a painless or inexpensive process to get this app created. In fact, the main reason it got completed is that we sent Ben off to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and he learned what he needed to finish it (as well as to make it iPad compatible). That little junket cost us about $2000 – or nearly 575 copies of the app once Apple takes their cut.

So we decided to charge for the app but make sure than those who want to take the time have full access to the code.

Q: What about an Android app?

I would love to have an Android version of this app, but at the moment no one has stepped forward to own it. We do have a Nexus One at the office so the hope is that it will happen, and happen soon, but no promises.

Be Careful What You Match For, You Might Not Get It

2010-09-01T19:02:25+00:00

So I ran into a really interesting issue in Java regular expression parsing while trying to work on an issue for a customer.

OpenNMS has the ability to listen for syslog messages, and turn them into OpenNMS events. To configure it, you specify a mapping of substring or regular expressions to UEIs (OpenNMS’s internal event identifiers).

The customer saw a huge drop in performance from 1.8.0 to 1.8.1. Basically the only change to the syslog daemon was a change to use Matcher.find() instead of Matcher.matches(). The problem was that they were making regular expressions like this:

foo0: .*load test (\\S+) on ((pts\\/\\d+)|(tty\\d+))

…which weren’t matching. So they changed it to put .* at the front, so matches() would get it:

.*foo0: .*load test (\\S+) on ((pts\\/\\d+)|(tty\\d+))

Upon upgrading to 1.8.1, they saw orders of magnitude slowdown. The reason is that when you haven’t specified an anchor, find has to figure out the “right” starting point for the match. In doing so, it spins a LOT, compared to matches() and its implicit anchors. It’s very expensive to scan all the way through the string, attempting to re-apply the regex, if it turns out there is no match. We figured this out this morning after I put together some benchmarks to show the differences:

—
regex = \s(19|20)\d\d([-/.])(0[1-9]|1[012])\2(0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])(\s+)(\S+)(\s)(\S.+)
input = 6>main: 2010-08-19 localhost foo23: load test 23 on tty1

matches = false: total time: 167, number per second: 5988023.9521
find = true: total time: 1264, number per second: 791139.2405
matches (.* at beginning and end) = true: total time: 2598, number per second: 384911.4704
find (.* at beginning and end) = true: total time: 2572, number per second: 388802.4883
matches (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = true: total time: 2918, number per second: 342700.4798
find (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = true: total time: 2648, number per second: 377643.5045

—
regex = \s(19|20)\d\d([-/.])(0[1-9]|1[012])\2(0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])(\s+)(\S+)(\s)(\S.+)
input = 6>main: 2010-08-01 localhost foo23: load test 23 on tty1

matches = false: total time: 128, number per second: 7812500.0000
find = true: total time: 1199, number per second: 834028.3570
matches (.* at beginning and end) = true: total time: 2570, number per second: 389105.0584
find (.* at beginning and end) = true: total time: 2554, number per second: 391542.6782
matches (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = true: total time: 2630, number per second: 380228.1369
find (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = true: total time: 2595, number per second: 385356.4547

—
regex = foo0: .*load test (\S+) on ((pts\/\d+)|(tty\d+))
input = 6>main: 2010-08-19 localhost foo23: load test 23 on tty1

matches = false: total time: 87, number per second: 11494252.8736
find = false: total time: 193, number per second: 5181347.1503
matches (.* at beginning and end) = false: total time: 1242, number per second: 805152.9791
find (.* at beginning and end) = false: total time: 28631, number per second: 34927.1768
matches (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = false: total time: 1241, number per second: 805801.7728
find (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = false: total time: 1242, number per second: 805152.9791

—
regex = foo23: .*load test (\S+) on ((pts\/\d+)|(tty\d+))
input = 6>main: 2010-08-19 localhost foo23: load test 23 on tty1

matches = false: total time: 85, number per second: 11764705.8824
find = true: total time: 873, number per second: 1145475.3723
matches (.* at beginning and end) = true: total time: 1812, number per second: 551876.3797
find (.* at beginning and end) = true: total time: 1879, number per second: 532197.9776
matches (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = true: total time: 1874, number per second: 533617.9296
find (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = true: total time: 1865, number per second: 536193.0295

—
regex = 1997
input = 6>main: 2010-08-19 localhost foo23: load test 23 on tty1

matches = false: total time: 80, number per second: 12500000.0000
find = false: total time: 215, number per second: 4651162.7907
matches (.* at beginning and end) = false: total time: 1339, number per second: 746825.9895
find (.* at beginning and end) = false: total time: 37722, number per second: 26509.7291
matches (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = false: total time: 1350, number per second: 740740.7407
find (^.* at beginning, .*$ at end) = false: total time: 1351, number per second: 740192.4500

The moral of the story is, if you’re using Matcher.find(), use no anchors and no .*, but in all cases, you’ll get the most deterministic behavior from always anchoring your regular expressions properly.

In Hessen, Germany

2010-08-31T18:53:37+00:00

As my car decided to take a longer break in the local Renault Dealership, I got time to wander around the place we stay in (with my in-laws).

OpenNMS Survey

2010-08-30T21:10:13+00:00

I am hoping that my three readers will take the time to complete this short, 10 question survey on how they use OpenNMS. We are trying to get a better idea of our users so that we can tailor our work to more closely meet their needs.

This Week in OpenNMS: Meet the new Bossie, same as the old Bossie

2010-08-30T19:02:57+00:00

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS. Two announcements to start us off:

(1) We’re very excited to announce that, for the second year running, the OpenNMS project has received InfoWorld’s prestigious Bossie (Best of Open Source Software) award in the “networking software” category.

(2) Here at OpenNMS Group, we’re trying to find out more about the OpenNMS user community. If you’re an OpenNMS user, could you take a couple of minutes and answer the ten questions on this survey? You can answer anonymously if you like; we’re just interested in finding out more about the settings in which folks are using OpenNMS. (Thanks!)

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.3-1
1.8.3-1 is the current stable release, tagged 12 August 2010. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
Made some performance improvements in the event and syslogd subsystem
Added a WMI detector for provisiond, and merged some WMI fixes into the codebase
Implemented minval and maxval for SNMPCollection
Creation of a Net-SNMP MIB extension and corresponding data collection definition to take into account the number of CPU cores when evaluating thresholds for system load average
The iPhone/iPad app has been submitted to Apple for App Store approval. It should be available for download soon!

Bugs Fixed Since Last TWiO

#1184: Added support for a MAC address format for incoming trap varbinds
#2132: Improved capsd configuration to have elements auto-assign asset values based on SNMP OIDs (see the documentation on the SNMP asset provisioning adapter for more information)
#3668: Fixed some formatting issues in the canned “early morning” report
#3919: Fixed a problem with outages display not updating properly on refresh on some platforms
#3920: Fixed problems with alarm page display in the iPhone app
#4059: Fixed a font problem with the “early morning” report
#4071: Added data collection support for Cisco C1250 WAPs

Upcoming Events

We’ll be heading to Ohio LinuxFest from September 10-12, 2010 in Columbus, OH.
The next OpenNMS training classes are scheduled for the week of September 20, 2010 in Pittsboro, NC. The basic class will be offered from September 20-22, and the advanced class, from September 23-24.
If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

(And again – we sure would appreciate it if you could spare a couple of minutes to take that user survey.)

Paint Class

2010-08-29T20:25:24+00:00

uhm, well. I’m afraid I could not get along with the style of Nolde, so after two attempts I reverted to what I like better ;)

Jonas did a road, in the end

but..we had fun ;-)

Nolde Museum

2010-08-29T20:23:45+00:00

Visiting the Vikings

2010-08-29T09:24:34+00:00

One of the more important trading posts of the vikings was located in Haithabu, south of today’s city of Schleswig. I went to school in Schleswig and have visited the museum a few times already – it’s interesting to come back though.

The vikings were known to be raiding countries, but they made a living as well of trading.

The trade brought goods as far as from Turkey, and talk is that the vikings went over to America in their little dragon boats as well.

Those are pearls made of glass, which was shown hands-on in the museum as well:

This last part of the Museum, added in 2006, consists of reconstructed housing. Based on what was found in the mud, the houses were reconstructed with ancient tools (or the lack of).

(All this is approx. 800 ad)

These houses were used for 4-5 years, typically.

And the boats..there is a canoe as well, which has been made the same way the native americans built canoes. Very funny to see the same style of craftmanship a few thousand miles away, again ;)

Those were however unique to the vikings.

New Blog

2010-08-27T21:13:52+00:00

As if I don’t have enough blogs…. ;)

But I wanted to write about non-techie things, and I kept putting it off, because it felt kind of weird posting them to a blog that is obviously mostly about my tech adventures. So, I’ve set up a new blog…

me.raccoonfink.com

If you feel like following it, go for it, if not, don’t.

Also, I’ve gone ahead and completely reworked my blog, and *cough* replaced it with WordPress, something I thought I’d never do. While WP has a somewhat sordid history and does require the upgrade train more often, it is easier to keep up-to-date, and appears to have a better track record more recently. I’d let the old blog software stagnate and found myself resisting messing with it more and more.

Let me know if you run into any issues. I think some old links will be busted, but google sitemap should pick up the new stuff pretty quickly, I hope.

Nord- und Ostsee

2010-08-27T19:18:27+00:00

In Wöhrden (Dithmarschen): Wir waren im Oldenwöhrden essen, Bismarck war auch schon da. Klassisch norddeutsche Einrichtung, wirklich angenehm und gemütlich ohne plüschig zu sein.

Das hier ist einer der ältesten Höfe (wenn nicht der) in Wöhrden.

Am nächsten Tag ging’s dann an die Ostsee, erst nach Kappeln und dann nach Drecht an den Strand. Vorher haben wir noch Fischbrötchen geholt und dann am Strand quasi Abendbrot im Abendrot gegessen.

OpenNMS – The Best Open Source Software 2010

2010-08-26T18:09:06+00:00

For the second year in a row, we are humbled to have been recognized by InfoWorld with a Bossie Award.

OpenNMS was a winner in their “Best of Networking Software” category.

What I also thought was cool was that of the ten other projects honored in the category, OpenNMS integrates with three of them: Hyperic HQ, RANCID and OTRS, and it is a honor to be in the company of all the other projects who also won.

Last year the focus was on OpenNMS 1.6, and this year it is for OpenNMS 1.8.

They also mention the upcoming iPhone app. For those who have been waiting, version 1.0.0 has been submitted to the App Store for approval, and a big thank you to Ben Reed for working on this. We should know something about it within the next week.

Erfolgreich benutze XING für social marketing!

2010-08-24T07:42:26+00:00

So geht’s!

Erstmal wird man natürlich Mitglied bei XING. Weil der Auftrag vom Boss kommt und einem XING eigentlich am Popo vorbeigeht, sieht das Profil so aus:

Positiv: Es stehen keine übertriebenen Karrieredaten im Profil.

Negativ: Es steht auch sonst nichts (nichts!) im Profil.

Das wird nicht besser, wenn man sich anmeldet:

So zeigt man schon von vorneherein, dass es einem nicht um Kontakte oder sonstwas geht, sondern wirklich nur um professionelles Networking. Also..professionell im Sinne von “hier will ich $Geld oder $Reputation verdienen oder mache das weil mein $Boss das will”. Sicher, man muß da nicht seine Lebensgeschichte ausbreiten, aber etwas Informationen wären ja nicht schlecht.

Beeindruckend auch die Zahl der Kontakte: 36. Und – ganz professionell – die kann jeder sehen.

Dann macht man sich auf die Suche nach seiner Zielgruppe:

Die Powersearch bei mir zeigt dann an:

PR Guy: Premium Member
$Coolname PR-Network GmbH: Search for organizations, “haves”, previous title, title

Ich habe einen der Jobtitel in meinem Profil, die über die CxO-Suchen gefunden werden. Das ist einfach, denn schließlich wissen wir ja alle was ein CxO macht (Firmengrösse und Skills spielen im C-Level ja keine Rolle mehr, das wissen wir alle).

Dann bekommen die Opfer, err, die Zielgruppe eine Nachricht:

From: PR Guy
To: Me
Date: 24 Aug 2010, 12:33 am
Subject: Invitation to the group “CleanEnergy-Project”

PR Guy would like you to join a group

Hello Mr. me

ich möchte Sie gerne in das $Marketing Project einladen, eines der größten Netzwerke für erneuerbare Energien und Umwelt.

Mehr als 20.000 interessierte Mitglieder haben sich dem Netzwerk angeschlossen. Wir betreiben ein Online Magazin, um mit täglichen Beiträgen über Energie- und Umweltthemen zu informieren, organisieren Events und begleiten ökologisch sinnvolle Projekte.

Über Ihre Teilnahme würden wir uns sehr freuen

Herzliche Grüße
$Marketing Project Team

Oh, PR-Guy hat also 20.000 Mitglieder in seiner Gruppe versammeln können? Wow. Und das auf der Basis von 36 Kontakten? Beeindruckend. Sexy finde ich auch “Hello”. Und dass es dann auf Deutsch weitergeht, aber das sind sprachliche Animositäten, meinerseits.

Wirklich interessant an der Einladung ist aber, dass sie weder mit mir persönlich, noch mit meinem Job, noch mit irgendeinem Merkmal meines XING-Profiles irgendwas zu tun hat. Da macht das ja richtig Sinn, dass ich Mitglied Nummer 20.001 werde :-o

Übrigens – das ist nicht die einzige sinnlose Kontaktaufnahme in Xing, aber sie sticht durch ihre beeindruckende Schlichtheit wirklich hervor.

This week in OpenNMS: Scaling it up

2010-08-23T20:07:37+00:00

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS.

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.3-1
1.8.3-1 is the current stable release, tagged 12 August 2010. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
We worked on getting the remote pollers to scale more gracefully.
We continued to add support for IPv6.
Work continues on the iPhone/iPad app, which we expect to move into testing shortly.

Bugs Fixed Since Last TWiO

#1523: Added the ability to specify a password parameter in the NSClient plugin.
#2132: Improved capsd configuration to include elements to auto-assign asset values based on SNMP OIDs.
#3748: Absolute change threshold now works with 64-bit counters.
#4054: Added alarm-data to APC upsOnBattery and powerRestored events.
#4056: Whitespace now recognized/preserved in notifications.

Upcoming Events

We’ll be heading to Ohio LinuxFest from September 10-12, 2010 in Columbus, OH.
The next OpenNMS training classes are scheduled for the week of September 20, 2010 in Pittsboro, NC. The basic class will be offered from September 20-22, and the advanced class, from September 23-24.
If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Summer

2010-08-22T09:36:24+00:00

German police on patrol. With google streetview!!

2010-08-21T18:09:56+00:00

It’s not an official, but the head of the german police workers union who suggested that “it’s not entirely clear if a virtual patrol is possible”.

Well.

Verbrecherjagd mit Street View | law blog.

Into the french alps

2010-08-20T17:15:28+00:00

I am not very fond of camping, absolutely not. I had my fair share, that’s what I normally answer when someone asks me. And it’s true, I had the ultimate week of camping in an extraordinary campground in December 1994. But as it was my son’s birthday I relented, bought a tent (wow, technology has advanced), sleeping bags (wow, techn..) and off we went on the bike, southwards.

Just one night, but for starters!

Our target was Serres. And on Thursday we took off to get home. Starting at 10h30 we made it home around 20h30, which makes 10 solid hours on the bike..you bet we slept well that night ;)

The alps are terriffic though, south or north.

To be able to actually ride we tried to stay off the main tourist roads, but we succeeded only partially.

But where we did, it was just great.

This, btw, is a full restaurant. They had no place for us to eat anymore. Strange. So if you ever make it to the area of Turriers and look for a place to eat – don’t go to the Hotel Roche Cline or their restaurant. They’re full. Further down the road, if you make it to the lakes, there are plenty of restaurants which are not full and even don’t bother to set a table for you. The reason why that’s nagging me is that I just learned a bit more about why some (american) tourists think that the french are arrogant and unwelcoming. I do absolutely not agree to that. This (above) was the first strange or unwelcoming experience I had since I know France (which is many more years than the nine we live here).

Back to nice things:

That’s the village of Ventavon which seemed to be competely void except for two kids. The village is nice to look at and worth a brief stop.

Fun starts when trucks are forbidden to pass ;-)

The GPZ is now 14y old. On the trip we passed the 99’000 km (I bought it at 45’000).

The cable stuff is the intercom. I could not imagine to ride 10h without it – still, I almost forgot to take it with me.. it was this “sit back and relax, go through the journey and ask yourself what you forgot or which gadget you could take with you”-thing ;)

Going up to ..

Amazing landscape, difficult driving – but fun. And I always again enjoy the air at high altitudes.

Almost home, well, another 2h of riding from here :-)

City of Duisburg tries to suppress documents on circumstances of Loveparade deseaster

2010-08-17T20:54:44+00:00

The city of Duisburg, place in which 20 people died during this year’s Loveparade, tries to suppress publishing of documents which give background information about the happenings.

The documents in question are annexes to a report made to (and paid by) the city to shine light onto the circumstances. A german weblog had published them and received a cease & desist order to stop the publishing from the city today.

Even if the weblog in question does bow into the cease & desist, the attempt to stop the documents form leaking is futile – “the internet” has already reacted and created multiple copies of the files all over the possible filesharing sites..and yet again old-style management of public knowledge and the reality of a truly connected society clash :)

The full story (in german) as well as the links to the documents can be found here.

WordPress wow.

2010-08-17T13:03:45+00:00

The thing I really like about wordpress is that it’s cleanly written – at least from my understanding. I sat down to create a new website on sunday. Starting off with the standard twentyten theme, I modified the CSS to look like a book.

I’m still amazed at how easy the changes were. You absolutely need the firebug extension (uhm, T, you *do* use it, do you?) to get into the css, but then things were just bliss.

To top it off I installed the “YAK” (Yet Another Kart) plugin to have a simple shopping functionality. YAK interprets eacht post as a possible product and handles the checkout things. I could even integrate online payment or use the cart itself (which I currently did not activate).

Google has a static maps API which permits to integrate the map into the webpage without handling any SOAP or Java Script.

The french translation of WordPress is ok’ish, but the theme will need some polishing by someone who writes better french than me.

This Week in OpenNMS: You are now free to move about the cabin

2010-08-16T19:22:18+00:00

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS… though I must admit, it’s awfully tempting to grab a couple of beers, activate the emergency slide and drive straight home.

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.3-1
1.8.3-1 is the current stable release, tagged 12 August 2010. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
On the Linkd config issue: Between OpenNMS 1.8.1 and 1.8.2, a new, mandatory element was added to the Linkd configuration file. We try never to let this happen between stable releases, but this one snuck in. We’ll fix the code to make the new element optional ahead of the next scheduled stable release (1.8.4), but in the meantime users upgrading from a pre-1.8.2 release to either 1.8.2 or 1.8.3 need to be sure to incorporate the <iproute> element from the version of linkd-configuration.xml that comes with the newer release. If you’re using the official Debian or RPM packages and haven’t modified this file on your system, you won’t need to take any action. Here is a link to the pristine 1.8.2 / 1.8.3 version of this file for use as a reference by those who have local changes: http://ur1.ca/15m5o
We continue to lay the groundwork for IPv6 support in OpenNMS.
Work continues on the iPhone/iPad app, which we expect to move into testing shortly.

Bugs Fixed Since Last TWiO

#1225: Performance in the outage editor has been improved.
#4034: The “move up” and “move down” buttons in group modification were broken.
#4045: Fixed problem where remote polling was creating excessively verbose event logging.

Upcoming Events

We’ll be heading to Ohio LinuxFest from September 10-12, 2010 in Columbus, OH.
The next OpenNMS training classes are scheduled for the week of September 20, 2010 in Pittsboro, NC. The basic class will be offered from September 20-22, and the advanced class, from September 23-24.
If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

Until Next Week…

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 personal emergency escape plan that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Recherche (test)

2010-08-15T21:58:30+00:00

Results of the photo competition

2010-08-12T20:09:50+00:00

The website has it now as well.

This Week in OpenNMS: Hot enough for you?

2010-08-09T17:20:35+00:00

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS. We’re sweltering through a very warm and humid August in North Carolina, but it’s nothing compared to the record heat some of our friends in Europe and Asia are experiencing. Wherever you are in the Northern Hemisphere, stay hydrated and keep cool! (Those of you in the Southern Hemisphere should feel free to stay warm and drink hot chocolate, as required.)

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.1
1.8.1 is the current stable release, tagged July 12th. The second stable release in the 1.8 series, it adds a ton of bugfixes and a number of enhancements since 1.8.0. For a complete list, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
Enhancements to remote map poller logic: Enhanced the GUI for the remote poller maps and improved MapQuest integration support.
Simplifying scheduled outages: We’re working on making it easier to set up scheduled outages in OpenNMS.
Work continues on iPhone app: We should have an updated beta release for the iPhone app in the next few days.
Improved Force10 Ethernet switch support: Identified a configuration workaround to enable OpenNMS to collect data from a problematic SNMP agent on Force10 Ethernet switches. A working configuration for these devices will be included in a future release.

Bugs Fixed Since Last TWiO

#4004: Fixed misspelling of a setting name in opennms.properties
#4022: OnmsMonitoredServiceResource now uses the EventUtils calss to build the NodeGainedService event

Upcoming Events

We’ll be heading to Ohio LinuxFest from September 10-12, 2010 in Columbus, OH.
The next OpenNMS training classes are scheduled for the week of September 20, 2010 in Pittsboro, NC. The basic class will be offered from September 20-22, and the advanced class, from September 23-24.
If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

Until Next Week…

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 weather report that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

mod_evasive

2010-08-06T10:24:27+00:00

Today my small server was not responding for some time due to overload; I tried to see where the load came from and bestguessed some robot doing a dos attack (probably unintentional, the server is not very performant).

To limit the number of connections from a bot I decided to do rate limiting. The required to install mod_rpaf first (which makes sure apache understands the X-Forwarded-For header that nginx is sending), then mod_evasive to apply the rate limiting.

A quick test shows that it’s working fine:
/usr/share/doc/libapache2-mod-evasive/examples# ./test.pl HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

Caveat: I might have tuned it so tightly that even “normal” users get blocked. If you see a 403, please tell me and I’ll open up the pipe a bit more.

Le Vélo

2010-08-03T16:12:35+00:00

When we started this running thing in the US I was already thinking about what to do when I come back home.
I thought about running here, but – I hate running, to be honest. It was fun with David and Ronny, but alone? Uphill? I will – and I do – start to hate myself.

Andrea inspired me already (damn, that bicycle was *light*) and I had, too, looked before already.

So big day and “this is what you will do during your vacation as sports”-decision today.

It’s french made, which is good for my soul and the environment, 11-something kilos (wow that’s light) and I managed to only slightly scratch my car with the bikerack from Hell.

If open core is dead, is SaaS a zombie? – IT Management podcast #77

2010-08-03T13:16:54+00:00

The podcast that Ethan Galstad and I did with John Willis and Michael Coté is now available.

This Week in OpenNMS: Minnesota On My Mind

2010-08-02T21:09:41+00:00

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS. Last week was DevJam 2010, where members of the Order of the Green Polo, OpenNMS Group employees, and friends converged on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis and got together for a week of coding, designing, planning… and not incidentally some fine eating, drinking and ferret-fondling. (Check out Tarus’s DevJam posts for more details.)

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.1
1.8.1 is the current stable release, tagged July 12th. The second stable release in the 1.8 series, it adds a ton of bugfixes and a number of enhancements since 1.8.0. For a complete list, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
1.8: Improved ability to update OpenNMS’s Web interface
Mike Huot worked on creating a Maven archetype to allow for quicker incorporation of GWT modules into the WebUI.
1.8: Preparing the way for IPv6 support
Added some preliminary IPv6 features at the poller level.
1.8: Significant progress towards OSGI packaging for OpenNMS
(Details here.)
1.8: New JDBC Collector code
1.8: Updates to SNMP Asset Provisioning Adapter
1.8: Fixed the file-handle leak bug in WMI
1.8: Integrated Instrumentation Log Reader (ILR) with the Web UI
1.8: Many, many small bug fixes. (See below).

Bugs Fixed Since Last TWiO

#2447: Custom / generic resourceType mibObjs not collected when no ifIndex resources exist in same collection
#2711: New in-memory thresholder (collectd) does not handle non-IP interfaces
#2834: Standard mib2 expression based thresholds behave strangely
#2910: Example thresholds.xml for net snmp memory should be updated
#3212: <resource-filter> usage in default thresholds.xml invalid and misleading
#3570: Can’t change name of notification from web GUI
#3573: Custom Resource Performance Reports not available
#3638: in-line latency thresholding ignores trigger parameter
#3726: Threshold: Enter a resource filter with negative lookbehind results in wrong display
3734: The history function is not working as expected on Safari and Chrome
3748: Absolute change threshold doesn’t work with 64bits-counters
3773: Linkd only uses ipRouteTable : No longer available on Cisco Routers
3808: highThreshHold notifications do not work for data sources that do not have SNMP enabled (layer 3 interfaces for instance)
3981: outage list on front page is not accurate
3982: make “nodes with outage” list on the front page configurable
3985: I’m getting a webUI error on SNMP enabled devices
3988: OTRS Integration not working.
3989: org.postgresql.util.PSQLException with linkd discovering links in OpenNMS 1.8.1
3991: Database connection leak in admin/nodelabel.jsp
3995: Element label incomplete
3997: Saving map duplicates the maps

Upcoming Events

We’ll be heading to Ohio LinuxFest from September 10-12, 2010 in Columbus, OH.
The next OpenNMS training classes are scheduled for the week of September 20, 2010 in Pittsboro, NC. The basic class will be offered from September 20-22, and the advanced class, from September 23-24.
If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

Until Next Week…

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 guacamole recipe that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

(Say, do you like the new .org website?)

Google the Alphabet, Redux

2010-08-02T20:54:32+00:00

A year ago I decided to see who “owned” each letter of the alphabet when doing a Google search. Simply go to Google, type in just one letter, and see what is suggested.

Let’s see what changes a year can make. Those with a “*” were there last year.

A – Amazon *
B – Best Buy *
C – the speed of light (Craiglist was second)
D – Durham Bulls (some still get Dictionary from last year)
E – natural logarithm (eBay is second)
F – Facebook *
G – Gmail *
H – Planck’s Constant (hotmail is second)
I – iPad (IRS drops to fifth)
J – Justin Bieber (Java is second, JCPenny from last year is fifth)
K – Kohls *
L – Lowes *
M – Mapquest (MySpace is second)
N – Netflix *
O – Orbitz *
P – Pandora (Photobucket is gone)
Q – QVC (Quotes is second)
R – REI (Redbox is second, Realtor from last year is fourth)
S – Sears (Skype is second and Southwest Airlines is gone)
T – Target *
U – USPS *
V – Verizon (Verizon Wireless, from last year, is second)
W – Walmart *
X – Xbox (xkcd is second, then XM Radio)
Y – Youtube *
Z – Zappos (Zillow is second)

So the big losers look like Photobucket and Southwest Airlines.

MySpace continues to decline, and I could never understand why Zappos wasn’t first last year (I had never heard of Zillow).

I am only vaguely aware of who Justin Bieber is, but he rules the “Js”, although Java now makes a strong showing at number two. I was also happy to see xkcd up there.

It was funny to see scientific hits, like the speed of light, coming up first, although in every case the number one from last year has simply moved down one.

The “D” was funny, since I think it is location-based. I asked a number of people on IRC and they got different things.

Anyway, until next year …

Link

2010-08-02T20:39:23+00:00

2010 Dev-Jam – Day Six

2010-07-31T13:07:23+00:00

The last day of Dev-Jam is always about commitment – well, commits to git anyway. After a solid week doing all things OpenNMS, parting is always bittersweet.

We took our group picture late, so we’re missing Bill and Matt R. The camera is Alex’s but the photo credit goes to Jen, one of the dorm advisor’s that Alex convinced to take our picture. I was stylin’ in my Doktor Kaboom t-shirt.

After we cleaned up the Club Room, 19 of us headed over to Town Hall Brewery for our last meal together this year. I think most people felt this was the best Dev-Jam ever: great facilities, awesome bandwidth and wonderful weather.

On Saturday the shuttle picks half of us up at 9am, while the rest will leave over the course of the day (well, except for Ronny who has decided to stay another week in the US). It will be nice to be home, but I’m not looking forward to a return to the hot and humid weather I’ve managed to avoid for the last two weeks.

We should be publishing a Dev-Jam wrap up in the next week or so, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

No “from the aircraft” pictures, please.

2010-07-31T04:05:12+00:00

Well, that’s what some stock photography agencies say, and they are sooooo right. Damn right. I mean. I would hate to try to sell photos and get resource to sell which is unusable. Like – pictures from the aircraft seat.

The good thing is that I could not care less. I do not sell any pictures *) and that I just take the pictures I like to take because I think they are nice/cool/interesting.

Whic is why I feel totally at ease to post this one.

It’s in IAD on the flight to MSP. That flight meant a lot to me, so it’s totally ok to post a boring wing.

And this one. C’mon, the reflections are great. I love it :-b

That is part of the University of Minnesota where we had Dev-Jam this year. Reminded me of FFB, a lot.

And that’s Jen. Jen took this picture:

:-)

Other images from MSP?

Tree torture. Well, the tree was dead. Looks still serious.

And that’s the Mississippi! First time for me to say hello to it.

Part of the University of Minnesota..

Clear rules for bike traffic..

And yet another boring highway – I hope nobody has hard feelings about highways being called boring. They are rarely..

“s”. I went onto a “range” as well, the first time. My thumb is still not responding to sensory stipulation.

ok, that’s it. I did not get to take many pictures this week :-)

*) I sold pictures I uploaded to a stock photography site of a total value of EUR 1 or so, please be so kind to ignore that.

OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2010

2010-07-30T22:46:03+00:00

I spent a week with an incredibly bright group of people in Minneapolis this week on the OpenNMS Developers Conference. I did not touch OpenNMS a lot, but focused on support organization and the configuration of .. RT ;-)

2010 Dev-Jam – Day Five

2010-07-30T15:56:49+00:00

Things are starting to blur together now, so I can’t really remember all I worked on Thursday. I know I played around more with RT, and in the early afternoon, Ethan came over and we did a podcast with John Willis and Michael Coté.

I’ll post a link when Coté puts it up, but I think it was one of my favorite podcasts of all time. Willis got to gloat when I said that I liked “the cloud” and I got to talk about some of the scalability features of OpenNMS, such as the ability to discover and manage devices with 32,000 interfaces each (virtual, of course) and a test we ran for the Department of Energy where OpenNMS was handling 125,000 syslog message a minute – more than the Netcool/Omnibus syslog probe could handle.

Oh, and OpenNMS did it for 8 straight hours before we stopped the test.

Ethan got to talk about Nagios XI and we had a friendly debate on the open source services model and the commercial software model. If you are in to that sort of thing, it will be worth a listen.

For dinner that night we ate leftovers, and then went to Big 10 for the weekly pub quiz. We started to play but got distracted by a game that Ben introduced to us called Mafia.

There is a moderator, who removes all of the aces and face cards from a standard deck, except for two aces, a king and a jack. They then add enough “plain” cards so that everyone playing gets one, and they are dealt out.

The people with the two aces are “mafia”. The person with the king is the “inspector” and the person with the jack is the “doctor”. All of the rest are villagers. The moderator then launches into a story about night falling on a village and every goes to sleep. Everyone playing shuts their eyes.

He then instructs the “mafia” to open their eyes, and then silently decide which person in the game they wish to kill. Once a decision is made, the moderator has them shut their eyes.

He then asks the “inspector” to open their eyes. The inspector can then indicate a person at the table and ask the moderator if that person is mafia. The moderator will then indicate “yes” or “no” and the inspector closes their eyes again.

Finally, the “doctor” opens his eyes and the moderator asks them to indicate if there is a person at the table they want to save, and then they close their eyes.

The moderator starts their story again, stating that dawn has come to the village, and tragically someone has died. The game is then opened up for discussion and the villagers must decide on someone to lynch. That player “dies” and the game repeats until either all of the mafia are dead or all of the villagers are dead.

If the mafia targets the person the doctor chooses to save, no one dies in the night.

It’s actually a pretty fun game. Even if the inspector knows who a mafia member is, it is doubtful that they would flatly state they were the inspector since the remaining mafia member would obviously target them next. It is also doubtful that the doctor would save anyone but themselves in the beginning (although if the inspector identified himself the doctor might protect them in the next round).

In our game the mafia targeted me in the second round, but the doctor saved me so I didn’t die (you don’t learn this during the game but I was told afterward). The villagers were victorious but it had nothing to do with me, since the final mafia member was Antonio and I kept arguing that it was stereotypical to blame the only Italian at the table.

I was wrong. (grin)

American Airlines iPhone App

2010-07-30T13:27:06+00:00

Just a heads up to everyone who has missed it – American Airlines has a sweet new iPhone app.

GPGMail 1.3.0 – Open Source In Action

2010-07-29T22:11:25+00:00

Yes, I use a Mac. Yes, I hate freedom. Yes, I use Mail.app.

And I am a bit of a security nut.

One of the most useful pieces of software I’ve used over the years is a plug-in for Mail.app called GPGMail. It was originally written by Stéphane Corthésy and released under an open source license, and it allows one to easily decrypt, encrypt and sign GPG messages right from Mail.app.

The problem is that Apple doesn’t really have an API to make such an integration easy, so with every new release of Mail.app it would usually break the plug-in, and Stéphane was responsible to fix it.

Well, after awhile Stéphane wanted to move on to other things, and with the advent of Snow Leopard GPGMail was broken – seemingly for good.

Stéphane writes:

I’ve just read the latest emails on the list, without participating. Actually I haven’t participated to the project since a very long time, for personal reasons. Situation will not change in the future, I guess.

It’s been now 10 years since I started GPGMail. At that time we were working on Rhapsody, the ancestor of Mac OS X, the link between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. gpg had just gone 1.0. I started the project because it might have been a critical piece of code for us at Sen:te in the near future, and it was really fun to develop

Plugin was then made public, and received some interest in the Mac community, though it was still for geeks. Interest in PGP became bigger, the MacGPG project was born a year later, thanks to Gordon Worley. This encouraged me to go on with GPGMail development, and also MacGPG sub-projects. I spent many week-ends and nights coding for those, and have been very happy to see interest growing more and more.

Then time passed, it became hard to find people able to help on MacGPG development, and very few people were able to spend time to understand the underpinnings of (GPG)Mail, except me, unfortunately. By making the project open-source I had expected that people would come in and make the project go further. I was rather deceived by this, I must admit. There was no real momentum.

On my side, I wanted to explore also other projects, and became tired of working on GPGMail. I wanted something new. It was getting boring, I had less time to reply to user requests, and code had got very messy. GPGMail development quite stalled from that time, I spent time on it only after major system updates. I was still hoping some people would enter and help on the project in the long-term, not only for a single patch. Thus I opened up the project by putting it on SF, with a real OpenSource license that would’t prevent people from working on GPGMail.

To be honest, I waited a rather long time to upgrade to Snow Leopard specifically because GPGMail support was important to me. When Stéphane backed out of the project, the list was abuzz with people wondering about its future. Luckily, a number of people stepped up to take it over. The project launched a new website, the code and bug tracker was moved to github, and various patched versions started to come out.

Stéphane continues:

When Snow Leopard arrived, I was already spending no time on coding during spare time, and was not really willing to. Finally people entered into the dance and started coding, not only whining. And I must admit I’ve been really surprised by the results they obtained (congrats Lukas and others!). I kept telling myself I would update the project, and make a public release, when I’ll find time to, but the fact is that I cannot, for several reasons.

For so many years I’ve been hoping to find people helping me on the project in the long-term, without finding any, but now that time has come, project can fly without me. I hope there will always be enough people to take care of it. Till now, project was organized by only one person, and depended only on me. I took care of every details. It’s time to change that model and let the project be managed more flexibly. The bazaar model, as I would say.

So please, move the project out of SF, leave it opened to developers, designers, writers, aficionados of all kind. It’s no longer dependent on me, it will depend on all of you. I will close the SF project (and mailing list), and redirect the Sen:te web pages to the new site, once you completed the migration, then I’ll have a glance at the project, from time to time, probably to complain . My baby’s no longer a baby; it no longer needs me.

Thanks all for your support, and now take great care of GPGMail.

Today the team released version 1.3.0 of GPGMail, the first real release under the new model. It installed for me without incident, and I am happy that this project will live on. Thank you Stéphane and thanks to the whole GPGMail team for making this happen. Plus, none of this would have been possible if GPG itself wasn’t open source and packaged by a number of groups. Score one for the open source ecosystem.

Had GPGMail been commercial software, I would have been out of luck, but because it was open source, and that there were many who found it valuable, it lives on and propers.

Awesome.

2010 Dev Jam – Day Four

2010-07-29T15:05:10+00:00

This was an incredibly long and busy day.

In a normal week I think about OpenNMS a lot, but during Dev-Jam there is so much energy that I think about it more (if that is possible) and it makes it hard to sleep. I stayed up late the night before working on the new opennms.org website and I woke up around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep for all of the new ideas swimming around my head.

So I got up, did a bunch of .com work (including payroll – it’s that time of the month once again) and wrote what may be my last post on open core (probably not, but we can always hope). I then went downstairs to join the rest of the team.

It was distracting. Mike Huot brought in his smoker and was cooking what would become our dinner and it smelled amazing. They had to start on it the night before and, to jump ahead, the results were delicious.

There was a lot of work going on, and on a whim Bill decided to discover the network we were using. Here is a screenshot of the unfiltered nodes:

I worked with Alex on RT for most of the day, and managed to take a short nap just before Ethan Galstad and Mary Starr showed up.

Ethan has been a visitor to Dev-Jam before (he lives nearby) and Mary is his business partner at Nagios Enterprises. Nagios Enterprises is Ethan’s commercial software company that builds on the open source Nagios platform to deliver an extended and supported commercial version. That differs greatly from the OpenNMS business model, so we had a lively debate about it.

First, even though Nagios is open source, Nagios XI is presented as commercial software. Just like my Hyperic example yesterday, go to nagios.com and search on “open source”. No matches. Ethan is 100% transparent about the commercial nature of his product. Nagios XI is not open core.

Second, I have often said that I see software taking two paths: either becoming a commodity or becoming open source. Ethan has structured his business around commoditizing the Nagios platform and it is priced accordingly.

Finally, people have been building proprietary software add-ons on top of Nagios for nearly a decade, and Ethan quite simply wants a part of it. As the main person responsible for the project, he has built a brand of considerable value. Just now a Google search on “Nagios” returns “About 9,470,000 results” (OpenNMS is only around 123K hits). That’s an impressive number.

It does illustrate a difference between the communities around Nagios and OpenNMS. From the moment I took over the administration of the project, I have relied heavily on the community to keep it going and make up for my considerable shortcomings. In contrast, Ethan has been the primary author of most of the Nagios core code.

He asked me point blank why we didn’t produce a commercial version of OpenNMS. I pointed out that our market was squarely aimed at “open source network management” and that we didn’t have any expertise in selling commercial software, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t feel the same ownership over OpenNMS that Ethan has toward Nagios. While The OpenNMS Group does hold 100% of the copyright, it would just seem wrong to me to build on that work and not give it back to the community, in any fashion.

If you have never met Ethan, please understand that he is one of the nicest guys I’ve met in this business, and his business partner Mary seems very competent and brings a strong business background to the company. Note that what I have written here our my thoughts on our conversation and Ethan may have a different take on some or all of them.

So we stuffed ourselves with barbecue and talked business for several hours, then Ethan and Mary left and many of the rest of the gang went off to an outdoor showing of Sherlock Holmes.

It had been a long day. I went to bed.

Love Parade – wie wurde die Katastrophe verursacht? Ein Zwischenfazit | beck-community

2010-07-28T20:23:22+00:00

Sehr lesenswerte Zusammenfassung auf dem BeckBlog zu dem, was man heute über das Geschehen auf der Loveparade weiß.

Love Parade – wie wurde die Katastrophe verursacht? Ein Zwischenfazit | beck-community.

20 people died on the german love parade in Duisburg. The article is a summary written by a law professor. He is discussing the different possibilities for responsibility and points out where things did not go right (as we know today).

Open Core is Dead

2010-07-28T18:14:37+00:00

I was wanting to take a break from Dev-Jam to put down some thoughts I’ve been having during this recent renaissance of the “open core” debate when I realized something:

Open core is dead.

At least as a business model. While I don’t expect it to go away overnight, I do expect to see very few new companies using the model and those commercial software companies that tout themselves as open source reframing their marketing to de-emphasize it.

I base this on observations of my own market. Even though searching on “open source network management” in Google returns OpenNMS as the first hit, for years the industry press omitted us from articles on open source management to focus on three VC-backed firms: Groundwork Open Source, Hyperic and Zenoss. All of these companies are what I would classify as “open core” and it is interesting to see where they are now.

Groundwork Open Source (GWOS)

This was one of the first open core companies to try and commercialize open source projects. When it started in 2004, GWOS sold commercial software “wrappers” around a number of open source projects without releasing any open source code on their own. In 2006 they started to distribute the “Groundwork Monitor Community Edition“. After four rounds of funding, they have raised $29 million (A: $3MM, B: $8.5MM, C: $12.5MM, D: $5MM) but they still come across as a company looking for a business plan. Once known for selling software licenses in excess of six figures, they now sell a “quickstart” version for $59.

Since I am pretty much known for running my mouth, people tend to contact me with their experiences with companies in this space. I received one such e-mail a few weeks ago:

Hey, I was just told that GWOS is no longer putting out a community (free) edition. I was told this by one of their support guys, was told that was the reason why they are now releasing version 6.2 while the 6.0 CE version hasn’t been updated since December. He said they were just going to quietly “let it go to the community” … Also interesting is that the $59 “quickstart” is just that, not really meant to be production, no upgrades or updates come with that, and no guarantee that you can even purchase the upgrades later

I thought this was interesting, so I did some poking around. I found an entry on their forums (which doesn’t seem to be policed for spam anymore):

Interesting, seems like all traces of the free/community version are gone from their site. Still available on sourceforge, I’d grab the latest version while it’s still there.

Not one to just publish hearsay, I sent a note to Tara Spalding, their Chief Marketing Officer, asking if the rumors of GWOS dropping support for their community edition was true, and she replied:

Thanks for reaching out. That is untrue, and the rumor mill is pretty lame.

I replied to ask her when we could expect the next community edition, but I haven’t heard back. The latest enterprise edition is 6.2, but the last community edition is 6.0. That’s pretty high number for a VC-backed firm – most have an exit between versions 3 and 4. (grin)

I was reminded of this exchange this week when I saw a GWOS ad in the Wall Street Journal (click to embiggen):

It was about 1/6th of a page, which runs around US$40K, so it must have been important to them. Note that the term “open source” does not appear at all in the ad.

So it seems, at least on the surface, that GWOS is trying to distance itself from the term “open source”. It will be interesting to see how they deal with their name. Perhaps after all that money and all that time they will find success marketing themselves as a commercial company.

Hyperic

Another open core firm that used to be referenced a lot was Hyperic. I would often use them as an example of the problems with the “feature wall” inherent in open core solutions. The difference between Hyperic and the other VC-backed companies is in the quality of the VCs. Benchmark and Accel seem to know what they are doing. Hyperic was rolled into SpringSource just before the latter company was sold to VMWare. Thus the VCs got an exit and I assume the five founders of Hyperic did okay financially.

What’s funny is that, although Hyperic products are owned and sold by a very commercial software company now, the interest we receive on the OpenNMS and Hyperic integration has actually gone up. It seems that framing the Hyperic products in the context of commercial software has actually made the buying decision easier, and the term “open source” does not appear anywhere on their home page.

Think about that – being honest and representing Hyperic software as commercial software with an open source component (versus open source software with a commercial component) has actually increased interest.

Zenoss

Zenoss has a very popular “core” product that they publish under an open source license, coupled with a variety of “enterprise” software offerings that they price per device per year. Their enterprise “silver” package is listed at $100/managed resource. Note that this is the subscription price – that is $100/resource/year. So if we take an average OpenNMS install of 2000 devices, that would run $200,000 a year, or $1,000,000 over five years.

It is really hard to argue that a Zenoss enterprise solution is any less expensive than, say, a solution using HP OpenView. In addition, most software from HP and IBM is licensed in perpetuity: i.e. once you’ve bought it you get the right to use that version forever. It would be hard for an enterprise of any size to base its management solution on something that must be renewed year after year, with no guarantee that the price will remain the same.

Now, this is a post proclaiming that open core is dead, so I’m not here to pick on the way Zenoss prices their software. What I want to examine is the usefulness of their business model. As a VC-backed firm that has raised around $25 million, I assume the desired exit would be an acquisition. But how would one evaluate them? A number of past Zenoss commercial clients have talked to us as an option to Zenoss, simply because their revenue structure is not sustainable. In addition, as part of the OpenNMS project we are targeting those enterprise features users of Zenoss find most valuable, and we plan to offer them for free. Heck, $200,000 can go a long way toward funding a lot of custom development, so a Zenoss user could spend that money once and get what they need under a truly free and open source license. Thus the value of the Zenoss commercial software has a very short shelf life, and since they have no revenue model based on their open source software, so does the value of the company.

I think investors are wising up to this. In their latest funding round the target was $5.2MM but they only raised $4.83MM. Thus it would appear that at least one of the investors pulled out of the deal at the last minute. That was a smart move.

[Note: our goal at OpenNMS is to produce the de facto network management platform, so I'm not targeting Zenoss specifically but all commercial software vendors in this space. Our free software will continue to erode the value of their commercial software. This is also not meant to be taken as an attack on anyone who uses any of the products listed here - if it works for you, great. This is more an examination of the business of open source.]

With the backlash hitting SugarCRM and NASA spurning Eucalyptus in favor of OpenStack, it seems that the market is wising up to open core and demanding more from companies that call themselves open source. With examples like Hyperic above, it seems to be in a commercial software company’s best interest to avoid referring to their offerings as open source. It looks like Groundwork is moving down that path and Hyperic is already there.

Open core is dead.

OpenNMS Training Available 20-24 September

2010-07-28T15:20:06+00:00

The OpenNMS Group is happy to announce that the popular Basic and Advanced Training courses will be available the week of 20 September 2010. Please check out the website for full details, and hope to see you there.

OpenNMS Sponsors Ohio LinuxFest 10-12 September

2010-07-28T15:20:06+00:00

OpenNMS is a Gold Sponsor this year of the popular Ohio LinuxFest conference to be held in Columbus, Ohio the weekend of 10-12 September. Come on out and visit the OpenNMS booth to meet some of the people who make the project possible.

Dev-Jam 2010 – July 26-30 at the University of Minnesota

2010-07-28T15:20:06+00:00

The fifth annual Dev-Jam OpenNMS developers conference will be held at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus the week of July 26th. Over 20 developers from six countries are expected to spend a week focused on the goal of making OpenNMS the de facto network management application platform of choice.

Photowettbewerb – photo competition

2010-07-28T15:19:29+00:00

Danke nochmal an Euch für Euer Feedback zum Photowettbewerb! Dieses Bild hier hat beim Wettbewerb gewonnen :-)

Thanks to everybody for their feedback, I won the competition with this picture:

2010 Dev-Jam – Day Three

2010-07-28T03:25:32+00:00

I am happy to announce that I was finally able to get the new www.opennms.org website to a point where it could go live. We started this process nearly a year ago and managed to get the www.opennms.com site finished early in the year, but for a variety of reasons we just couldn’t finish the other one.

Outside of cosmetic changes, not much has changed. At the heart of the site is still a wiki, but we wrapped a few information pages in front of it to help introduce people to the project.

There is also a tighter coupling between the .org and the .com sites, but we will strive to keep the commercial content on .com and the project content on .org. I do hope that this will end the occasional question we get on the mailing lists about whether or not one can get commercial support for OpenNMS, however.

I’ve been pretty heads down on the site, so I’m not sure what everyone else has been working on, but there is a scratchpad page that is tracking some of it.

Dinner was catered by Brasa and most agree that it was in the top five Dev-Jam meals of all time.

OpenNMS Training Available 20-24 September

2010-07-28T00:14:47+00:00

The OpenNMS Group is happy to announce that the popular Basic and Advanced Training courses will be available the week of 20 September 2010.

Please check out the website for full details, and hope to see you there.

OpenNMS Sponsors Ohio LinuxFest 10-12 September

2010-07-28T00:12:30+00:00

OpenNMS is a Gold Sponsor this year of the popular Ohio LinuxFest conference to be held in Columbus, Ohio the weekend of 10-12 September.

Come on out and visit the OpenNMS booth to meet some of the people who make the project possible.

Dev-Jam 2010 – July 26-30 at the University of Minnesota

2010-07-27T22:13:12+00:00

2010 Dev-Jam – Day Two

2010-07-27T17:37:16+00:00

I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll be able to do this week, since it is way more fun to hang out with the gang, but I thought I needed to post at least one picture.

Thanks to Chris Rodman and Papa Johns sponsoring dinner, we were inundated with pizza and wings yesterday and it was nice to be able to eat without interrupting work.

2010 Dev-Jam – Day One

2010-07-26T04:33:48+00:00

Well, while not really the official start of Dev-Jam, that’s tomorrow, today was when most people showed up. Despite some travel delays due to weather, as I write this most people have arrived. Craig’s plane should be in soon and Johan should be arriving by motorcycle from Denver any minute now.

Plus, today, people actually got to see a little surprise I planned. While in Portland I got a hair cut:

Like it? It actually took about three hours, since they had to bleach my hair first for the green “swoosh” of the logo. If you want your very own OpenNMS logo, head to Bishops Barbershop on Columbia and be sure to ask for Jake. He’s the only one who would even attempt it, and I think he did a great job.

Today Mike took me to an unusual place for lunch called Brasa. It was really good, and I plan to have them cater at least one meal while we are here. Then we went to Sam’s Club and stocked up on “supplies” for the week.

Then there was a bit of downtime while we waited for others to arrive. After moving into the Yudof Hall Club Room (where we will spend most of our time) we all went out to dinner at Sally’s.

Now, time for bed.

2010 OSCON to Dev-Jam

2010-07-25T15:07:53+00:00

Okay, I really wasn’t going to blog about this part of the trip, but it did turn into something of an adventure, so why not?

I got a notice Friday night that, due to weather in Chicago, there would be a crew delay for flights out of PDX the next morning. Since that put me on a pretty tight connection time through DFW, I called and got myself on an earlier flight. That one, too, was delayed, but it was then scheduled to leave about the time of my original flight (if it had left on time) so everything was cool.

I took the MAX to the airport, checked my bag, got put on the waiting list for an upgrade and I went to the gate.

I’m sitting there reading when I look up and there is Jesse Vincent staring at the upgrade list. I said “hi” and he looked at me, then back at the list and then said that it was rare that he wasn’t number one for upgrades. It turns out that his name was second, behind mine. Then Kevin Falcone shows up (also from Best Practical) and his is the third name on the list.

Never seen something like that before.

Anyway, so I didn’t know that another thing Jesse and I had in common was an interest in collecting frequent flyer miles and air travel in general. He’s way more of a geek at it than me – in fact he has an active Sabre account so that he has access to the same information as travel agents.

While we are sitting there, Amber Graner shows up (it was like a little OSCON). She was on her way to DFW and then Charlotte, but then had to stay one more night in a hotel since her husband’s flight from Europe was delayed until Sunday (they were to meet up and drive home together).

First Class checked in full so none up us got upgraded. I went to my seat at 21F, Jesse went to his seat at 21D and Kevin to his seat at 21C.

I had pity on the person who was to sit in 21E, since I figured Jesse and I would be talking across them the whole way, but we behaved (I got caught up on Burn Notice and watched two episodes of Dollhouse).

When we made it to Dallas, Kevin and Jesse’s original flight to Boston was backing out of the gate, so they had some time until the next one. We hit the Admiral’s Club and had some lunch, and then they took off. My own flight to Minneapolis was still an hour or so away, so I made some calls and caught up on e-mail.

As I was leaving, I noticed a couple sitting nearby traveling with two small dogs. I like dogs so I couldn’t stop myself from talking to them (yeah, yeah – I know). It turns out that they were originally from West Virginia (I spent some time in WV back in 1986) but now lived in Los Angeles, and that they traveled about as much as I do. There names were Scott and Kristan, and they had met while in WV, gotten married and now were both working in television. Since Kristan had “model” good looks I asked her if she was someone famous that I should know.

They both laughed and said, well, maybe. Kristan had worked with Rachel Ray for several years and she is a host of the HGTV show “Design on a Dime“. Since I only have “over the air” television (no cable or satellite) I could plead ignorance at least, but I must say that they were both incredibly easy to talk to, so much so that I had to run to catch my plane.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I watched two more episodes of Dollhouse (three more to go) and while the plane was a little late as they had to route around some thunderstorms, both myself and Alex landed pretty much at the same time. Mike Huot met us at the airport and we headed toward UMN and Dev-Jam.

2010 OSCON – Day Four

2010-07-23T16:40:05+00:00

The last full day of the conference started off kind of busy for me. I had a number of work things to do (the business doesn’t stop just ’cause I’m at a conference) and I didn’t make it to the convention center until 10am. I ran in order to catch r0ml’s talk where he was going to propose that all software should be in the public domain and that licenses (even OSI approved licenses) indicated failure.

Turns out that session wasn’t until 10:40am, so I decided to wander around the show floor until then. I ran into a couple of people I knew and told them I’d missed the keynotes, to which the reply was “no, you didn’t” so I guess they didn’t go over all that well.

As I was wandering, I met Brian Reale who had come to my talk the day before. He manages ProcessMaker, an open source business process management and workflow tool. We were chatting about running a services company around open source when I realized it was right at 10:40 and I had to run to the session.

As I got close to the room I met Karen and Bradley coming the other way. Apparently the room was so packed that they had to stop letting people in due to fire safety regulations. Grrrr. So r0ml, if you are reading this, you are wrong.

(grin)

[Note: we watched one geek walk up, be told by the dude at the door that the session was full, and he just shouldered passed him to go in anyway. The door dude just stood there, and we realized why when the geek found the door to be locked. Classic]

We ended up talking awhile in the hallway, and Tom “Spot” Callaway joined us. I haven’t been involved in TriLUG for awhile and so I had not seen him, or even realized he had moved to Boston, so it was nice to catch up. I then wandered back to the Expo.

I was able to finally meet Adam Monsen, who showed up in a blue OpenNMS polo. He also had a nice little gift for me for talking with him a few weeks ago.

I’ve learned if you ever need a conversation starter at a geek show, walk around with a bottle of single malt under your arm. You’ll meet a lot of people.

Adam and I continued our discussion over lunch, and they he had to get back to work promoting Mifos. Eric and I decided to walk around some more when I bumped into Brian Aker.

I follow Brian’s blog, and for the last several months I’ve seen him working on this large monorail project. Since he just tends to post pictures, I never understood what it was for, so I got to ask him. It turns out that he is building a 500 foot long monorail to be deployed at the Burning Man festival next year. I’ve never been (for years I’ve been spending Labor Day up in the North Carolina mountains) but some friends of mine haven’t missed it for over a decade and so from their stories I’ve always wanted to go. It would be cool to see it in action.

I also got to meet Aaron Williamson of the SFLC. He is the resident free software on Android guru, and we chatted about free software (free as in freedom) as well as the fact that Android isn’t 100% free (he told me there are three pieces of proprietary driver code on his G1).

Continuing that theme, I did actually make it to a session when I went to see Jesse Vincent’s K-9 e-mail client talk. Everyone I asked about FOSS on the Android mentioned his mail program, so it was cool to listen to its history and to learn how Android has evolved to be a lot more open to the open source development style over the years.

After that I went back to the hotel room to drop off some things before heading out to dinner. OpenNMS is heavily used in Oregon, from OSU to Clackamas County, the state of Oregon and even the City of Portland. My friend Stan, who I met at an OpenNMS training session earlier this year, came with his wife Jane to take me out to dinner.

In continuing the McMenamins theme started on Monday, we drove out to Edgefield.

Edgefield was once a “poor farm“. From Wikipedia:

Poor farms were county or town-run residences where paupers (mainly elderly and disabled people) were supported at public expense. They were common in the United States beginning in the middle of the 19th century and declined in use after the Social Security Act took effect in 1935 with most disappearing completely by about 1950.

Most were working farms that produced at least some of the produce, grain, and livestock they consumed. Residents were expected to provide labor to the extent that their health would allow, both in the fields and in providing housekeeping and care for other residents. Rules were strict and accommodations minimal.

It is now a complex that includes restaurants, bars, a hotel, a spa and a golf course, among other things. We shared a nice meal (where I sampled their artisan made gin) and then walked around the grounds for a bit. In the background you could hear a bluegrass band that was playing a free concert to a rather large crowd in one of the side fields.

They then drove me back into Portland and dropped me a Club Barracuda, where Rackspace, Linux Fund, iX Systems and MindTouch were hosting a party. It started off a little slow but then began to fill up. I ran into Eric again (Rackspace hosted a hiring “meet and greet” beforehand and I believe he was required to attend) as well as Stephen Walli, but I also got to spend some time with Ilan Rabinovich and Amber Graner (Amber is a fellow North Carolinian). While we were talking, a man named Roger came up to chat and it turns out he works with Stan at the City. Talk about a small world.

A little after 11pm we decided to head back. While waiting for the train I looked over an saw a man in a MariaDB shirt. I thought it might be Monty Widenius, so I looked up his picture on Google and sure enough, it was him. I walked over and introduced myself.

While we were talking I met Jeff Mitchell of KDE. He knew our very own Ben Reed and as we walked back to the hotel he was hoping Ben could find the time to update his Mac packages for Amarok. Ben ported KDE natively to the Mac when TrollTech opened up Qt awhile back, so Ben, if you are reading this, Jeff says “hi”.

There is still a half day of show left (I doubt I’ll make it there on Friday) but overall I had a good time. I was surprised that Sourceforge didn’t do its Community Choice Awards this year (not that OpenNMS would win anyway) but other than that I enjoyed it.

It was really nice to see (at least among my biased, self-filtered list of contacts) the growing backlash against open core calling itself open source or at least a much larger group of people who cared about the difference.

Next stop: Dev-Jam!

2010 OSCON – Day Three

2010-07-22T16:22:39+00:00

Today was the official start of the conference, and time for keynotes and sessions.

The morning keynote was interesting in that it involved a number of presenters, each of whom had about 10 minutes to talk, versus one long presentation. Tim O’Reilly started it off. I usually run hot and cold with Tim, but today’s talk I’d rate at “lukewarm”.

He did start off his presentation with a quote from Harlan Ellison. I collaborated with Harlan on a short story that can be found in his collection Slippage (Jane Doe #112).

Well, “collaborated” is probably too strong a term. Harlan has this gig where he’ll show up at a bookstore and write a short story in a day. If you spend a certain amount in the store you get a free copy of the manuscript. He was doing this in New Orleans at a Bookstar when I just happened to walk past, and he was surprisingly approachable.

He was talking with George Alec Effinger about some plot points, and me, being the shy and withdrawn person I am, jumped into the conversation. Anyway, he used some of my ideas in the short story, and although I have never talked to him since then, I did strike up an actual mail (not e-mail) correspondence with Effinger that spanned a couple of years (until his untimely death in 2002).

Anyway, where was I.

Oh, the keynote.

The last time I was at OSCON, Tim was all about “Web 2.0″. This year it is “Government 2.0″, and the first few speakers after him focused on how open source and the open source way could be applied to making government better. This included talks by Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America and Bryan Sivak from the government of DC. Both were interesting, but when Jennifer was speaking I thought if I heard the term “millennials” one more time I was going to hurl.

Stormy Peters gave the best presentation, going over the reasons why you should care about the security and freedom of your personal data (thoughts, pictures, etc.) that are published on-line (the “picking up the dog poo” analogy she used was priceless). She also gave several examples of free and open source options for many popular social networking sites (Identica vs. Twitter for example).

The last speaker was Martin Mikos, who tried to gloss over the fact that his latest endeavor, Eucalyptus, is a open core/fauxpen source commercial software company that is trying to gain mindshare by touting itself as open source. I found it hard not to heckle.

When you have, right on your slide, that your business plan is to generate revenue by selling “enterprise” closed-source software – you are a commercial software company.

He pointed out that the MySQL sale put millions of dollars into the pockets of developers, which is true, but it also put the MySQL project, one of the most successful open source projects ever made (well, truly open source at least until about 2006) into a tailspin when it landed at Oracle. Yes, certain MySQL people got wealthy, but it was at the expense of the open source community.

Getting wealthy at the expense of your community is wrong and antithetical to open source. Sorry.

Others seem to agree with me. Even though the open source side of Eucalyptus is part of Ubuntu’s private cloud strategy, NASA went with Rackspace to form OpenStack mainly because the commercial side of Eucalyptus was at odds with NASA’s desire for everything to be open source.

Luckily, he didn’t speak too long.

After the keynotes, the sessions started. The first one I went to was called “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: The Joys of Engineering Leadership“.

This was run by a couple of Googlers who gave some real common sense advice about management in technical fields. I once wrote a guide for the management of one company I worked for called “Geeks: Care and Feeding” to try to cover some of this, but luckily I don’t really have to use it at OpenNMS. We tend to hire straight out of the community, and if people are willing to do something for free they tend to make awesome employees when you pay them.

One thing I had not heard of was “The Compliment Sandwich“. It’s when timid managers criticize an employee, but sandwich it between two compliments. It makes the manager feel better but more often than not the employee only remembers the compliments.

The second session was a panel discussion on motivating members of an open source community with financial rewards. I have to say that I didn’t pay too much attention, and I should have been warned by the fact that is was a panel discussion and as Chris Dibona says “all panel discussions stink.” One main criticism I have for panel discussions is that rarely is the audience included, but there was a lot of give and take in this one, I just couldn’t get into the subject matter.

By now it was lunch time, and the buffet sponsored by Google was really good (surprisingly so for a conference). As I was leaving I ran into Stephen Walli and Cat Allman, and I finally got to tell Stephen how much I enjoyed his post on how open source companies should not focus on selling to their community, and it was great to see Cat as always.

As we were talking, Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz joined us. Now, I had never heard of r0ml before but he is quite the character, and I decided to attend his session “Collaboration vs. Competition: Who Wins and Who Loses?”

The thesis of his talk was that “collaboration == good” and “competition == bad”. Some of his arguments were quite persuasive but a few toward the end were a little flat. For example, he argued that in cooperative situations there tends to be an even mix of men and women, but since open source tends to be mainly male it must be competitive. I believe this is the Fallacy of “Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc“, as the ratio of men to women in technology fields is due more to societal gender roles than competition, but I often get my informal fallacies mixed up (which is odd since the Internet gives me so many opportunities to practice identifying them).

He made me think, however, and I like that.

On Thursday he is proposing that we do away with licensing and publish everything in the public domain. I heartily disagree with that, so it should be interesting.

I skipped the next session to wander the Expo Hall and to get ready for my own talk. It was supposed to be a 40 minute version of my “So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business?” talk but I read it wrong and thought it was 50 minutes. Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler were presenting after me and I hope my delay in shutting up wasn’t too rude.

At the moment the talk has 3 ratings all of “5 stars” so I think it went well.

I then ran to see “From ‘Titanic’ to ‘Awesome’ – Open Source Continuity In Practice” by Simon Phipps. Simon was responsible for a lot of the open source movement within Sun, and I always wanted to meet him.

He gave a talk on how true open source communities can survive when their main sponsor (i.e. Sun/Oracle) goes away, and to my delight demonstrated how open core/fauxpen source companies quite often don’t have such communities.

Even OpenNMS didn’t score 100% on his criteria, getting dinged on the fact that the copyright and trademark are held by a single organization, but we did pass with high marks on the rest.

Simon’s session was the last for the day, and I had about an hour to relax before going to the “Android: Hands On” session that night. This was a three hour introduction to writing Android apps, sponsored by Google.

While part of me thought it might happen, it was still delightful to walk into the room and get handed my very own Nexus One. Now that I actually had an Android phone, I would be in a position to rethink my reasons for getting an iPhone.

But I’m still frustrated. I went to the marketplace to look for free (as in freedom) apps but was deluged with free (as in crap) apps. I bought up Wikipedia to search for open source apps for Android, and was extremely disappointed in the rather small number of them.

[On a side note, the guy next to me asked what I thought of the new Wikipedia redesign. I mentioned that it looked nice but I was still not used to having the search box on the right side. It turns out he was Trevor Parscal, the guy who designed it. Gotta love OSCON]

If I move from the iPhone I want to run as many free apps as possible. I also don’t want to have to sync via Google. As much as I love them as a company, I don’t want my e-mail, my contacts and my calendar on their servers. Where is the sync for Thunderbird or Evolution? Where is the sync for Lightning? One would think the open source community would be itching to create FOSS apps for Android. Perhaps it is due to Android running a Java VM, who knows.

One thing I really, really want them to do is to add a FOSS category to the marketplace. That would go a long way to both getting FOSS apps adopted and promoted.

But for now it looks like if I want to sync my address book I’ll need Missing Sync. If I want to sync my music I’ll need Salling Media Sync. So here I am, once again locking myself into commercial software with respect to my phone.

I did tear my eyes away from the phone long enough to listen to the REST discussion during the seminar. OpenNMS 1.8 has a robust RESTful interface, and the iPhone app is based on it. Now that there are a couple of Android phones in the office (Jeff bought one after returning his iPhone 4) I am hoping an Android version of the OpenNMS mobile app isn’t too far away. It will be nice to have one more FOSS app for the platform.

By the time the session was over it was past 10pm, so Eric and I grabbed a late dinner at Denny’s (right next to the La Quinta, of course) and called it a night.

Xing Recruiter Membership

2010-07-22T14:58:25+00:00

XING (which should be pronounced Crossing..) proposes now a Recruiter Membership. That Membership provides better search criteria and probably some bells and whistles.

The search criteria are however interesting:

“Gezielt Suchen, schneller Finden: Filtern Sie Ihre Suche per Mausklick nach Kriterien wie „Aktivität auf XING“, „Karrierelevel“ und „Branche“ und erhalten Sie in 10 Sekunden Ihre perfekte Ergebnisliste.”

Filter by “Acitivity on Xing”, “Career Level”, “Business sector” and get perfect results.

Now, dear recruiters. Do you value someone with a lot of activity on Xing higher? Or would you rather think that he’s not focusing his energies the right way?

I’m not sure I like that idea, not sure at all.

2010 OSCON – Day Two

2010-07-21T14:58:10+00:00

For the second day of the conference, I had two tutorials lined up. Both, I’m happy to say, were really good.

The first one was on Puppet. While I’ve known about Puppet for some time, I had no experience with it, so I thought I’d be cool to check out. The tutorial was organized well and while I believe I’ve only scratched the surface of using the tool, the ability to easily add users via the command line on OS X is worth it alone (I kid, but I attempted to add a user to a Mac remotely this week and I ended up just changing my password and having a guy there log in and do it through the GUI). Since I just brought two new servers online, I’m thinking about deploying Puppet to keep them in sync. Of course, the idea of an integration between Puppet and OpenNMS obviously suggests itself, so I’ll be looking for ideas when I play with it.

The second tutorial was on Request Tracker (RT). The course was taught by Jesse Vincent, who started the project. We’ve used RT for years and we’re getting ready to do a new deployment, so I was hoping to pick up some new tricks.

One that I’m excited about is that it looks like we’ll be able to put together a single sign-on solution between OpenNMS and RT. We already have a tight integration, but we have a client who is interested in making it even tighter, and that was a requirement.

What I enjoyed most about the talk was learning more about Best Practical and talking with Jesse. Best Practical is a true open source company like OpenNMS, and it was fun to swap stories and poke fun at the VC-backed fauxpen source crowd.

It was a full day, and I was happy to unwind with an old friend of mine who took me out to Miyamoto Sushi. The place seats 9, the food was extremely fresh and the portions huge. Being old, I called it an early night. I went back to the hotel to catch up on some work and to get ready for the first day of the main conference.

France.fr

2010-07-21T03:05:57+00:00

Website temporarily unavailable

The France.fr teams regretfully announce that the new French portal is currently inaccessible. We are dealing with a problem linked to the configuration of our servers. All the systems are being audited to allow us to get the site up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and see you very soon on the site!

via France.fr.

I will now press Apple + I to see what is behind. Nothing special, but they use a tracker to track the failed attempts.

And now Applie + U for the source.

Not a lot, but we get to

//-- Copyright 2010 AT Internet, All Rights Reserved.
//-- AT Internet Tag 3.4.007

after following a jscript. That’s the tracker.

But well. C’est la vie :-)

This Week in OpenNMS: We Be (Dev) Jammin’

2010-07-20T18:04:37+00:00

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS. In the last week, we released 1.8.1, among other things.

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.1
1.8.1 is the current stable release, tagged July 12th. The second stable release in the 1.8 series, it adds a ton of bugfixes and a number of enhancements since 1.8.0. For a complete list, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
1.8: Windows Installation Fixes
More work on WIndows installation has been going on this week, with an overhauled launcher setup which works properly on 32- or 64-bit Windows, as well as a possible fix for the installation of PL/PgSQL on systems that don’t have it enabled in their template1 databases by default.
1.8: Remote Poller Updates
When the remote poller fires events, it now includes the location monitor ID, so alarms can be processed based on the monitor reporting issues. Also, Philip updated the legend on the Distributed Status page to better reflect the various statuses shown. A few other UI bugs were fixed as well.
1.8: Instrumentation Log Reader
Philip wrote a handy tool for debugging collection issues called the Instrumentation Log Reader. It’s in the opennms-tools/ directory of the OpenNMS source (as of what will be 1.8.2), and allows you to analyze your collectd.log to get statistics on how long collections take for various services. You can see a sample output in the source tree here.
1.8: SNMP Asset Adapter
Seth has been working on a Provisiond adapter for pulling SNMP data into asset records. He’s still working on documentation, so I don’t have a ton of details, I’ll try to give a pointer to it next week. =)

Bugs Fixed Since Last TWiO

#3836: Unable to delete nodes with capsd disabled.

Count Down to Dev-Jam 2010

Everyone is humming in anticipation with Dev-Jam 2010 just around the corner. People will start arriving in Minnesota at the end of the week, and we’ll be kicking off the festivities with the ritual hazing initiation welcoming our new OGP members and OpenNMS Group employees. We’ve got the monkeys, duct tape, leather straps, pomade, pitchforks, and belt sander ready, so listen for the screams of excitement about becoming part of the fold, you’ll be able to hear them wherever you’re at!
Traditionally Dev-Jam is accompanied by a flurry of activity in the OpenNMS codebase, so expect the next few weeks’ TWiOs to be way cooler than this one.

Upcoming Events

July 21st, 2010: Tarus will be giving his “So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business?” talk at OSCON
July 26th-30th, 2010: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2010 will be held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN

If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

Until Next Week…

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 hazing rituals that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

2010 OSCON – Day One

2010-07-20T17:17:30+00:00

My trip to OSCON was pretty uneventful, with the exception of getting hassled at airport security. Well, hassled is too strong a word – the TSA folks were friendly and professional – but I did hit a snag with my new contact lens solution.

I am extremely nearsighted (about -7 for those keeping score at home), but I manage by wearing contacts. However, as I have gotten older I’ve run into problems wearing them, so my doctor has me on some strange no preservative contact solutions which includes a cleaning product called “One Step” by Sauflon.

First off, One Step only comes in large bottles (you use about a half ounce a night so the TSA approved size won’t last a week) and second, it contains hydrogen peroxide.

Of course, the highly diluted hydrogen peroxide solution for my contacts is perfect bomb making material (sarcasm mine) so there is no way I could take it on the plane. I ended up having to work my way back out of security to check my bag. It made it to Portland with no issue (it was the third bag off the plane) so no harm, no foul.

Plus, it is delightfully cool and unusually dry in Portland which is a welcome change from the 100F+ days back home.

Note: While I haven’t used Twitter in a long time, I do ‘dent occasionally if you are in to that sort of thing.

Monday morning I set off for the Convention Center. Along the way I saw a guy who just struck me as a computer geek: jeans, dark t-shirt and walking with a backpack, and then I realized it was Eric Evans (OGP), an old friend from Rackspace. He is giving a tutorial on Tuesday on Cassandra, and it was nice to see him again.

My morning tutorial was on git. Considering that OpenNMS has a large number of developers spread out around the world, managing all of the code and merging it into a common repo can be difficult. We used to use subversion but switched to git last year, and I have to be honest that it is still a little bit like black magic to me.

At the tutorial I ran into Ken Eshelby, a long time OpenNMS user who manages about 100,000 interfaces with the application. It turns out that of the four tutorials I am attending, he is in three of them.

I wish I could say I got a lot out of the tutorial, but while it was obvious that Scott Chacon knew his stuff, he went through it so fast that it was almost impossible for me to keep up.

For example, I remember at one time he asked if people knew what “rebasing” was, and he followed it up by asking how many people used it. He then laughed and said more people used it than knew what it was, but the fact was that we couldn’t get our hands up fast enough in response to his first question before he asked the second.

The second tutorial, at least for me, was better. Josh Berkus gave a talk on keeping databases healthy (with a focus on PostgreSQL). I know Josh from SCaLE and he, too, really knows his stuff. Since OpenNMS currently runs only on Postgres, we often have to maintain our client’s database instances to insure that OpenNMS is optimally responsive. We are moving toward database independence by using Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) in the form of Hibernate, and of course Josh was against this from a performance standpoint, but I argued that since OpenNMS is a network management application platform versus a plain application we want to offer as many options to our users as possible, including choice of database. This allows for them to leverage in-house expertise to build truly custom solutions, and that flexibility is worth the performance trade off.

That evening Ken took Eric and me to a place called the Kennedy School. This is an old schoolhouse that has been turned into a rather unique collection of bars, a restaurant and a movie theatre (among other things). We sampled some of the local brew and then saw Iron Man 2, which was okay for $3 (not being familiar with the “Avengers” mythology I have the same neutral feeling about both it and the first movie) and my only complaint was I wanted more screen time for Scarlett Johansson.

It was cool that part of the movie took place in Monaco, where I managed to visit back in May.

If you’re at OSCON and want to meet up, let me know.

Monty Says: A Definition of an Open Source Company

2010-07-18T22:51:26+00:00

Just a quick post as I head toward OSCON.

Monty Widenius, one of the founders of MySQL, has an interesting post where he makes an attempt to define what it means to be an “open source company“. I’m happy to say that the OpenNMS Group meets that definition, but I’m not 100% sure it is complete as the requirement that an open source company is one that “produces software” does leave out a number of companies that promote and deploy open source solutions without actually writing code. But I think it is a start.

I also hate that I missed the Community Leadership Summit due to a prior (and totally enjoyable) commitment, but we were able to at least sponsor it. If this is any indication of what went on I’ll have to be sure to make the next one.