Clamav woes

Gang – we’ve been having some issues with clamav on the OpenNMS server today. The way our mail server is configured, incoming mail gets passed to amavisd and then on to clamav before being delivered. When clam dies, mail starts to queue.

We hope it is fixed, now. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks to Eric for fixing it.

Supported Platforms

Today I took some time off to try and wade through my e-mails. My Inbox is my “to do” list, and I’ll answer an e-mail much faster than pretty much anything else.

However, my Inbox was over 550 messages strong, the oldest from more than a year ago, so something needed to be done. I am now under 100, but too tired to go on today, so if you got a reply from me to an e-mail you sent five months ago, let me apologise once again.

I was surprised that a number of the e-mails were from people wanting support for a particular platform. When I listed out the platforms we will support starting in 1.1.3 I was surprised at the number:

  • Solaris 8 and 9, both SPARC and x86
  • Mac OSX (Panther)
  • Debian, woody and sid
  • Red Hat 7, 8, and 9
  • Mandrake 8 and 9
  • Fedora Core 1
  • CentOS (equivalent to RHES 3)

And I have probably forgotten a few. These platforms will be supported via our “lynx installer”. Why did we choose these? Well, our support customers pay us to (grin).

Here is a list of the platforms I hope to have out for 1.2, but no promises:

  • SuSE
  • Gentoo
  • FreeBSD

Until then, we should build on all of those platforms, so if you happen to get it running please drop me and/or the list a note with your process and we’ll try to get it on the web page.

28 Bugs in the Code …

Okay, we’re down to about 28 bugs blocking 1.1.3. Thanks to everyone who looked into helping, and to those that contributed patches.

If nothing comes up, we should be able to tag 1.1.3 this week or next. Stay tuned.

OpenNMS Roadmap

Okay, I’ve been heads down on 1.1.3/1.2 and ignoring the list, but I hear talk that folks are looking for a “roadmap”. This is something I sent around internally, and it is subject to heavy changes, but I thought I’d share it for what it is worth.

Here is a draft of the roadmap for OpenNMS, represented by pairs of version numbers reflecting the development/production cycle for each release.

Note that this list is by no means exhaustive, and represents the main points I want to cover.

Version: 1.1/1.2
Timeframe: As soon as possible

  • This is almost complete. All the features are basically in, but many things are broken.
    I have been spending time in Bugzilla cleaning things up so that I can set up a “blocker”
    bug that will track when we can release 1.1.3.
    (Bug 804)
  • Installer: We need to fix the installer to handle the install more cleanly.
  • Documentation: The documentation needs a lot of work. I want to sequester myself for a week
    and fix this.

In the “would be nice” category:

  • Performance enhancements to data collection
  • Support for the latest Java: 1.4.2, as well as IBM’s SDK.
  • OpenNMS on a disk: Using White Dwarf, support OpenNMS as a single CD iso.

Continue reading

OpenNMS 1.1.2 for Debian unstable

Ok, I know they are way late in coming, but Debian unstable packages for OpenNMS 1.1.2 are now available for your apt-get upgrade/install ‘ing pleasure.

Detailed installation instructions can be found here, but in a nutshell you just need to:

  • Meet the java dependency by installing one of j2sdk1.4 or java-virtual-machine or java2-runtime
  • Add the OpenNMS repository to sources.list, (deb http://debian.opennms.org/ debian/opennms unstable)
  • apt-get update ; apt-get install opennms

<lame-excuse>
Due to much “brokenness” between OpenNMS and Sid at the time of the 1.1.2 release, I opted to hold off on building any 1.1.2 packages for Debian unstable and concentrate my efforts on the Woody packages. Afterwards, and with the impending release of 1.1.3, skipping 1.1.2 and waiting for the new release sounded like a Good Idea(tm), I have since learned that it is not wise to count unhatched chickens.

My apologies to the Debian user-base, and I promise from here-on-out that I will try to be more timely. 😉
</lame-excuse>

Where, oh where, is 1.1.3?

Okay, everyone is wondering where 1.1.3 is. Somewhere between here and not here.

More than other releases in the 1.1 development stream, 1.1.3 includes a lot of new/changed code. Included is the ability to delete nodes, discover nodes and manage/unmanage nodes without restarts. Also, management functions are available from the node page (no more searching through long lists). And finally, OpenNMS can handle duplicate IP addresses.

But, these changes touched on a lot of the capsd and poller code, and unfortunately things are broken. More so than I originally thought when testing this.

Continue reading

Bugzilla Has Been Updated

The orginal installation of Bugzilla was used mainly by a small group of developers who were very familiar with the code. Thus the “Component” fields consisted mainly of subsections of the source tree. Useful to the designers, but not so good for the average OpenNMS user.

So I’ve gone ahead and cleaned them up a bit. There are two main “products”, OpenNMS and Miscellaneous. The latter is for the OpenNMS support infrastructure, so use that to report issues with the web site, FAQ, CVS and Bugzilla itself.

The joeSNMP bugs will be moving to the joeSNMP site on SourceForge, so consider it deprecated.

For the OpenNMS project, here are the new component categories:

Continue reading

Let's get this enkai started …

I’ve live in rural North Carolina (USA). While it is still technically winter, we’ve recently had a bit of warm weather, and spring feels just around the corner. Yesterday I saw a grey fox, and I fall to sleep at night listening to the frogs.

So it may seem strange that as a “country boy” I recently had an amazing trip to Tokyo.

I guess this is a good time to mention that I have always wanted OpenNMS to be an international application. I have been lucky enough in my life to spend time in different countries, and I’ve always wanted to work on a project that can bring together people from different parts of the world, with different ideas and cultures, to create something special. To this end, internationalization is a main feature of the next development cycle.

Getting back to Japan …

One of the services we do at Blast is training, and I was hired to hold an OpenNMS training course for a customer in Tokyo. We don’t charge extra for work outside the country, but since we bill travel expenses back to the client we don’t get too many such requests.

While I was there, I hoped to meet up with the Tokyo OpenNMS Users group. I dropped a note to the list, and Hiro Sugisaka did all of the work to get us a nice place to meet and eat.

So we had the first TOUG meeting.



Left to right: Hori-san, me, Kasai-san, Yachi-san, Kondou-san, Sugisaka-san, Sekino-san, and Yoshida-san

It was a lot of fun. While many of the guests seemed to worry about their English skills, everyone one spoke better English than I spoke Japanese. It was a special treat to meet Katsuhiro Kondou, not only a TOUG founder but also the main force behind OpenNMS on Solaris (back in the day).

Yachi-san had also started converting the OpenNMS webapp to Japanese:

I hope in a couple of months there will be an easy way to do this.

Sugisaka-san deserves many thanks for making this happen.

I really enjoyed Japan. The people are friendly, the country is very clean and the consumer electronics are a couple of years ahead of what we get in the states. I really, really wanted a new Sharp Zaurus, and I even found a deal on one in Akihabara, but unfortunately there was no way to set it up in English.

Due to my travel arrangements I stayed the weekend (the Saturday night stay resulting in cheaper airfare rule applies), so I got to spend some extra time in Tokyo. I thought about taking the bullet train (shinkasin) to Kyoto or Nikko, but then decided that there was too much to see in Tokyo proper. I visited Ginza, Asakusa, the Imperial Palace gardens and Shinjuku (where I was staying).

My last night in Japan found me pretty tired and ready for bed, but the phone rang and it turned out to be Jamie Roughan, the other founder of TOUG. He invited me out to Shibuya (just south of Shinjuku) for dinner. It sounded like fun, so I went, and I was glad I did. Shibuya is where a number of scenes in the movie “Lost in Translation” were filmed.

Here he is goofing off with his girlfriend Yuki:

The restaurant where we dined was on the 14th floor of a building, with a great view of the city. Good food and good company, like the rest of my trip.

The trip home was uneventful, although I had to go through Kennedy airport in New York. Many of the people there were rude, the airport is dirty, and the public restroom I used was downright filthy. Even though I had spent 12 hours on a plane, I was ready to turn around and head back (grin).

I recommend a trip to Japan to everyone, and hope I can return there in the future.

But it is nice to be home. As I write this I am on the front porch of the Blast offices, listening to the frogs.