Planet OpenNMS

What can you do in the aftermath?

2010-02-09T08:15:43+00:00

You can for example help to operate networks: http://www.opennms.com/415 .

Communication networks are critical for operations in deseaster-struck areas, and making sure they run is something which does not really come to your mind straight away if you think of “helping”.

Congratulations Saints

2010-02-09T00:44:01+00:00

Yesterday I, along with a large number of other people, watched the New Orleans Saints win their first Super Bowl.

Last year I watched the game in a hotel room in Milan (when my Steelers won their sixth championship – number 43 we miss you) but this year I was able to hold a little party.

Now, like hot dogs go with baseball, pizza is fast becoming the food of choice for football, and no Super Bowl party would be complete without some Papa John’s.

Of course, my Mom also showed up (that’s her behind the pies – “Hi mom”) and she brought enough food to feed an army. I think everyone left stuffed.

Anyway, Denise Dubie at Network World wrote an article about how Papa John’s uses OpenNMS, and how they delivered 6 million slices of pizza yesterday.

They worked so we didn’t have to (well, except for Mom. Thanks Mom).

Open Source, Social Contracts and Running a Business

2010-02-08T19:58:01+00:00

When I started my first company in 2002, I had a lot of previous employers to provide examples, both positive and negative, of how to run a business. At the time IBM and Hewlett-Packard were leaders in network management, so I could have modeled my business on them.

Instead I modeled it on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Many might think it was a strange choice, but it seems to have worked out well, at least for us.

First, they make a good product. This is of paramount importance in any business.

Second, they limited the amount of money the highest paid people could earn in salary. In their case, the highest paid person could not make more than seven times the lowest paid person.

I am constantly disgusted by executive salaries these days. Being a previous employee of NORTEL, now in bankruptcy, I find it highly ironic that the executives responsible for driving the company into the ground received huge retention bonus to keep them from leaving. In a just world they would have had no where to go, and particularly they would not be financially rewarded for poor performance.

To me a salary should exist to cover the basic necessities of living, but the real compensation should be based on the performance of the company. Let me stress that I want there to be no limits on overall compensation – if the company is doing well I want everyone’s “upside” to be unlimited. But getting a huge salary just for showing up feels wrong, especially if the company is doing poorly.

Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs ever, takes home a salary of just $1.

Back to Ben and Jerry’s. The one other thing they did that I admired was to donate a certain percentage of pre-tax profits to charity.

I like donating to charity, but I find that I am most eager to give to those organizations that are a) small and b) concerned directly with something I care about. Thus each year I give to the EFF, the FSF and the SFLC, plus a number of local charities.

When the earthquake in Haiti happened, we were shocked and saddened like most of the world. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure how. Luckily, the opportunity came in a most unexpected way.

Matt and Jeff (along with Alex) were hanging out in the OpenNMS IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net) when a man named Andris Bjornson joined and started asking questions about OpenNMS. It turns out that he works for an organization called Inveneo that supplies bandwidth in rural and under-served areas in the developing world. Haiti was the perfect example of a place that needed their services, since a lot of the relief effort is run by non-government organizations (NGOs), and they rely on communications in order to maximize the good they can do.

Haiti’s communications infrastructure, such as it was, was destroyed by the earthquake, and Inveneo is using wireless technology to provide a timely replacement. Of course they need some way to manage this infrastructure (as you can imagine, it is in high demand) and they chose OpenNMS.

Andris installing an antenna in Port au Prince (click for more pictures)

Andris has been using OpenNMS for awhile, but he had some questions and there were some issues in managing the radios they were using. The guys in the channel were more than happy to help out, but we wanted to be involved in a more formal way.

We decided to donate a commercial support contract to Inveneo to help them out in Haiti.

It’s pretty cool to be involved, at least in some small way, with getting Haiti back on its feet. It was also cool to have OpenNMS chosen from all possible apps out there to play a role.

You can read more about Inveneo and OpenNMS in this press release, and please consider donating to their efforts.

Open source has a large social component, and I have a theory that being involved in open source software makes one generally more interested in social issues. I want to hear from others about their experiences with social causes tied to open source. Jon “Maddog” Hall is also a fan of Inveneo, and I’d love to have more examples.

UPDATE: Here’s a network diagram of the Inveneo network, and the “How to Deploy” document mentions us by name.

Winter

2010-02-07T20:36:54+00:00

74 – Haute Savoie – genevainformation::pictures.

This was dutifully parked ;)

Details of Rural Life

2010-02-07T18:08:37+00:00

Details of Rural Life – genevainformation::pictures.

Details of rural life, well, sort of the “pictures with the small things in them”, though you might want to ask back if a horse is small. But the flies are!

That’s the next Gallery I “collected” on smugmug with their new “collect gallery” feature!

Marketing, now Sales? WTF?

2010-02-05T00:08:07+00:00

The OpenNMS Group has finally moved into double digit employee numbers with the hiring of Brad Miesner as our Vice President of Sales.

I know what you’re thinking – a sales guy? Earlier you post that you hired some folks to do marketing, and now you hire a sales guy?

First, let me point out that I’ve known Brad for over ten years and he started off in a technical role. So he’s not just some guy with no network management knowledge who’s going to pester people to spend money.

Second, interest in OpenNMS has grown to the point that it can be difficult for us to handle, in a timely manner, requests for information about our services. I always focus on our existing customers first, sometimes to the detriment of potential clients, but Brad will insure that our future clients receive the attention they deserve.

But most importantly Brad will have the role of “customer satisfaction manager”. We tend to build close relationships with our clients, and if we should happen to drop the ball, these clients might be a little hesitant to complain directly to the people at OpenNMS with whom they are working. Brad will proactively be in touch with all of our partners to insure that we’re providing the best service we can, and if there are ways we can improve, it is hoped he will hear about them.

Brad comes to us from Network Appliance, voted by Fortune Magazine as the number one “Best Place to Work” in 2009. He was doing really well there, and I think his decision to join our band of open source revolutionaries speaks well for both the company and our future sales prospects.

We are extremely happy to have Brad join our team.

Oh, at one time he worked for a little software company called Zenoss, but I think he’ll quickly adjust to working in open source.

(grin)

It’s Poll Time Again: Linuxquestions.org

2010-02-04T15:09:32+00:00

Linuxquestions.org is running a poll on the best open source projects and there is a network monitoring application category.

If you like OpenNMS, we’d appreciate your vote

Dear Lazyweb: jQuery help

2010-02-04T04:51:16+00:00

We launched a new OpenNMS Group website this week and I am having a small problem. On the home page we have a jQuery script called Crossslide that rotates some pictures in the banner:

It works fine on Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE8. It doesn’t work on IE7 and I have absolutely no idea why. I’ve reformatted the code, used both relative and explicit paths, and … nothing. No errors either.

I have no experience debugging Javascript issues within IE, so if you can help I would appreciate it.

Texte mit Perl auf Qualität kontrollieren.

2010-02-02T17:12:30+00:00

Einige haben vielleicht mitbekommen, daß zwei tapfere Streiter und ich gemeinsam ein Buch über OpenNMS schreiben (kommt im April heraus).

Zur Zeit befinden wir uns in der Endphase. Da wir alle drei unterschiedliche Schreibstile haben, stellt sich die Frage wie man die Qualität kontrollieren kann. Eine besonders nervige Sache sind die langen Bandwurmsätze. Die schreibt man meistens dann, wenn man etwas kompliziertes erklären will. Der Nachteil ist allein, daß die komplizierte Erklärung der komplizierten Sache nur noch schwer verständlich ist.

Das Buch ist aber ein wenig umfangreicher – diese Sätze durch “Herauslesen” zu finden geht zwar, kostet aber viel Zeit.

Mit etwas Perl und Liebe kann man sich diese Arbeit allerdings deutlich vereinfachen: Das Perl-Modul Lingua::DE::Sentence zerlegt einen Text unter Berücksichtigung der deutschen Grammatik in Sätze. In diesen Sätzen zähle ich die “,” und die “und”. Das Ergebnis ist dann eine Gewichtung. Ist der Satz zu schwer, wird er auf STDOUT ausgedruckt. Dann kann der Bearbeiter entscheiden, ob etwas geändert werden sollte oder nicht.

Der Teil Code, der die Hauptarbeit erledigt sieht so aus:

my $sentences = get_sentences($text); foreach (@$sentences) { &check_sentence($_); }

sub check_sentence { my $sentence=$_; my $length=length($sentence); my $comma,$und=""; $und= () = $sentence =~ /\ und\ /g; $comma= () = $sentence =~ /\,\ /g; my $weight=$und+$comma; if ($weight > 3) {$counter++;print "Sentence possibly too long, weight $weight.\n$sentence\n\n"}; }

Die regulären Ausdrücke (regular expressions) zählen die Übeltäter. Der Rest ist Perl 101 :)

Lingua::DE::Sentence – search.cpan.org

Menthonnex-en-Bornes – genevainformation::pictures

2010-02-02T08:33:40+00:00

Menthonnex-en-Bornes – genevainformation::pictures.

I tried the new smart collection feature of smugmug and created a gallery for the place I live in.

Looks as if the smart collection will allow me to create “location”-based base galleries and then “feature”-based collections to show some pictures based on a specific point of view.

How do you organize 50.000 Pictures?

2010-02-02T07:48:11+00:00

To be honest, I don’t know the answer. I bought a shiny little 500 GB Hard drive recently and copied all photos I have in digital format on it. Then I fired off Adobe’s Lightroom and started to add all the pictures to my catalog. I went to work and gave it a day to finish that job. When I came back, my catalog was at around 50k files. Wow.

Ok, there are some double entries, but few – Lightroom is holding an index and probably hashes the pictures, so there are really very few redundant pics in the catalog.

But what do I do now? I started to sight them, first – right now I’m at picture 35′000 or so (duh, there’s some crap, but as well some very good ones). As a next step I will likely start to rate (will probably take a day or two), select the best. At the end, I will probably create a big (really big) photo book as a catalog on paper – blurb goes up to 440 Pages (in large landscape format).

440 Pages means that if I put 4 pictures per page, I can handle 1720 photos..and they still can be viewed. That should probably be a fair selection (knowing that I did not delete as merciless in my early days as I delete today)..but still huge ;)

This Week in OpenNMS: Strategies and New Looks

2010-02-01T21:50:37+00:00

It's time for This Week in OpenNMS. In the last few weeks, we've been busy with a number of projects, including a funky multiplexing RRD strategy, a rework of our remote poller code, an upgrade to GWT 2.0, and a number of bug fixes.

Project Updates

Stable: Current Release is 1.6.8

1.6.8 is the current stable release, tagged December 10th. It adds a few small features and fixes a few bugs, as well as adding a new web-based "easy installer" UI. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.8 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.8.
Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.8

1.7.8 is the current unstable release, tagged December 8th. Since 1.7.7, there have been quite a few bug fixes. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
Unstable: Reporting

Jason Aras and Jonathan both are in the final stages of getting their reporting branches ready for release.
Unstable: MultiOutputRrdStrategy

Seth has been working on an RRD strategy which will let you write performance data to RRDs as well as a TCP socket, using the Google protobuf format.
Unstable: Remote Poller Updates

The remote poller has gone through a number of changes in the last few weeks. First of all, the build system has been cleaned up to no longer have intermittent issues with unsigned artifacts. Second, the remote poller code no longer requires RMI to phone home to the OpenNMS server, it can now do so over HTTP instead. Support for this still needs to be added to the webstart version of the remote poller, but the command-line jar can do this in current 1.7 snapshots.
Unstable: Dashboard Upgraded to GWT 2.0

The dashboard has been updated to use GWT 2.0, which should provide more speed and better browser support.

New OpenNMS.com Site Live

While this newsletter is primarily about the project, and not the commercial OpenNMS company, I wanted to add a quick note about the new OpenNMS.com web site, which is purty and has all kinds of enterprise-y features like "case studies" and "graphics." Crazy, I know. ;)

Upcoming Events

February 11th, 2010: Benjamin Reed will be shaving his head for charity at a Carolina Hurricanes game. Totally off-topic, but you can look forward to amusing pictures.
February 19th-21st, 2010: OpenNMS will be attending the Southern California Linux Expo. Additionally, Tarus Balog will be the keynote speaker.
May 6th-7th, 2010: The second annual OpenNMS Users Conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany, thanks again to Nethinks. The call for papers ends January 31st, if you are interested in presenting.

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

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 warm winter hats you'd like to share, don't hesitiate to say hi.

Marketing and the New OpenNMS Group Website

2010-02-01T14:51:29+00:00

Last year was a pivotal year for the OpenNMS Group. In addition to having our five year anniversary, we finally hit a critical mass of customers that found us with some discretionary income. We used most of it to hire new people, but we felt it was time to actually spend some money on marketing OpenNMS.

In the past I’ve had a personal distaste for marketing. I always saw it as, well, something close to lying. For example, in my last post I talked about a company claiming its web site is “the epicenter of all open source projects that relate to IT monitoring” when it clearly is not.

But that is par for the course for many companies. They don’t have a story to tell so they have to make one up, or at least embellish the news they have. This is because their ultimate goal is to be purchased by a large company, preferably in a short amount of time, and so they have to seem bigger and more popular than they really are. Hence the emphasis on downloads and web site registrations, etc.

I count our success based on happy customers and money in the bank.

To me, a project is more successful that has 50 people who find it valuable versus one million who download it and never use it.

Our mission statement of “Help Customers, Have Fun, Make Money” has produced happy customers, and we’d like to have more. Specifically, we’d like to have more customers for whom OpenNMS is a great solution. As a services company it does us no good to have a client that is a poor fit. We just end up working harder for a client who can’t be made happy. We want to focus on getting the word out about the value of using OpenNMS to those people who most need it.

Enter marketing – a way to focus on introducing the value of our services to those who would truly value it.

Last year I hired two people to help us come up with (gulp) a marketing strategy. I am lucky in that they have turned out to be amazing.

The first was Phil Marsosudiro. I’ve known Phil for over 25 years. We met in high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. NCSSM is a two-year public residential high school for students to focus on mathematics and the sciences at a level not normally available in a public school environment. It was a great experience, and I met some amazing people – Phil being one of them.

Phil and I share the same philosophy when it comes to business. The idea is not to take as much money as you can, as fast as you can, from customers, but to instead create value for them that allows both parties to make money.

He brought Margaret Gifford to our team. Margaret is the first “real” public relations person I have ever worked with, and I am surprised someone of her background happened to be local. She’s been a Senior VP at Ogilvy and worked in corporate communications at Hewlett-Packard, among other things.

Together, they are a marketing dream team.

Since neither of them had a background in open source software, I had to tell them about our business. It was harder than I thought. When you work day in and day out in a particular field, you start making assumptions about what people know. To me using open source software is a no-brainer, but to the majority it is still somewhat of an unknown. Going through the exercise of explaining what we do and why it is valuable to people outside of the field was enlightening.

The first thing we focused on was why the heck would anyone need network management in the first place, much less open source network management. This literally took a couple of weeks.

What we came up with is that network management is a lot like maintaining an automobile. If you buy a brand new car and do little maintenance, it will run fine – for awhile. But without oil changes, new filters and keeping it clean it won’t last nearly as long as it could, and the investment made in buying a new car will yield a lot less than it should.

It’s the same way with computer hardware and software. Companies, at least successful ones, invest in information technology in order to provide some sort of productivity gains that should translate to the bottom line. But unless they have management, it is almost impossible to tell if it is providing value, and without the ability to tune it and detect problems, one can be sure any positive value will be less than what it could be.

Which is why they need OpenNMS. In Phil and Margaret’s words, the OpenNMS Group is there to “Get the Network to Work™”.

I know it sounds a little “sales-y” but that is at the heart of what we do. Papa John’s isn’t in the business of buying servers or building a website – they are in the business of providing quality food to their customers as quickly and easily as possible. The servers and the websites are there to enable that, but they aren’t the reason the company exists.

The next hurdle was to be able to tell people why an open source solution like OpenNMS was better than commercial software. I’ve known for years that OpenNMS was more powerful, scalable and flexible than things like Unicenter, Tivoli and OpenView, but how to get that across to people who haven’t “walked the path”?

Now a lesser marketing person would just put words up on the website claiming to be better. I could imagine seeing something like:

OpenNMS can expedite virtual paradigms and benchmark mission-critical technologies in order to grow ubiquitous solutions and visualize visionary experiences with the final goal to repurpose value-added experiences and harness magnetic relationships.

(I had help with that)

I hate stuff like this. Instead, Margaret insisted that the reasons to use OpenNMS and the OpenNMS Group should come from the people who use it and find it valuable, and not from the people who make it.

After months of hard work, I’d like to present the new OpenNMS Group website. While there is a lot of text describing what we do, the emphasis is on the stories from our customers. At launch we have been able to get two case studies approved, with many more in process.

The first is from New Edge Networks. If I had to pick a company that shared our dedication to helping customers and having fun doing it, New Edge would be at the top of the list. I’ve been able to watch them grow over the years, and OpenNMS has been able to grow along with it. In their environment, OpenNMS gathers data which is presented directly to their end users. At the moment this means data collection on over 160,000 interfaces. This is something that the most expensive commercial products would have trouble doing.

The second is Papa John’s Pizza. They were the first company to allow on-line ordering at 100% of their US stores, and OpenNMS makes sure that billion dollar business is working smoothly. We are now working on a project to extend that to manage all of their 3,400 stores worldwide and not just the data center.

But enough talking from me – read about it in their own words. These are the people that we help, have fun with and together we make money. We want to meet more.

Shouldn’t that really be the role of marketing?

Winter, Sun and Snow

2010-01-31T19:11:38+00:00

74 – Haute Savoie – genevainformation::pictures

Winter is only “real” if there’s snow and sun. That’s what makes it up and what creates the “oh, wow” when you walk across the fields behind our house.

I’ve taken this picture before (but not with this camera, which makes a good excuse for repeating myself):

When we walked today I saw the paths the kids created with their sledges and the footprints of the animals. The landscape seems to be in a standstill with the solid snow coverage, but that impression does not match reality. There’s plenty of activity above and below the snow cover.

MonitoringForge Redux

2010-01-30T00:09:18+00:00

A few months ago I blogged about a new site called “MonitoringForge.org“. It seemed to me to be a thinly veiled marketing attempt with little value, but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and time would tell.

Well, I was reading Coté’s blog today and read a link where they created a press release to trumpet their 2,000th registered member.

This struck me as funny because, in the same sentence, they state that there are “more than 2,000 projects” registered on the site.

Wah?

So, if only one unique member of each project on their site registered, there should be more than 2,000 of them, yet they have less than that, and this is considered news? Heck, we have nearly 1300 people on the opennms discussion list and we’re just one project, but with their site running at an average of less than one person per project I guess we’re doing pretty well. And while I’m sure that 80 or so of our subscribers are directly working on OpenNMS, that still leaves about 1200 end users.

I’ll leave the similar calculation for MonitoringForge as an exercise for the reader.

(sigh)

Now I’m not one to beat a dead horse, but when the “Chief Marketing Officer” is willing to issue a press release on a site she calls “the epicenter of all open source projects that relate to IT monitoring” with such, in my humble opinion, lame numbers, I’m willing to stand by my original impression that this is just a marketing ploy.

Am I wrong? Can anyone comment who found the site valuable? Inquiring minds want to know.

For A Good Cause, Shave Here

2010-01-29T22:19:06+00:00

For the first time, I am participating in a St. Baldrick's event for cancer research. It's a great cause; I have family members and friends who are either battling with cancer, or are themselves survivors.

My goal is to reach $1000 in donations towards cancer research through the St. Baldrick's Foundation. If there's anything you can do to help, I would very much appreciate it, and there are many others out there who can benefit from your help.

Donate Here!

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We’re Going The Distance

2010-01-29T14:01:52+00:00

Today, the OpenNMS Group joined the ranks of other huge, profitable multi-national companies.

We got us a race car.

My friend Jason Tower has finally decided to get serious about driving, and he’s put together a Spec E30 race car. We were happy to sponsor him and we got the hood spot.

I really like the philosophy behind “specified” racing classes. The rules only allow for a limited number of modifications from stock, so while the car will always play a part in racing success, it is much more about the skills of the driver.

There is an analogy here with commercial vs. open source software. It used to be that just getting started as a software company required a lot of money. At a minimum you had to at least buy a compiler, if not expensive hardware on which to use it. This is similar to Formula 1 or NASCAR where teams require millions just to show up on race day, and the more money you have can directly relate to how successful you are.

Not so with Spec racing. Here all of the drivers are on equal footing and success is measured on merit, not how much money you have.

Open source has helped level the playing field. While having lots of money rarely hurts, today’s market is much more open. A group of people with great ideas and a good product can compete against much larger companies – and often win.

Now the pressure is on Jason – he’d better win. (grin)

UPDATE: This weekend’s race has been cancelled due to the snow storm (sigh).

Red Hat Launches opensource.com

2010-01-28T15:48:44+00:00

The domain name opensource.org is owned by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but Red Hat owns opensource.com. In talking to friends of mine involved with the OSI, people have been wondering what Red Hat will do with it.

Now we know. Today they announced that opensource.com has been launched with a new site.

It looks pretty slick and is worth a poke around. As someone who holds open source concepts near and dear to my heart, I am always eager to see how they are promoted. After all, we did register fauxpensource.com as a reaction to the dilution of the term “open source” but at first glance I’m pretty happy with what I see on the new site. Now if I could just find some time to participate.

To reheat, set the oven at 350F …

2010-01-28T02:48:34+00:00

At OpenNMS we are thankful that we have clients who believe in us and use our services. As a result, we also try to buy from them when we can. Our shirts come from Lands End (since Sears is a client). I always request a USA Today paper when I travel, since they’ve been using OpenNMS for years.

And we luvs us some Papa John’s pizza.

We’ve had three guys up to PJI headquarters in Louisville working on OpenNMS, but I’m the only one who missed out on a tour of the dough room (sigh). I did get to see the famous Camaro that you’ll see featured in some of the ads.

Anyway, this week is a training week, and I am in charge of getting all of the students fed at lunchtime. We don’t have a Papa John’s in town, but Phil was coming down through Chapel Hill and offered to pick up some pies.

Lucky Ihenyen at the Chapel Hill Papa John’s

I love training week, but man does it take a lot out of me. Yes, even I have a problem talking for eight hours straight. We have eight people in training, which is just one shy of our maximum of nine (we keep our classes small on purpose) so it has been a lot of fun with lots of great questions.

We have two guys up from Honduras, two over from Seattle, two down from Ottawa, one guy from Atlanta and a new hire who is local.

Everyone seemed to like the pizza, and it was fun ordering it on the web especially knowing that OpenNMS was insuring the service was working (and of course, it went flawlessly).

Remember – never re-heat pizza in a microwave as it will destroy the crust. Place it in a hot oven (350F) and wait until the cheese just starts to bubble.

Yum.

I can’t wait for the Super Bowl, as my party will be catered by Papa John’s (grin).

Confluence

2010-01-25T21:18:30+00:00

Atlassian is right now giving away licenses for their products for $10 each. For $10 you get a 10-User Jira, Bamboo, Crowd, whatever and Confluence license.

I’ve been a long-term confluence user and came to appreciate the quality, functionality and style of the software. If you’re looking into running a wiki or collaboration platform for your team/company, it’s probably the best choice (if you have a choice).

My confluence is available here Home – Public – Confluence don’t get seasick though ;)

SCaLE Schedule Published

2010-01-25T12:11:17+00:00

This just in from Gareth:

The schedule of weekend talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized and are posted on the SCALE web site at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org. The topics are interesting and wide-ranging – check them out! The schedule for the Friday specialty sessions (OSSIE, WIOS and the Try-It Lab) will be posted in the next week.

Looks like I have the Sunday morning keynote.

KDE4 Progress

2010-01-22T19:58:38+00:00

I've been making good progress on getting KDE 4.4 (release candidates) working. It's been quite an interesting ride, in both a good and bad way. =)

First, there's the fun of 10.6 making it even harder to have code that forks without it accidentally exploding on the CoreFoundation fork-without-exec prohibition. I was able to solve this with a combination of fixes from macports' kdelibs4, and some of my own code which changes things to use low-level POSIX APIs instead of Qt APIs for some bounds-checking before execution.

Next, there's the fun of Phonon. KDE 4.4 requires a newer version of Phonon than what ships with Qt (even Qt 4.6). On OSX it gets even hinkier, since the QuickTime plugin for Phonon requires private Qt headers, so the only sane way to build it is to build the Phonon included with Qt, rather than building it as a separate project.

I ended up adapting a patch the Kubuntu folks use to inject a modern Phonon into Qt 4.6. In the process, I finally got around to learning my way around Git (and gitorious), and have set up my own Qt branch which includes my (binary incompatible outside of Fink) patch to Qt to fix plugin-building, Phonon from kdesupport, the kde-qt (formerly qt-copy) changes, and my patches to Qt that splits OSX into two platforms, Q_OS_DARWIN (i.e. use raw UNIX APIs, no Core*), and Q_OS_MAC (standard Qt/Mac).

Long story short, I'm getting there. I've gotten about half of KDE 4.4 RC1 built and apparently running reasonably. RC2 was just released to packagers, and I'm testing out my move to Qt 4.6.1 from 4.6.0, but once I get everything test-built on 10.6, I'll go validate everything on 10.4 and 10.5 (including making some DBus fixes for 10.4).

After that, the next thing to tackle is Mono, and then eventually I'll see if I can get KDE3 building/working on 10.6.

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(Payam Minoofar on Feb 1, 2010 12:44 PM) I would like to let you know that your efforts are greatly appreciated. I will be donating to your charity shortly. I hope the value that you are providing to the community is returned upon you tenfold.

Highlevel

2010-01-22T15:56:47+00:00

A friend called me up and asked me a quite high-level question about the architecture of network zones..I give a high-level, out-of-the-book reply but can’t really get over the feeling that I just indirectly kicked somebodies butt.

Fribourg – Brouillard, soleil..

2010-01-21T19:34:57+00:00

Fribourg – genevainformation::pictures.

I absolutely dig the view from our offices :)

This Week in OpenNMS: Resolutions

2010-01-19T17:21:27+00:00

It's time for This Week (Month?) in OpenNMS. In the last month, we've been pretty busy on a number of projects, including reporting and maps. My new year's resolution is to get back on track writing TWiO regularly. =)

Project Updates

Stable: Current Release is 1.6.8

1.6.8 is the current stable release, tagged December 10th. It adds a few small features and fixes a few bugs, as well as adding a new web-based "easy installer" UI. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.8 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.8.
Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.8

1.7.8 is the current unstable release, tagged December 8th. Since 1.7.7, there have been quite a few bug fixes. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
Unstable: Reporting

Jason Aras continued his work on a dynamic reporting engine. Additionally, Jonathan Sartin has been working on the reporting scheduling daemon some more. See below for more on Jonathan's work.
Unstable: Lots of Updates

I've been slack in doing TWiO, and there's been a ton of work going on in unstable since the last post.

Git Move Complete!

The move to Git is complete, and went pretty smoothly. SVN has been marked as read-only, and the new Git repository is available through http://opennms.git.sourceforge.net/ (which provides a web interface).

Full instructions on working with the git repository are available in the OpenNMS wiki.

Reporting API

Jonathan has finished up his work on the report scheduling API, and is ready for code review. Here's what he wrote to me about this new feature:

I have just about completed the initial work on feature-report-api. Features of this branch are:

The old availability reports can now be run on demand (as they always have been), or scheduled to run in the future (no more messing around with cron jobs outside of OpenNMS). You can save these reports as well as mail them, and they can be downloaded on demand.

There is an API in place now that should allow other report engines to use the framework that we've written (it was designed with BIRT and Jasper in mind).

The beginnings of a unified XML config are there to allow report parameters to be entered via the webUI when the report is run (it only accepts integer, string and date parameters at the moment). Multiple report xsl can used to simultaneously support multiple languages.

Next steps are to move the old reports into a new project that reflects the amended structure, and further tidying up of the old code. Demands on my time permitting, this should be in an unstable release soon.

Upcoming Events

January 25th-29th, 2010: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.
February 19th-21st, 2010: OpenNMS will be attending the Southern California Linux Expo. Additionally, Tarus Balog will be the keynote speaker.
May 6th-7th, 2010: The second annual OpenNMS Users Conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany, thanks again to Nethinks. The call for papers ends January 31st, if you are interested in presenting.

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

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 UFO evidence that explains my loss of time you'd like to share, don't hesitiate to say hi.

OpenNMS and Prowl

2010-01-17T10:42:35+00:00

I just added a section on how to set up Prowl and OpenNMS in the book. The last time I configured something in OpenNMS is a bit away as I’m not using it for production business anymore (though I do have a live instance running), but within an hour or so the integration worked. Probably less if I would not have been chatting in the meantime :)

Prowl Notifications are now one option for my OpenNMS to tell me about bad things (such as if the power at home goes off).

Why We Do What We Do

2010-01-15T15:46:31+00:00

“There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all of your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.”

- Dr. Joe Vigil, quoted in Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

I am reading a book David loaned me called Born to Run. It discusses the Tarahumara people who live in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. The book focuses on the fact that these people can run hundreds of miles without stopping or getting hurt (I also found it interesting that their economy is based, in part, on the trading of favors).

In trying to determine why these people can run so far so fast, it appears that the main reason is that, quite simply, they like to do it.

When I was younger I kept hearing from older people “choose something you like to do for a career” and I kind of ignored them. I wanted money, so I was going to choose the career that provided the best path to financial security.

It was only later that I lucked into doing something that I loved. When I became the OpenNMS admin in 2002, I went from a solid six figure salary to sometimes earning $300 a month. That was way less than minimum wage (and was offset by better months), but at least I enjoyed the work. We made adjustments to our expenses and I was surprised to find that at the end of the first year I had spend only $5000 out of savings.

Things took off from there, and I managed to attract amazing people who also loved what they were doing. We decided on a mission statement of “Help Customers – Have Fun – Make Money” with the emphasis on the first two. The money showed up. While all of us could make higher salaries in a more traditional job, we are content for now to use our profits to build a better company, since that increases our ability to both help customers and have fun doing it.

I can remember bringing up open source software on the OpenView Forum mailing list many years ago and being called a communist. I am far from it, although communist and community do share the same root (and I am very interested in the latter). I just want to create an environment where people are rewarded for doing good work, and the best way to get good work is to find people who enjoy and even look forward to doing it.

Ultimately, I think this is the best way to make money. Provide value and you will become valuable.

I end every employment offer letter I make with the same sentence. It has nothing to do with money or even network management, but it distills into five words why I get out of bed in the morning: Let’s go do great things.

“Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry” – Mark Twain

Pwr out

2010-01-15T14:33:24+00:00

Well, a couple of hours after taking the nice picture of the snow falling, our power went out. And did not come back until this afternoon. 10.9.0.1 is the tunnel I’m running between my servers, I use that to collect data via snmp from the machine which is standing in the livingroom.

Snow

2010-01-14T23:05:39+00:00

74 – Haute Savoie – genevainformation::pictures.

Touch and go

2010-01-14T12:52:07+00:00

Seems that this is the first trip to germany I took for a long time which did not leave the feeling of deep fulfillment to not live abroad. Might be it was the environments as well – I had an excellent opportunity to learn about how others do a business of a similar style than ours, and when I visited my old colleagues from epost I literally felt as if I had just walked out of the door and came back. Sure, things changed, a lot, but the atmosphere and a lot of people are still the same. And that was nine years ago, that I left that office. You rock :)

And to top it all off, even the security staff at Düsseldorf Airport was friendly..I am still contemplating whether this was a spiel or if they were for real like that (my tip: If you need to take a flight, do it in the off-hours..around noon, everybody is so bored that they become friendly out of boredom ;).

Upcoming OpenNMS Events

2010-01-13T20:50:13+00:00

The new year has been no less hectic than the old one, which is actually a good thing, I guess.

Yesterday was my 44th birthday. It was pretty much just another birthday, with the only somewhat interesting thing is that now my age starts and ends with the same numeral. It is also the cost in US cents for a first class postage stamp (which has been the case with my age since 1998).

Anyway, I did get a delightful and unexpected present. The gang at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) issued a press release announcing that I have been named one of the two keynote speakers for the conference in February.

This is pretty cool, and I am both honored and humbled by their decision. I will be presenting a talk about what it is like to start and run a business based on open source software. One reason I write this blog is to both inform, and perhaps inspire, others to take the risk and start their own business, and to be able to talk about this in front of the SCaLE attendees is pretty exciting. It has been one of my favorite shows since we first attended. OpenNMS will also have a booth where you can see the latest stuff we are working on, as well as to meet some of the folks from the community.

This will be my first ever keynote, if you don’t count last year’s inaugural OpenNMS Users Conference in Frankfurt, and speaking of that, we had so much success last year that we are doing again. The 2010 Users Conference will be back in Frankfurt, and we’ve extended it to two days to include a day of workshops. Nethinks is once again a major sponsor along with the OpenNMS Group, and we will hold it on 6-7 May. If you are interested in being a sponsor, please drop me a note.

We’ve had a great response to our Call for Papers, but if you are interested in presenting, there is still time as it doesn’t close until 31 January. Accepted speakers will receive two nights in the hotel and all meals, but you will be responsible for getting there. We are looking for both presentations on any aspect of OpenNMS as well as workshops.

I’ll post more information on attending once we’ve settled on the agenda.

Finally, we’ve added new training dates in April (the January training is booked). If you are finding OpenNMS a little daunting, consider coming to metropolitan Pittsboro for one of our training courses. They’re useful and a whole lot of fun.

Health Savings Accounts

2010-01-12T22:29:08+00:00

Note: My one reader outside of the US might have issues understanding the “purchase” of health care insurance and should probably skip this post.

I can remember how happy we were in March of 2005 to finally be able to offer health care as a benefit.

The OpenNMS Group is a company focused on the happiness of its employees since they are responsible for all of our revenue, and we don’t want anyone worrying about being sick or whether or not they should go to the doctor. We cover 100% of the employee’s insurance premium: medical, dental, disability, etc.

There is also the benefit of having a group plan so that the premiums for family plans (which we don’t cover) can come out of pre-tax dollars.

This has worked fine for over five years, and I’ve been happy with our provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Well, as happy as one can expect to be when dealing with an insurance company (I’m also happy with our lawyer, if you can believe that).

However, this year our premiums went up nearly 27%. This is more than twice what we usually see and it was strange since no one hit an age barrier (30-34, 35-39, 40-44, etc.) or had (as far as I know) a catastrophic illness. Think about it – the premiums would double every four years if this was a constant rate.

That’s about as bad as some of those open core license fees (grin).

Anyway, our options were to either pay more, consider having the employee shoulder some of the burden, or change plans. All of which are a bit of a pain.

But then our broker suggested a Health Savings Account (HSA) combined with a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP).

An HSA is basically a savings plan, similar to a 401(k) retirement plan, that can only be used for health expenses. The HDHP is similar to a standard health plan with one main catch – no co-payments. This means if you go to the doctor, you play the insurance company’s negotiated rate in full. The same thing goes for prescription drugs. You pay everything up to the deductible, and then after that the insurance company covers 100% (or possibly less, but we’re looking at a 100% plan).

The HDHP premiums can be significantly less than the “normal” premiums.

The way this is supposed to work is the higher deductible means lower premiums, for both the company’s individual coverage and the employee’s family coverage. Both the company and the employee can fund the HSA, and the goal would be to put enough in the HSA to cover the deductible.

For example: supposed you have an HDHP with a $2500 deductible for an individual, and the company puts in $200 a month toward that account for $2400 a year. Any expenses up to $2400 are paid for, and the employee would only be responsible for the last $100 up to the deductible. Any expenses after that are fully covered.

Better yet, say you use only $500 of it, then there’d be $1900 left over for the future. And, while it isn’t much these days, these accounts can earn interest.

With families it is a little different, as the deductible tends to be doubled. In this case, the added savings of having a reduced premium can be applied to the HSA to cover that difference.

My favorite part is that there is nothing preventing you from contributing just the amount of your expenses to the HSA at the end of the year and immediately withdrawing it, tax free.

In the short term, an HSA that is funded by the company does not save much, if any, money for the company. But over time, as premiums increase, it could be possible to raise the deductible so that eventually it does, or is at least at parity.

The (small “L”) libertarian in me loves the idea. I like the fact that people can use as much or as little healthcare as they choose. Plus, any funds that have been accrued can be taken out at retirement age similar to an IRA (and also, hardship withdrawals with tax penalties are also available).

We’re still investigating whether this option is for us, but my current take on it is that most of the guys are for it.

Having a decent healthcare plan is important for any business in the United States, so I thought I’d share.

Last reminders of christmas

2010-01-10T20:00:07+00:00

74 – Haute Savoie – genevainformation::pictures.

Rackwatch and OpenNMS

2010-01-10T18:06:21+00:00

One of my favorite clients is Rackspace Managed Hosting. They have been using OpenNMS since 2002, and they were either our second or third official customer (I can’t remember if they came before or after NASA), and I’m happy to say that they are still a client.

We like to describe OpenNMS as a network management application platform, and what that means is that it is easy to integrate OpenNMS into other systems to build a custom and unique management solution. In the case of Rackwatch, OpenNMS is integrated into an internal Rackspace system called CORE (CORE Objects Reused Everywhere).

We have a server hosted at Rackspace which we, of course, monitor with OpenNMS. This morning I got an e-mail from our OpenNMS system:

Subject: Notice #19845: HTTP down on 10.1.1.1 (10.1.1.1) on node server.opennms.org.
Date: January 10, 2010 7:46:07 AM EST
To: Tarus Balog

The HTTP service poll on interface 10.1.1.1 (10.1.1.1) on node server.opennms.org failed at Sunday, January 10, 2010 7:38:56 AM EST.

What I though was cool was that at approximately the same time I got an e-mail from Rackspace:

From: support@rackspace.com
Subject: Created Rackspace Ticket #100110-01016: Service Down: Webport (Computer #40906)
Date: January 10, 2010 7:39:59 AM EST
To: Tarus Balog

Dear Tarus Balog,

The following support ticket has been created:

Ticket #: 100110-01016
Subject: Service Down: Webport (Computer #40906)
Status: Confirm Solved
Account #: 14290 (Sortova Consulting Group)
Date: 01/10/2010 6:39am CDT
Comment:
————————————————————————

The Rackwatch monitoring system was unable to reach the
Webport service on computer #40906.
It may be down.
————————————————————————

Note the times of the notices were nearly identical, although this is more of a coincidence since our polling rate it set at 5 minutes (I believe Rackwatch is more frequent).

I just thought it was cool to actually experience OpenNMS in action at such a large company (we have instances of OpenNMS running in all nine data centers as part of the Rackwatch application).

Anyway, this notice allowed me to fix an issue with the Apache config on that server, and I dutifully got “resolved” messages from both Rackwatch and our own internal instance of OpenNMS when it was detected as being back up.

Sometimes you get so caught up in the internal issues with running a project that you forget that people actually use it, and it is nice to think that we play some small role in helping Rackspace provide fanatical service to their tens of thousands of customers.

Freiburg im Breisgau

2010-01-10T11:46:23+00:00

Freiburg im Breisgau – genevainformation::pictures.

When we came back from northern germany we staid in Freiburg/Breisgau – often mixed up with Freiburg/Switzerland where I work.

The funny thing is that the cities have more similarities, I think, than just the name. Both are very old, with a charming old town, and even some of the places in the cities carry the same names.

We staid only one night, only in the dark, but I think of coming back.

More on Copyright Assignment

2010-01-08T21:09:50+00:00

A couple of days ago I saw a post by Dana Blankenhorn continuing the discussion of copyright assignment in open source. He pointed to a piece by Michael Meeks that he describes as:

This may be one of the most important papers on open source since The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It is well worth your time to read it in full.

With a comment like that, how could I not read it?

The main driver for a lot of this discussion is the impending acquisition of Sun, and thus MySQL, by Oracle. MySQL had a policy that any code contributed to the project required that the author assign the copyright to to the MySQL corporation. This gave them full control over the application, including the ability to publish it under different licenses.

The problem I foresaw with this was that some contributors would be reluctant assign copyright, and thus community contribution to MySQL would be lessened. This really didn’t seem to affect MySQL at all, and the fact that they “owned” 100% of the code definitely helped them get bought for US$1 billion by Sun. Their ability to generate revenue from that code was also responsible for their rapid growth and in a large part helped make the MySQL database what it is.

But now that MySQL looks destined to be owned by Oracle, people are worried that Oracle won’t put much energy into the project. MySQL was designed to be a replacement for Oracle’s bread and butter products, so it is obvious that as the new owner, Oracle won’t be working too hard to put itself out of business, thus the only real question is how much less effort will be put into MySQL. Since MySQL was published under the GPL, it would be very hard for another company to commercialize it, which will limit the chances that a well funded fork could be created. MySQL’s future growth looks pretty small, or at least much smaller than it could have been under a different owner.

Because of this, one of the MySQL founders, Monty Widenius, has even started a petition to prevent the sale by appealing to the EU.

Now I’ve had a couple of e-mail exchanges with Monty and I found him to be a very friendly and nice guy, but I’m a little puzzled by his actions. One can only assume that as a founder of MySQL he made quite a bit of money on the sale of the company, and that he was also instrumental in creating the company that eventually was sold. Thus his decisions led directly to this predicament. It seems to me, well, “wrong” to accept VC money, have a record breaking buy-out and then want things back the way they were, so I have little sympathy for this effort. Perhaps instead of trying to block the sale via legal channels he would be better off forming a foundation to try and purchase MySQL back from Oracle and then he could make it as free as he wanted.

Anyway, had MySQL been licensed under a more permissive license, or had contributors not assigned copyright, it would make it much easier for a third party to step in and commercialize a fork. I responded to some of Brian Aker’s comments on the subject a few weeks ago, and now I thought it’d be fun to examine those of Michael Meeks.

The two main points I took away from Michael’s paper were that copyright assignment should be avoided, and that one should use a permissive license. This is in order to build “a social environment built for the common good”.

I can’t really disagree with his conclusions. I believe that, yes, if one wants “a diverse, and thriving developer community” creating software with the most freedom is important. But it is based on one of the biggest flaws and misconceptions about open source, which is that simply by being open source thousands of qualified people will give up nights and weekends to work on your project.

I would never base any business plan on altruism. In fact, I don’t think it exists, at least on a large scale. People are selfish, and they do things in order to bring themselves personal gratification. The trick is to align those things that benefit individuals with those that benefit the group.

In many cases the ideas that Michael describes work. If you take a look at some of the successful open source projects, the end users are also developers (Spring, JBoss and to a lesser extent MySQL). The product that is sold is usually built using the open source tools, but it is not the tool itself. Thus having permissive licenses can make this very beneficial for all involved, since they are then free to commercialize the final product as they see fit.

But what happens when the project is aimed at end users and not developers? Take OpenNMS for example: our end users are network and system administrators, not Java coders. The project is the product. In order to develop this software, someone has to write it, and the most qualified coders tend to have things like mortgages, car payments and other needs that require money. It’s fine to preach altruism when you work for a large company like Novell or Sun, but what about small companies that are dedicated to open source? How can they make money and protect their work, while still remaining true to open source ideals?

In my own experience with OpenNMS we had a company that took our project, made some changes to it and distributed it in violation of the license. They had raised several million dollars in VC money and thus were able to hire the resources necessary to rapidly advance the application, and they claim to have made millions more selling, ultimately, the work of our community.

Had OpenNMS been published under a permissive license, this would have been perfectly legal. Thus the work of a small but dedicated group of people could have easily been commercialized by a larger company with more money. But since OpenNMS is published under the GPL this was not permitted, so we decided to pursue legal action.

The first thing you learn is that you are on your own. No one really cares that someone is abusing an open source license, especially if the code being stolen is maintained by a commercial institution. Luckily we were in a position to afford to hire a legal team.

Then we hit the second hurdle. At the time no single entity held copyright to the OpenNMS code. All code up until version 1.0 was held by Raritan (which had bought the assets of Oculan after they went out of business) and most of the remaining code was held by the OpenNMS Group. The company in question claimed that if it was using the code in violation of the license, it was only the code for which Raritan owned the copyright, and thus we had no recourse, as only the copyright holder can enforce the license.

It took us a year working with Raritan before they could join us in pursuing this company, and in that time the company ripping off our community’s work tried to clean up their act by releasing a fork of OpenNMS. While I can’t see how that fork would absolve them of their licensing issues (OpenNMS is a Java program published without the classpath exception, so simply importing OpenNMS classes is the creation of a derivative work under the GPL and there is no way this forked code could have been used without importing those classes) it did muddy the water quite a bit. I also found out that the legal system in the United States is reluctant to award damages based on software that used to violate a license, even if that software was sold for large amounts of money.

Before we could pursue it much farther, that company closed its doors. Whether our actions had anything to do with it, I don’t know, but part of me likes to think that there were some consequences for the theft of our code. But we did get a benefit: Raritan was willing to sell us the copyright to the code we didn’t own. It wasn’t cheap (two houses had to be mortgaged to cover the cost of the loan) but it was fair.

Once we purchased the copyright to the 1.0 code, all that remained for us to be able to defend OpenNMS from cases like this in the future was to reach some sort of agreement concerning copyright with the 40 or so contributors to OpenNMS since 1.0. Copyright assignment seemed to be the best way to go, but it didn’t seem fair to me. For example, suppose a member of our community comes up with a cool algorithm for doing some task and they integrate that into OpenNMS. Copyright assignment would mean that they were giving away that work, and if they wanted to reuse it in the future they would have to license it back from us. While it is important for all of the OpenNMS code to have a single owner, that was not fair to, and definitely discourages contribution from, the original programmer.

Our solution came from an OGP member named DJ Gregor who suggested that we adopt the Sun Contributors Agreement (SCA). This introduces the concept of dual-ownership: the copyright is assigned to a third party yet the author also maintains copyright. While this has never been tested in court, I trust the Sun legal team that it will hold up. I was happy to see that this meets, somewhat, with Michael’s approval, as he mentions the SCA a number of times in his article.

Thus, based on my experiences with OpenNMS, for a small company trying to make it with a business based on open source software, I think restrictive licenses like the GPL are crucial, as is copyright assignment.

The key part of any community is trust, and open source communities are no different. We don’t have huge numbers of people outside of the company contributing code (heck, we tend to hire the most prolific coders) but we do have an active core of people that help keep the project moving forward. The way we’ve been able to maintain that is by promising that no matter how much OpenNMS grows or is packaged in the future, the source will always be 100% available under an open source license. This is a promise we maintain by doing all of our development publicly – even custom development projects have their own branches in our git repository.

And we truly do listen to our team (DJ’s suggestion of the SCA as a case in point) even if they aren’t employed by the commercial side of the project. They are empowered to help determine the direction of the OpenNMS even though they don’t work for the company.

I think it is easy to describe a utopian world where all software is free, especially when your paycheck doesn’t directly depend on revenue from that software, but for a company that wants to both generate revenue and remain 100% open source, some sense of ownership and control is necessary.

I agree with Dana that the article is definitely worth reading, although I’d stop short of comparing it to The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Also check out the links at the bottom of Michael’s post. It includes the aforementioned article by Brian Aker as well as a great one by Bradley Kuhn called “‘Open Core’ is the New Shareware“.

At OpenNMS we try to avoid the pitfalls of open core commercial software by publishing 100% of our work publicly, but that requires such things as a restrictive license and copyright assignment. As with any situation involving trust it takes time to build, but we hope to continue to earn it.

xkcd explained

2010-01-08T14:39:02+00:00

I fully understand that the non-unix-non-technical person will not find xkcd funny at all.

That’s why I thought about explaining xkcd. And while I started to think about how I possibly could explain this comic I realized how deep down in Unix you need to be to fully grasp the funny part here. Oh my, we’re lost!

Well, let me try like this: On a Unix system, users “log on”, as they do in windows. Only that real computers don’t have a graphical user interface but are used on the command line. If you want that experience in Windows, start “cmd.exe”. You’ll start something like a shell, well, actually it *is* a shell: A text-based, line-oriented interface to the computer. You type a command, the computer does it. You type the next one, the computer does it. And so on.

A shell is a program. A program is always executed by a user and attached to his “session”. A session can time out, but to prevent so you can use a program called screen. Screen will detach your program execution from your session.

Now, if the user starts screen, then a shell and disconnects, screen will make sure that your session stays alive and the program is still executed.

Over the last few lines of text I have been desperately trying to come up with a sensible analogy..so let me try this: If you go shopping and take a shopping cart you will take it empty and leave it empty. The shopping cart is your session, the products inside the programs you run. The normal process is that you go in, take a shopping cart. You fill it with products, take out products and so on. Latest when you go to the cashier, your shopping cart will be emptied completely. That’s your normal system log off – your session ends, all programs are terminated.

Screen is like a bag you put in your shopping cart. Once you have that bag in your cart, you can decide whether you want your stuff directly in the cart or in the bag which is in the cart. When you now need to leave the shop, you can do the following: Instead of either going to the cashier and pay or empty your shopping cart, you can leave the bag in the shop, go away, come back and pick it up again later.

All the complexity to leaving a bag full of groceries in a shop apply to screen as well – you can forget about it, the products can become stale or, if the shop closes down, someone will sweep out the bag you left behind (that’s a rule, bags can’t stay in the shop if it closes).

So the above comic refers to shopping bags left in the shop. The people who created them will never come back, but full of good memories, the shop owner will never close down because he knows that if he closes the shop, he will have to remove the bags. Instead he keeps the memory alive and passes by from time to time to look at the leftovers of human beings in his shop, represented by bags full of rotten grocery. Sort of.

xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe.

Monitoring Asterisk with OpenNMS

2010-01-07T21:47:05+00:00

Yesterday I saw this article, which lays out a recipe for basic Asterisk monitoring using Munin, in Matt Riddell’s daily Asterisk news. OpenNMS has included out-of-the-box support for Asterisk management for some time now, but the functionality is often hidden for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. This article provides a set of steps for switching it on.

You’ll need to be running Asterisk 1.4 or 1.6 (more statistics are available via SNMP in 1.6) and OpenNMS 1.6.8 or later (earlier versions have an SNMP data collection bug; there’s a workaround, but it’s better just to upgrade).

The Munin article uses a set of Perl scripts on the Asterisk server that execute commands directly on the Asterisk CLI, parse the output, and ship the resulting data back to Munin. We tend to do things a bit differently in OpenNMS; to borrow a quote from Bobby, one of our prime directives is “thou shalt not fork.” We also tend to prefer standards-track protocols (particularly SNMP) over ad-hoc ones. The first step, then, is to get Asterisk speaking SNMP. Many people are unaware that Asterisk has included a baked-in SNMP (sub)agent since the 1.4 releases; it’s not the easiest bit of Asterisk to get working properly, and I won’t even touch that topic here since somebody else has already done a good write-up on the process. The one point on which I will diverge from that article is on the recommendation of SNMPv3 with authentication and privacy enabled; while great for security and a very good idea in production, it’s much more straightforward to troubleshoot SNMPv2c while you’re getting the solution going.

If you’re able, from the OpenNMS server, to read values from the Asterisk MIB via the SNMP agent on the Asterisk server, then you’ve done everything right on the Asterisk server. You can check this using the snmpwalk command from the Net-SNMP tools:

opennms$ snmpwalk -v2c -c public 192.168.2.5 .1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.1
SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.22736.1.1.1.0 = STRING: "1.6.0.6"
SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.22736.1.1.2.0 = Gauge32: 999999

Or with the pure-Java SNMP4J library that OpenNMS uses:

opennms$ java -cp /opt/opennms/lib/snmp4j-1.9.3c.jar \
  org.snmp4j.tools.console.SnmpRequest \
  -v 2c -c public -Ow 192.168.2.5/161 .1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.1
Jan 7, 2010 2:17:34 PM org.snmp4j.log.JavaLogAdapter log
INFO: UDP receive buffer size for socket 192.168.23.73/0 is set to: 65507
1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.1.1.0 = 1.6.0.6
1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.1.2.0 = 999999

Total requests sent:    1
Total objects received: 2
Total walk time:        34 milliseconds

Add the Asterisk server to OpenNMS and verify in the OpenNMS web UI that the SNMP service shows up on one or more of the Asterisk server’s interfaces. If you see a populated SNMP Attributes box on the node’s detail page:

And if resource graphs for node-level and interface-level performance data are available:

Then you’re ready to proceed with configuring OpenNMS. We’ll be editing three files (that number will drop to two in OpenNMS 1.8). Of course you’ll be making backups of each file before you begin. Start with capsd-configuration.xml; the bolded lines are what you’ll be adding. If your file isn’t exactly like this one, just add these lines above the </capsd-configuration> at the bottom of the file.

  <protocol-plugin protocol=”Windows-Task-Scheduler” class-name=”org.opennms.netmgt.capsd.plugins.Win32ServicePlugin” scan=”on”>
    <property key=”timeout” value=”2000″ />
    <property key=”retry” value=”1″ />
    <property key=”service-name” value=”Task Scheduler” />
  </protocol-plugin>

  <protocol-plugin protocol=”Asterisk_SNMP” class-name=”org.opennms.netmgt.capsd.plugins.SnmpPlugin” scan=”on”>
    <property key=”vbname” value=”.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.1.1.0″ />
    <property key=”timeout” value=”2000″ />
    <property key=”retry” value=”1″ />
  </protocol-plugin>
</capsd-configuration>

The new protocol-plugin tells the OpenNMS capabilities scanner daemon, or Capsd, how to find a service called Asterisk_SNMP. We’ll use this as a marker service to get around the fact that most Asterisk servers return whatever sysObjectID their SNMP agent uses by default, thus identifying themselves as plain old Linux or FreeBSD or whatever kind of server they are but giving no immediate clue to their Asteriskness. This is the reason why the Asterisk management functionality is usually hidden.

Now we need to make an addition to collectd-configuration.xml. Again, add only the bolded lines, and if your file looks a bit different, add them between the last </package> line and the first <collector> line.

  <package name=”example1″>
    <filter>IPADDR != ‘0.0.0.0′</filter>
    <include-range begin=”1.1.1.1″ end=”254.254.254.254″/>

      <service name=”SNMP” interval=”300000″ user-defined=”false” status=”on”>
        <parameter key=”collection” value=”default”/>
        <parameter key=”thresholding-enabled” value=”true”/>
      </service>

    </package>

    <package name=”asterisk-servers”>
      <filter>IPADDR != ‘0.0.0.0′ & isAsterisk_SNMP</filter>
      <include-range begin=”1.1.1.1″ end=”254.254.254.254″/>

      <service name=”SNMP” interval=”300000″ user-defined=”false” status=”on”>
        <parameter key=”collection” value=”asterisk”/>
        <parameter key=”thresholding-enabled” value=”true”/>
      </service>

    </package>

    <collector service=”SNMP”         class-name=”org.opennms.netmgt.collectd.SnmpCollector”/>

  </collectd-configuration>

This new package tells OpenNMS’ SNMP collector that it will be collecting an additional set of metrics from all nodes that have the Asterisk_SNMP marker service on one of their interfaces.

Finally, we’ll define that extra set of Asterisk-specific metrics in datacollection-config.xml. Once again it’s only the bolded lines that we’ll be adding. If your file differs from the unbolded context provided below, just insert the new lines between the last </snmp-collection> line and the <datacollection-config> line at the bottom of the file.

      <systemDef name=”Riverbed Steelhead WAN Accelerators”>
        <sysoid>.1.3.6.1.4.1.17163.1.1</sysoid>
        <collect>
          <includeGroup>mib2-X-interfaces</includeGroup>
          <includeGroup>riverbed-steelhead-scalars</includeGroup>
          <includeGroup>riverbed-steelhead-cpu-stats</includeGroup>
          <includeGroup>riverbed-steelhead-port-bandwidth</includeGroup>
        </collect>
      </systemDef>

    </systems>
  </snmp-collection>

  <snmp-collection name=”asterisk” snmpStorageFlag=”select”>
    <rrd step=”300″>
      <rra>RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:2016</rra>
      <rra>RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:12:1488</rra>
      <rra>RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:288:366</rra>
      <rra>RRA:MAX:0.5:288:366</rra>
      <rra>RRA:MIN:0.5:288:366</rra>
    </rrd>
    <groups>
      <!– Asterisk (Digium) MIBs –>
      <group name=”asterisk-scalars” ifType=”ignore”>
        <mibObj oid=”.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.5.1″   instance=”0″ alias=”astNumChannels”      type=”gauge” />
        <mibObj oid=”.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.5.5.1″ instance=”0″ alias=”astNumChanBridge”    type=”gauge” />
        <mibObj oid=”.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.2.5″   instance=”0″ alias=”astCfgCallsActive”   type=”gauge” />
        <mibObj oid=”.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.2.6″   instance=”0″ alias=”astCfgCallsPrcessed” type=”counter” />
      </group>
      <group name=”asterisk-chantype” ifType=”all”>
        <mibObj oid=”.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.5.4.1.2″ instance=”astChanType” alias=”astChanTypeName”     type=”string” />
        <mibObj oid=”.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1.5.4.1.7″ instance=”astChanType” alias=”astChanTypeChannels” type=”gauge” />
      </group>
    </groups>
    <systems>
      <systemDef name=”Enterprise”>
        <sysoidMask>.1.3.6.1.4.1.</sysoidMask>
        <collect>
          <includeGroup>asterisk-scalars</includeGroup>
          <includeGroup>asterisk-chantype</includeGroup>
        </collect>

      </systemDef>
    </systems>
  </snmp-collection>

</datacollection-config>

You’ll need to restart OpenNMS, but first it’s a good idea to validate that you didn’t make any XML-borking mistakes. One good way to do this is to run the edited files through the xmllint utility, which is part of the libxml2 (Red Hat, Fedora, or CentOS) or libxml2-utils (Debian and Ubuntu) package.

opennms$ xmllint --noout capsd-configuration.xml collectd-configuration.xml datacollection-config.xml

If the command produces no output, you’re in good shape. If it finds problems, you’ll need to correct them before you can expect OpenNMS to restart successfully.

Once OpenNMS has restarted, log in to the OpenNMS web UI as a user with administrator privileges. Navigate to the Asterisk server’s node detail page, click on the Rescan link, and confirm that you wish to rescan the node. Give the rescan a few minutes to complete, then reload the node detail page. You should now see the Asterisk_SNMP service on one of the node’s interfaces:

If you see the new service (it’s OK and expected that its status is Unmonitored), then you’re just one more restart away from having Asterisk performance data in OpenNMS. The restarts, by the way, are another step that will go away in OpenNMS 1.8, which will include the ability to reload the configurations of individual daemons (in this case Capsd and Collectd) while the system is running. After the restart, log in again to the web UI and navigate to the resource graphs workflow for the Asterisk server node. You should see a new pick-list labeled Asterisk Channel Type containing an item for each type of channel technology supported by your Asterisk server:

Select Node-Level Performance Data and at least one channel type that you know is in use on your Asterisk server and click Submit. Amid the other node-level data, you should have four new resource graphs: Active Channels, Active and Bridged Channels (not present in Asterisk 1.4), Calls Active, and Calls Processed. Here’s how they look on a fairly slow day in our office:

After the node-level resource graphs will come one section per channel type that you selected. We’ve been using both SIP and Skype channels today, so those are the two I selected for this post:

Everybody likes resource graphs, but eventually everybody tires of looking at them and wishes that OpenNMS could notify the Asterisk admins when the data goes outside the comfort zone. That’s where thresholds come in. If you would like to be notified when a given Asterisk server has more than ten thousand bridged SIP channels (so that you can take up John Todd on his steak dinner offer), there’s a threshold for that:

There’s much more that can be done than I’ve shown here, particularly if you’re handy with Net-SNMP’s extensibility facilities. There are also other ways (such as changing the sysObjectId of your Asterisk servers to

.1.3.6.1.4.1.22736.1) to switch on Asterisk data collection in OpenNMS; the method presented here is calculated to minimize the potential disruption to other data collection already happening in an environment.

Netflix and Warner Bros.

2010-01-07T18:05:46+00:00

I’ve blogged in the past about my issues with Netflix, and I definitely have a love/hate relationship with them, but at the moment I am pretty happy as a Netflix customer. While I’m still not very satisfied with their customer service, they are making the right moves in other areas.

One is that streaming is now available on the PS3. I have heard that, in order not to break an agreement with Microsoft and the Xbox, there could not be a downloadable app, but they sent me a disk which allows me to stream from the PS3 to my television, which is only slightly annoying (I have to insert the disk versus just turning on the machine).

So I read with amusement that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment negotiated a 28 day delay before new releases would be available on the Netflix service, in exchange for more favorable terms and more content to be available via streaming.

I think this is a great deal for Netflix and a pretty stupid move on the part of Warner Bros. Their reasoning is that the availability of renting a DVD the day it is released cuts in to DVD sales. I’d love to see the numbers after this change, but my guess is that they will stay pretty flat.

My reasoning in simple. If someone loves a movie enough to buy it, that buying decision is made without regard to if it can be rented. Either they get it close to the day it is released since they like it so much, or they get it as a gift at some later point in time. In my own informal poll, people tend to buy movies they’ve already seen, and thus those that are sold in the first few weeks of release are sold to people who have already seen the movie in the theatre. This is unaffected by the availability of the title on Netflix.

I just don’t see someone going “Jeez, I can either wait four weeks to see ‘Final Destination 3D‘ for free as part of my Netflix subscription or drop $15+ to buy it from Amazon – ooh, hit that one-click” especially when a monthly Netflix subscription costs about the same if not less.

But this is a great deal for Netflix, especially if they get better access to the Warner Bros. back catalog for streaming. I don’t think anyone will argue that in ten years (if not sooner) almost all video will be delivered via streaming, and so seeing Netflix positioning itself as the best streaming service is a smart move.

I think there are parallels here with open source. You have a legacy company like Warner Bros. trying to understand a new distribution model in much the same way you have commercial software companies trying to come to grips with open source. Netflix, on the other hand, is similar to OpenNMS as a company that “gets it” and is laying the groundwork to become a dominant player.

The biggest thing we struggle with is trying to break people out of the mold that good software must be purchased. People have the expectation that software comes in shrink-wrapped boxes with a DVD and a license key, and anything else is just wrong. In much the same way, Warner Bros. thinks that having early access to the physical media is important to a consumer’s buying decision.

Now the streaming service provided by Netflix does not compare with, say, the quality of a Blu-ray disk, but are you willing to bet against it getting close in the near future? In much the same way, OpenNMS is not a complete replacement for suites like OpenView or Tivoli today, but with large improvements year over year it will be. My guess is that companies that understand open source today will be the dominant players in the software markets of tomorrow.

Thoughts on the New Year

2010-01-07T16:56:07+00:00

Okay, I have a lot of stuff I’d like to post but the problem will be finding the time, so instead of meticulously crafting a post in my usual manner (grin) this one will be more “stream of consciousness”.

Last year started off horribly for the business side of things. It was so bad that I had to cancel our annual developer’s conference, Dev-Jam. It is a huge regret, since come March things went crazy and we posted three record quarters in a row, but it was the decision to make at the time.

When we had our first Dev-Jam it was kind of a lark, but I didn’t realize how important that yearly gathering of people was to the project. We’ve inked in the week of July 25th, 2010, back at the University of Minnesota, to make sure we don’t miss out again.

Other than that, 2009 was a great year. We hired Jason Aras (an OGP member) as a full time employee and Seth Leger, one of the original OpenNMS coders, came to work for us on a contract basis (and we hope he’ll join us full time in 2010).

On the development side we got a lot of interesting custom development business and delved more fully into the whole “agile” development process. It has enabled us to work more efficiently (especially as distributed as we are) and produce even more robust code. The last week in December we switched to git to streamline further our development process.

We enter 2010 in the best shape of our corporate lives, and I am confident it will be a solid year for the OpenNMS project as well. Seeing all of this talk about Sun/Oracle/MySQL and copyright assignment makes me glad that we are bootstrapped and make money the old fashioned way (by spending less than we earn) versus having to make concessions to our open source philosophy.

On the down side, it is frustrating not to be able to implement some of our ideas as quickly as I would like, but our organic growth means that the pace of development is getting faster and faster. This results in higher revenues, and since we plow all that back into the company it just feeds the growth of the project.

All the experts say that this business model is flawed and that we’re not a “real” company or at a minimum we are some sort of “lifestyle company“, but you know what? I don’t care. And as long as we can stick to our mission statement of “Help customers, have fun, make money” I don’t have to. (grin)

But if I had to lay out a goal for 2010 it would be to make it easier for people to get involved, and to get those involved more involved. I think calling 2010 “The Year of Community” is a little cheesy, but that is where my heart lies. We have a new stable release coming out, our first book (in German) and an iPhone app all in the first half of the year, but I think that would pale in my mind to getting the community back on track, and I hope that Dev-Jam goes a long way toward getting that done.

Happy New Year everyone.

Why Contact Center Trainers can make money.

2010-01-07T15:49:41+00:00

Simple, because you need them:

I want to order tires in Germany (significantly cheaper than in France..) but the user interface of the website requires me to put in the german reference codes for the car. Being Europe the codes are likely “sort of” the same, but I don’t know how to translate from the french coding to the german one.

So – I tried to call.

“Tire shop, hello, what can I do for you”

“I’d like to order wheels and tires”

“ok, do you know what you want?”

“Yes, exactly, the only issue is that I can’t type in my registration data in your web site because I don’t have german car papers”

“Oh, I can’t help you then, I use the same interface”

(..silence..)

Now, the call center trainer will have his moment of truth and ask the Agent the question: How could you satisfy the client’s need?

I agree that it’s probably boring to do that for a living, but I’m certainly convinced that there’s a value in teaching Agents to “think about what the client wants and how you could SELL him something he wants” (though I know people who would say that giving somebody something he wants in exchange for money is not selling, but that’s another discussion).

I broke the silence then (I need those tires) and asked: “Ok, but how could I order then with you?” on which I received an email address to send my data and request to.

But hey, call-center-trainers out there, I can give you the name of the company if you want to make a proposal :)

And for the germans: That’s where people from the rest of the world will assume that you are unwilling to provide good customer service. Guess what. You are :-(

Purchasing..

2010-01-06T16:45:50+00:00

..see that interdiscount has a set of mag lites (2D & AA) for 39,90 CHF, go to interdiscount, see that 2 are left, buy one and see that you’ve could have had the bigger one for 25 EUR online.
Well, without P&P..and I had them immediately (it’s really dark in Switzerland ;-))..

Repost: Comparing things

2010-01-06T08:31:28+00:00

Someone asked me to dig through the blog archive, but instead of finding what he asked me to look for, I dug out an older article which might be good to repost..

A friend of mine picked on me in regards to the OpenNMS Iphone App. For Nagios, he said, there were plenty of Applications on the Appstore. I did not check whether that’s true or not. Mostly because it does not matter.

First, the OpenNMS IPhone app is created by the creators of OpenNMS. It’s not a third-party thing which makes use of interfaces which have initially been designed for something else. “Our” app (though it’s really the sole work of Rander Rick) uses the newly introduced Restful interfaces into OpenNMS. That means version 1.8, yes. But it means as well that we talk about a native integration, using interfaces which were actually thought for integration and will be maintained in the future with that very purpose in mind.

You can, by the way, use these interfaces for much more than an IPhone app (which reminds me that I should really add a chapter about REST to the book). And, as a part-time amateur programmer with an unhealthy addiction
to PERL I can tell you that REST is much more usable than SOAP. And it does the same thing, in the end (show me the applications which realy make use of the versatile capabilities of SOAP and WSDL, you’ll not find many). Yes, I do think that SOAP is a real pain in the butt and that already replacing EDIFACT by XML did not bring a lot of added value. But it looked cooler, that’s true. I wrote EDIFACT interpreters in Perl and that was fairly straightforward and lean…now talk about XML ;-)

Nothing new here, that’s my rant since 1996 or so and I’m really comfortable with it.

So coming back to why it does not really matter if there are ten, twenty or twothousand apps for the iphone for Nagios: The fact that Nagios addresses a different market does not change.

To illustrate that I did a quick google in my brain to come up with a suitable parable, and I illustrated it with

this:

..this is an incredible useful truck, call “unimog”. “Uni” comes from “universal” and don’t ask me where “mog” comes from. Right, it comes from “motorgerät”, “universal engine powered utility” or so. The Unimog is a success story of Mercedes-Benz (completely opposed to my experience posted below which shows the top of the engine of my Mercedes station wagon). Initially intended to be a “better tractor” it was quickly adopted in all environments which had a need for a powerful engine with basically unlimited fields of use. It can replace a tractor, a bagger, a snow plow. And in this picture you can see that indeed, it can even replace a locomotive.

The way that works is that the steel belted wheels you see in the front and the end of the engine are pushed o
n the rails. The normal, tired-equipped wheels are used, still, to transmit the engine power onto the steel rails.

And that works, you can actually pull (or push) a train with a unimog.

But. Let’s look a bit at performance. One of the first diesel-powered locomotive in germany was the V200. Started in 1953, it puts 1618 kW on the rails. It has a maximum speed of 140km/h which is, think back 60y in infrastructure, pretty fast

The newest Unimogs (see here) are able to perform with 160kW. That’s 10% of what an almost 60yo locomotive puts out.

This does not mean that the Unimog is “bad”. The contrary is the case. It’s a great tool, you can use it in a lot of situations, it’s incredibly flexible and so on. But if y
ou want to operate a railroad network your choice of engines would probably rather go towards something like the V200 as a locomotive as opposed to having your trains pulled by Unimogs.

And to come back to the starting point of the discussion. A lot of things which are bolted on to Nagios try to make it enterprise grade. We add steel wheels to roll on railroad tracks as we add somehow the capability to understand SNMP or to provide usable Notification Paths. But in the end, all those efforts will not lead to an enterprise network management solution. Sure, you can use Nagios for that. As much as you can run your railroad network with Unimogs.

(If you ask yourself why I am writing this, it’s Matteo’s Reto’s fault)

Was lief 2009?

2010-01-01T12:47:42+00:00

ROSPANZ20090010001-312.jpg JPEG Image, 312×412 pixels:

Lustig, eigentlich sollte man sich das Stück für Stück vornehmen, aber das macht Hal Faber vermutlich viel besser.

Bleibt das persönliche. Abschied von einigen Organisationen in Deutschland, ein neuer Job. Damit verbunden neuer Arbeitsort, neues Team, natürlich neue Aufgaben: Eine gute Entscheidung, sowohl für den Spaßfaktor als auch für die Gesundheit :-)

Mit dem Arbeitsweg hat sich auch mein “Sozialleben” geändert, ich sehe auf einmal wieder Menschen. Sowohl im Zug als auch in Fribourg, schließlich liegen unsere Büros mitten in der Stadt. Wenn man jahrzehntelang (naja..eines ;-)) nur in Gewerbeparks oder Quasi-Industriegebieten gearbeitet hat ist das ein interessanter Wechsel.

Mein Lieblingsprojekt OpenNMS kann ich nicht mehr ganz so begleiten wie ich eigentlich will, dafür haben wir das Buch fast fertig..ich bin gespannt.

Also, 2010, let’s do it. Noch 30 Jahre bis zur Rente ;-)

Nothern Germany in Winter

2009-12-29T22:55:03+00:00

SH – genevainformation::pictures.

I know I know, it’s sort of nice looking. But. It’s cold, windy, rainy. And I admit that if my parents would not live up here I’d know a zillion places to stay over christmas (including my own house) BUT this cold and windy and rainy place :)

Ordnung muss sein

2009-12-29T13:15:34+00:00

Wo kämen wir denn hin wenn jeder seinen Einkaufswagen einfach so abstellte?
Im Bild also: Der Stellplatz. Mit gelben Linien.

A guide to practical hacking

2009-12-28T19:48:52+00:00

xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe:

What others do for Christmas ;-)

2009-12-27T16:23:52+00:00

YouTube – TAP e Aeroporto de Lisboa ao rubro!.

23rd of December, Lisbon Airport

Inheritance

2009-12-25T19:54:53+00:00

Always fun to come back to the place you grew up in, at least for me.

That’s not “our” road, but typical; the houses you see here were constructed around 1970. And we’re staying in an appartement which has a livingroom, furnished like germany furnished livingrooms once.

I can’t get around noticing that this looks like a museum, a bit.

The other thing you notice is that the germans collect..

(And I can’t get along humming “Inheritance” when I see these things)

.. dog waste :-)

Strange xmas antics

2009-12-23T18:57:34+00:00

Right next to the crib:

Banale Unterschiede in der Politik

2009-12-17T07:57:04+00:00

In Frankreich gibt es, historisch und geographisch bedingt, viele Menschen aus dem Mittelmeerraum – das gesamte Mittelmeer war ja mal von den Mauren kontrolliert und etwas später hat Frankreich dann etliche koloniale Abenteuer gewagt. Die Folge davon ist, daß man einigen Teilen Afrikas immernoch ganz gut mit Französisch durchkommt und daß es eine Migrationsbewegung aus diesen frankophonen Ländern nach Frankreich gibt. Diese Migration wird durch Sonderrechte der Bürger der ehemaligen Kolonien erleichtert – und natürlich gab’s auch ein wirtschaftliches Interesse, günstige Arbeitskräfte ins Land zu holen. So groß sind die Unterschiede zwischen den europäischen Ländern da nicht.

Und wie überall wo man irgendwie Angst vor dem Fremden hat gibt’s dann immer mal wieder jemanden, der sich durch wenig intelligente Äußerungen profiliert. In diesem Flal war das Nadine Morano:

Nadine Morano, qui attend du jeune musulman «qu’il ne parle pas le verlan (…) et qu’il ne mette pas sa casquette à l’envers».

Das ist erstmal gar nicht so einfach zu übersetzen ohne selber in einige rhetorische Fallen zu tappen. Fangen wir mit den einfachen Dingen an: Verlan ist eine Verkasperung der Sprache, in der die Silben ausgetauscht werden. Wenn alle sich einig sind, kein Problem – dumm nur wenn geistig weniger bewegliche Menschen daneben stehen und nichts mehr mitbekommen weil die Worte sich etwas sehr anders anhören. Eine fiese Geheimsprache also!

Dann zu dem Wort “Muselman”. Den Begriff könnte man wortwörtlich übersetzen, historisch auslegen oder religiös bestimmen. Damit würde man Nadine Morano aber zu sehr entgegenkommen, denn was sie meint sind die Kinder der Einwanderer (aus den oben genannten Gebieten), die sich durch ihre Hautfarbe, ihre “Geheimsprache” und – jetzt kommts – durch das Aufsetzen der Schirmmütze mit dem Schirm nach hinten! vom französischen Standardjugendlichen abheben.

Also insgesamt ziemlicher Blödsinn. Inspiriert wurde das Frl. Morano zu diesen Statements durch eine gerade laufende Debatte “zur nationalen Identität”, einer großartigen vom König der Regierung, organisierten Nabelschau (des konservativen) Frankreichs.

Wenn Nadine Morano nicht über die Mützen der Muselmanen spricht ist sie übrigens eine der stellvertretenden Bürgermeisterinnen von Paris und für die Kultur zuständig.

Christophe Girard, Politiker in Paris, kam deswegen mit der Mütze (mit dem Schirm nach hinten!) in eine Sitzung.

via Attention, Christophe Girard porte sa casquette à l’envers – Libération.

Und nu? Was ich eigentlich sagen wollte ist daß ich den Eindruck habe, daß man in Frankreich die Sache mit der Politik doch noch etwas ernster nimmt und den Dingen Bedeutung zumißt. Nicht nur daß reagiert wird, der anderen Meinung wird Ausdruck verliehen und! die Presse berichtet auch noch darüber. Vom deutschen Einheitsbrei hebt sich das erfrischend ab.

Up in the Air

2009-12-16T16:01:39+00:00

I am eagerly awaiting the release of George Clooney’s new movie Up in the Air this Christmas. In it, he plays a man who travels a tremendous amount for his job, and he has become addicted to collecting frequent flyer miles and similar perks. I empathize with a character who feels at home in airports and hotels.

His program of choice is American Airlines AAdvantage, which is also my favorite, but while his character is aiming for 10 million lifetime miles, I only just passed 1 million earlier this year. However, for the first time in my life I managed to make “Executive Platinum” by accruing over 100,000 elite miles in one calendar year.

Even as much as I travel, hitting EXP was difficult. I tend to travel in one or two week chunks, so I’m only on a plane once or twice a week, and it took several trips overseas plus a special program at American in which one could earn double elite miles for me to get there. I am interested to see if I’m treated any differently, as I have zero plans to make EXP again next year, so I hope to enjoy it while I can.

Unlike this year, in 2010 I also hope to avoid being molested by the crew. The following is a letter I sent to American Airlines about an experience I had on a flight from New York back to Raleigh. I never got a reply, so I assume they really don’t care that such things are happening (at least to men), but it didn’t upset me enough to keep me from flying on their airline.

27 July 2009

American Airlines Customer Relations
P.O. Box 619612 MD 2400
DFW Airport, TX 75261-9612

Dear American:

As I have just reached my first million miles in the AAdvantage program, you probably know I am a big fan of American Airlines. In fact, the only two times previously I have used this address to write a letter was for the purpose of singing the praises of flight attendants who went the extra mile to make my journey a pleasant one, and they are one of the reasons I love American.

Unfortunately, this is not one of those letters.

Last night I was on flight 4738 from LGA to RDU in seat 11A. This was an American Eagle flight, and I believe the name of the attendant was Kathy (she didn’t have on a name tag but I believe the pilot referred to her as such).

Due to weather we ended up sitting on the taxiway for a couple of hours. When it came time to take off, the attendant came through the cabin to check seat belts. Since I had been fidgeting for two hours my belt buckle was slightly twisted. She saw this and said, “Sir, your seat belt has to lie flat” and before I could move she reached down and adjusted it.

Now picture this procedure: the fingers of her left hand were inserted between the buckle and my thigh, while the fingers of her right hand went between the belt and my crotch.

Both me and the man across the aisle looked at each other with amazement. As we talked about it later, neither of us had heard of this new FAA regulation that the seatbelt has to be perfectly flat for takeoff.

I don’t believe this violation of personal space was sexual in nature – it struck me as more of an obsessive/compulsive problem – but still, I suffer enough indignity simply going through the security screening process to have to worry about being groped on the plane.

Please don’t think I’m one of those people who complains about the slightest problem. With all of its complexity, I realize that no organization can make air travel perfect. But the behavior of this attendant was thoughtless and somewhat disturbing (you can contact the nice couple in 11B and 11C if you want to verify this story, as they were just as astonished as I was) and I can’t help but think if our genders were reversed you’d have a much larger problem on your hands.

I still love American (I’m on pace to make Executive Platinum this year and this won’t change that) and I understand that there is some difference between American and American Eagle, but as it is your name on the outside of the plane, I figured you should know.

Tarus Paul Balog
Chief Executive Officer
The OpenNMS Group, Inc.

First Impressions of Dubai

2009-12-16T01:51:37+00:00

While I have been in Dubai for several days now, only recently have I been able to get out and see some of the city. Fourth quarter for us is usually insane, this year more than others, and to be quite honest for the first two days I was here I did little more than work and sleep.

I didn’t arrive until nearly midnight, and there were at least a thousand people queued up at passport control. Once I got through that I wasn’t able to find the car I was to take to the hotel, which was compounded by the fact that my fancy new iPhone from AT&T was unable to roam internationally (the fix, according to AT&T, is to have it connect to an AT&T tower to “re-register” which is a bit difficult considering there are no such towers available when one is roaming internationally) and my credit card was declined (Citibank said that the initial swipe triggered fraud detection even though I had called them to let them know I was traveling).

(sigh)

I did manage to get everything sorted, but after that my allotted window for sleep was pretty small.

However, after work on Monday I took a cab to the Dubai Mall, the largest shopping mall by area in the world. Now, I have been to many of the world’s temples of consumerism, including Ginza in Tokyo and Orchard Road in Singapore (all with OpenNMS actually) and none can compare with the sheer scale of the Dubai Mall, or of Dubai in general. It is almost as if Disney World and Las Vegas had a love child that drank some mad scientist’s potion and grew to ten times normal size.

Not only is the Mall large, it is spacious, with huge installations including five story waterfalls and a world-class aquarium. I wandered around in awe for quite some time, and managed to get my obligatory McDonalds meal out of the way (I have ordered a Big Mac meal in almost every country I have ever visited).

On the way back to the hotel, I was able to take some quick photos from the cab, including the world’s tallest man-made structure, Burj Dubai:

and a really poor shot of a metro station:

I rarely get an emotional response from modern architecture, but I am totally in love with the design of the Dubai metro stations. They drape over the tracks like some sort of giant golden scarab, and they really stand out. At points on the road you can see two or three of them at a time, and you get the idea that you are looking at the city of the future – something Disney wished for EPCOT or like something out of Total Recall.

Yesterday, my friend Yunus picked me up at the hotel and we actually took a metro train.

The Union station is actually underground, so it is not as impressive as the above ground stations, but it was still cool nonetheless. The metro system has only been in operation since September, and so everything is brand spanking new. The stations are immaculately clean, and it feels like they just took the shrink wrap off of everything.

We took the train to the Mall of the Emirates. Until the opening of the Dubai Mall, it was the largest mall in the world (by area). It is famous for having an indoor ski park called Ski Dubai, recently featured on The Amazing Race.

We had mainly gone there just to ride on the metro, so after a short visit we headed back. Yunus had told me that adoption of the metro system by the locals had been a bit slow, but you wouldn’t have know it by looking:

We then found a more traditional area which included an Iranian restaurant known for its shawarma. I was told that the thing to look for when choosing a shawarma restaurant is a queue outside, waiting.

He wasn’t wrong – the meal was excellent.

Google simply does it.

2009-12-15T22:16:42+00:00

Finally, Google will provide easy roaming data services in other countries. For example, if you go to Europe, you can roam on HSDPA data networks for the same price of 20€ per month, and if you only stay in Europe for a few days you won’t need to pay for the whole month. You may not even need to change the SIM card.

via Reuters: Nexus One Available Directly Through Google Website January 5 | AndroidGuys.

This means the end of some business models of some companies. Not the immediate, straight, scary, brutal end, but the fading away of a solid market share in a certain market, rendering the existing business models worthless. Ouch.

“Heute verhandelten Fragen werfen grundlegende Fragen bezüglich des Verhältnis von Freiheit und Sicherheit auf”

2009-12-15T09:31:10+00:00

Die heutige Verhandlung vor dem Bundesverfassungsgericht wird vom AKVorrat live ge-identica-t: http://identi.ca/akvorrat

This Week in OpenNMS: Release Time Again

2009-12-14T20:17:11+00:00

It's time for This Week in OpenNMS. This last few weeks, we've been pretty busy on a number of projects, including reporting, maps, and 2 releases.

Project Updates

Stable: Current Release is 1.6.8

1.6.8 is the current stable release, tagged December 10th. It adds a few small features and fixes a few bugs, as well as adding a new web-based "easy installer" UI. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.8 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.8.
Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.8

1.7.8 is the current unstable release, tagged December 8th. Since 1.7.7, there have been quite a few bug fixes. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
Unstable: Reporting

Jason Aras started working on the specification for a new built-in reporting engine. Additionally, Jonathan Sartin has been working on the reporting scheduling daemon some more.
Unstable: Map and Link Updates

Antonio and Donald have been doing more work on the map code, fixing bugs and adding a bit more polish.

Upcoming Events

January 25th-29th, 2010: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.
February 19th-21st, 2010: OpenNMS will be attending the Southern California Linux Expo.

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 automated release scripts you'd like to share, don't hesitiate to say hi.

Landesbrandkasse Schleswig-Holstein

2009-12-12T20:58:54+00:00

Landesbrandkasse Schleswig-Holstein – genevainformation::pictures:

I don’t know who googled for “Landesbrandkasse Schleswig Holstein”, but whoever did it found this picture ;-)

Webserver log files are always interesting to read.

Off To the UAE (Country 21)

2009-12-12T01:46:12+00:00

In a short while I will board a plane to begin my journey from Chicago to Dubai. It’s about eight hours to London and then another seven to Dubai, so I’ll arrive about 11:30pm local time – on Saturday.

This will be my first trip to the Middle East in 15 years, and I have to say that I’m looking forward to it. I spent the month of October, 1994, in and around Damascus, Syria, and I really enjoyed myself.

Yes, I can make this work

I especially remember the food as being particularly good. I liked the shawarma, best when bought right off the street and served with lots of sauce. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

But my fondest memories are of the people. While I think one can never go wrong underestimating a government’s ability to royally screw things up (my own included), in my travels I’ve found that people around the world are basically the same. They want to be safe and they want to be rewarded for the work they do. They want the opportunity to better themselves and to provide for their families. Especially in technical circles, they like solving problems and things like OpenNMS can help with that. Plus, the fact that OpenNMS is free and open source encourages cooperation, and people know that recognition in open source is based on merit – no matter the color of your skin, the name of your God or the TLD of your e-mail address.

I’ve been pretty lucky in the fact that the Internet has provided me with a way to keep up with people I’ve met over the years, but I’m still missing contact information for some of them. The picture above was taken in Damascus and the man on the left is Ghazwan M. Hawach. My Google-fu has failed me, so just in case Ghazwan gets on the Internet and finds this post – please drop me a note. I’d love to find out what you’ve been up to.

So, outside of the long hours in the air I am eager to be off to Dubai. I’m working for a company called Etisalat, which happens to be the 13th largest wireless communications provider in the world. Although you’ve probably never heard of them, they have more subscribers than Verizon, AT&T or Sprint. I can’t wait to get OpenNMS to rock on their network.

But I also can’t wait to make some new friends and eat some shawarma. The fact that Dubai is much warmer than Chicago doesn’t hurt, either.

So welcome, United Arab Emirates, as our 21st client country.

See you on the other side.

Le Weihnachtsmann

2009-12-11T20:36:26+00:00

Artwork – genevainformation::pictures.

Welcome Sweden, our 20th country

2009-12-11T15:18:33+00:00

I just finished up some work for a client in Sweden this week. Unfortunately it was remote, although I’m not so sure I’d like to visit there right at this time. (grin)

This makes Sweden the 20th country in which the commercial side of OpenNMS has clients. While the OpenNMS application has been downloaded from just about every country on the planet, in this list I tend to only count the countries where they are using OpenNMS enough to purchase commercial services. This way I am certain that they have adopted it as their management solution (I think overall downloads are a poor indicator of open source success for a variety of reasons).

The other countries are, in no particular order:

Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Israel, Denmark, France, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, the UK, Italy, Trinidad, Malta, India, Honduras, Chile and the US.