Adventures in Open Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What about an Android app?

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Note: Ben has been writing these for some time now, but I figured it is worth highlighting them on the blog, too. They can always be found in the News section of opennms.com]

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS. In the last week, we did some more work in preparation for 1.8.1, worked a bit more on the iPhone/iPad app, and did a huge amount of bugfixing.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.0
  1.8.0 is the current stable release, tagged June 7th. The first major stable release in the 1.8 series, it adds a whole slew of new features compared to 1.6. For a high-level overview, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. While we consider this release to be stable, a ton has changed. It is recommended that you back up your database, and test an upgrade on non-production hardware before moving to 1.8 in production.
• 1.8: Inline Thresholding Regression
  Inline thresholding was enabled in the default configs late in the 1.6 series, but it was never enabled by default in the 1.7 branch, so 1.8.0 was released without inline thresholding enabled. This was changed with the fixing of bug #3912, so be aware when merging configs when 1.8.1 comes out!
• 1.8: Remote Poller Maps Updates
  Matt, Donald, and I did a bunch of work on the remote poller maps, doing a huge amount of optimization of the queries used to pull poller data into the UI, adding support for Mapquest’s click and double-click behaviour (center, and center+zoom), and adding support for multiple map types in the OpenLayers implementation.
  
• 1.8: Tons of Bug Fixes
  I did a bunch of work going through Bugzilla this week, trying to close out bugs in preparation for 1.8.1, which will go into code slush next monday, and be released on the 12th.

Bugs Fixed Since Last TWiO

• #1181: Collectin Windows disk space, trying to poll the CD drive
• #1920: javamail using authentication encodes the username and password twice
• #1959: Too many calls to getlocahost()
• #2922: PSQLException in poller backend: DB field length exceeded on remote location monitor status update
• #2944: java.lang.NullPointerException on KSC Graphs
• #3124: HttpMonitor doesn’t check JSON repsonses for response-text
• #3192: New Feature: allow syslogd to bind to specific ipaddress
• #3280: Equallogic iSCSI array performance data
• #3283: Reparenting of iLO interface on HP servers not working with ESX4
• #3291: provisiond : snmpinterfaces not created
• #3296: running the installer without the database running throws an exception about “The database server’s error messages are not in English”
• #3306: 1.7.svn (fresh today) does not show service, availability on node page
• #3514: default datacollection-config.xml breaks alias length limit
• #3536: Unable to use the “percent sign (%)” in a notification text message
• #3576: Fix send-event.pl script to encode time in DateFormat.LONG
• #3578: Incorrect http content-type header for svg request
• #3589: Advanced Alarm Search some of the Sort by options don’t work properly
• #3598: An Exception occurs when you try to create a surveillance category that already exists.
• #3622: Bugs with Hyperic servlets
• #3624: Rename from Import to Synch(cronize) in Prov Groups
• #3632: admin role is negated for users also in readonly role
• #3637: JasperException PWC6033
• #3644: trying to add list of ip range to discover
• #3656: mib2opennms does not install in Debian Lenny
• #3675: Events missing page counter
• #3722: Debian Packages: opennms-contrib missing dependency for libxml-twig-perl
• #3847: Page Sequence Monitor still submitting multiple ‘Cookie:’ response headers even with BROWSER_COMPATIBILITY is enabled
• #3869: Data Collection Failed Event (dataCollectionFailed) not informative
• #3871: linkd not showing links between nodes and cisco switches
• #3899: Patch: allow per node filtering in notifications list
• #3900: dashboard user has security issues
• #3901: add support for click/double-click handlers
• #3910: Patch: display First Next Previous links in events list at the bottom of the page
• #3912: inline thresholding is no longer enabled by default
• #3915: regular expression “pattern”s in XSDs are not evaluated
• #3923: Stale location specific status change events should be deleted
• #3924: NPE handled too gracefully by MailAckProcessor in Ackd

Goof-Up of the Week

Jeff relayed this tale of the importance of having priorities in scrum this morning…

I spent last week helping a telecoms industry client implement OpenNMS. Toward the end of the second day we decided to switch from Capsd discovery to Provisiond requisitions, so I wrote a small script that
reads an inventory dump from their old NMS (CA Spectrum) and creates an OpenNMS requisition describing the same nodes. The database was full of junk events from before we’d put in place some new SNMP trap definitions, so I went about removing all that stuff manually before importing the new requisition. Several folks were going out for a beverage and invited me along, so I hurried in order not to hold them
up. The next morning there were over 600 nodes in the system instead of the 391 I was expecting. I double-checked that Capsd was turned off, that Provisiond was not handling newSuspect events, and that there were in fact no such events in the database, then contacted the development team about my suspicion of a bug. After nearly an hour, the client mentioned that he was seeing some duplicate nodes that didn’t have any events, alarms, or notifications associated with them. Only then did it dawn on me that, in my haste to get my hands on some suds, I had forgotten to delete the old nodes themselves before importing the new requisition!

Upcoming Events

• July 7th-9th, 2010: Ben will be speaking at OpenStreetMaps’ State of the Map 2010, in Girona, Spain.
• July 21st, 2010: Tarus will be giving his “So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business?” talk at OSCON
• July 26th-30th, 2010: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2010 will be held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN

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

Until Next Week…

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

It is with great pleasure that I can announce the general availability of OpenNMS 1.8.0 – codenamed “Cardinal”. Almost two years in development, it represents the next step in making OpenNMS the de facto standard for network management platforms.

It’s faster, more powerful and more flexible than ever before. And as always, it is 100% free and open source software. A list of the major new features can be found on the wiki.

A lot of work went into things under the covers. We are moving toward making OpenNMS database independent (by leveraging the Hibernate project) as well as preparing for the OSGi-based OpenNMS 2.0.

Users can now have fine-grained control over discovery using the new capsd replacement provisiond. Combining the best of automated discovery with the older model importer feature, provisiond can manage the most complex networks with its asynchronous and non-blocking design (we tested it against 300 devices, each of which had over 30,000 virtual interfaces).

We also made several changes to make OpenNMS, well, prettier. The Maps subsystem now works on all browsers with SVG 1.1 capability, and the integration with JasperReports means that the folks in the trenches can now wow management with pretty reports.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. As always, report bugs to our Bugzilla instance, and we hope you have as much fun using OpenNMS as we had making it