#OSMC 2018 – Day -1

The annual Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) held in Nürnberg, Germany each year brings together pretty much everyone who is anyone in the free and open source monitoring space. I really look forward to attending, and so do a number of other people at OpenNMS, but this year I won the privilege, so go me.

The conference is a lot of fun, which must be the reason for the hell trip to get here this year. Karma must be trying to bring things into balance.

As an American Airlines frequent flier whose home airport is RDU, most of my trips to Europe involve Heathrow airport (American has a direct flight from RDU to LHR that I’ve taken more times than I can count).

I hate that airport with the core of my being, and try to avoid it whenever possible. While I could have taken a flight from LHR directly to Nürnberg on British Airways, I decided to fly to Philadelphia and take a direct American flight to Munich. It is just about two hours by train from MUC to Nürnberg Hbf and I like trains, so combine that with getting to skip LHR and it is a win/win.

But it was not to be.

I got to the airport and watched as my flight to PHL got delayed further and further. Chris, at the Admiral’s Club desk, was able to re-route me, but that meant a flight through Heathrow (sigh). Also, the Heathrow flight left five hours later than my flight to Philadelphia, and I ended up waiting it out at the airport (Andrea had dropped me off and I didn’t want to ask her to drive all the way back to get me just for a couple of hours).

Because of the length of this trip I had to check a bag, and I had a lot of trepidation that my bag would not be re-routed properly. Chris even mentioned that American had actually put it on the Philadelphia flight but he had managed to get it removed and put on the England flight, and American’s website showed it loaded on the plane.

That also turns out to be the last record American has on my bag, at least on the website I can access.

American Tracking Website

The fight to London was uneventful. American planes tend to land at Terminal 3 and most other British Airways planes take off from Terminal 5, so you have to make your way down a series a long corridors and take a bus to the other terminal. Then you have to go through security, which is usually when my problems begin.

I wear contact lenses, and since my eyes tend to react negatively to the preservatives found in saline solution I use a special, preservative-free brand of saline. Unfortunately, it is only available in 118ml bottles. As most frequent fliers know, the limit for the size of liquid containers for carry on baggage is 100ml, although the security people rarely notice the difference. When they do I usually just explain that I need it for my eyes and I’m allowed to bring it with me. That is, everywhere except Heathrow airport. Due to the preservative-free nature of the saline I can’t move it to another container for fear of contamination.

Back in 2011 was the first time that my saline was ever confiscated at Heathrow. Since then I’ve carried a doctor’s note stating that it is “medically necessary” but once even then I had it confiscated a few years later at LHR because the screener didn’t like the fact that my note was almost a year old. That said, many times have I gone through that airport with no one noticing the slightly larger size of my saline bottle, but on this trip it was not to be.

When your carry on items get tagged for screening at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, you kind of wait in a little mob of people for the one person to methodically go through your stuff. Since I had several hours between flights it was no big deal for me, but it is still very annoying. Of course when the screener got to my items he was all excited that he had stopped the terrorist plot of the century by discovering my saline bottle was 18ml over the limit, and he truly seemed disappointed when I produced my doctor’s note, freshly updated as of August of this year.

Screeners at Heathrow are not imbued with much decision making ability, so he literally had to take my note and bottle to a supervisor to get it approved. I was then allowed to take it with me, but I couldn’t help thinking that the terrorists had won.

The rest of my stay at the world’s worst airport was without incident, and I squeezed into my window seat on the completely full A319 to head to Munich.

One we landed I breezed through immigration (Germans run their airports a bit more efficiently than the British) and waited for my bag. And waited. And waited.

When I realized it wouldn’t be arriving with me, I went to look for a BA representative. The sign said to find them at the “Lost and Found” kiosk, but the only two kiosks in the rather small baggage area were not staffed. I eventually left the baggage area and made my way to the main BA desk, where I managed to meet Norbert. After another 15 minutes or so, Norbert brought me a form to fill out and promised that I would receive an e-mail and a text message with a “file number” to track the status of my bag.

I then found the S-Bahn train which would take me to the Munich Hauptbahnhof where I would get my next train to Nürnberg.

I had made a reservation for the train to insure I had a seat, but of course that was on the 09:55 train which I would have taken had I been on the PHL flight. I changed that to a 15:00 train when I was rerouted, and apparently one change is all you get with Deutsche Bahn, but Ronny had suggested I buy a “flexpreis” ticket so I could take any train from Munich to Nürnberg that I wanted. I saw there were a number of “Inter-City Express (ICE)” trains available, so I figured I would just hop on the first one I found.

When I got to the station I saw that a train was leaving from Platform (Gleis) 20 at 15:28. It was now 15:30 so I ran and boarded just before it pulled out of the station.

It was the wrong train.

Well, not exactly. There are a number of types of trains you can take. The fastest are the ICE trains that run non-stop between major cities, but there are also “Inter-City (IC)” trains that make more stops. I had managed to get on a “Regional Bahn (RB)” train which makes many, many stops, turning my one hour trip into three.

(sigh)

The man who took my ticket was sympathetic, and told me to get off at Ingolstadt and switch to an ICE train. I was chatting on Mattermost with Ronny most of this time, and he was able to verify the proper train and platform I needed to take. That train was packed, but I ended up sitting with some lovely people who didn’t mind chatting with me in English (I so love visiting Germany for this reason).

So, about seven hours later than I had planned I arrived at my hotel, still sans luggage. After getting something to eat I started the long process of trying to locate my bag.

I started on Twitter. Both the people at American and British Airways asked me to DM them. The AA folks said I needed to talk with the BA folks and the BA folks still have yet to reply to me. Seriously BA, don’t reach out to me if you don’t plan to do anything. It sets up expectations you apparently can’t meet.

Speaking of not doing anything, my main issue was that I need a “file reference” in order to track my lost bag, but despite Norbert’s promise I never received a text or e-mail with that information. I ended up calling American, and the woman there was able to tell me that she showed the bag was in the hands of BA at LHR. That was at least a start, so she transferred me to BA customer support, who in turn transferred me to BA delayed baggage, who told me I needed to contact American.

(sigh)

As calmly as I could, I reiterated that I started there, and then the BA agent suggested I visit a particular website and complete a form (similar to the one I did for Norbert I assume) to get my “file reference”. After making sure I had the right URL I ended the call and started the process.

I hit the first snag when trying to enter in my tag number. As you can see from the screenshot above, my tag number starts with “600” and is ten digits long. The website expected a tag number that started with “BA” followed by six digits, so my AA tag was not going to work.

BA Tracking Website - wrong number

But at least this website had a different number to call, so I called it and explained my situation once again. This agent told me that I should have a different tag number, and after looking around my ticket I did find one in the format they were after, except starting with “AA” instead of “BA”. Of course, when I entered that in I got an error.

BA Tracking Website - error

After I explained that to the agent I remained on the phone for about 30 minutes until he was able to, finally, give me a file reference number. At this point I was very tired, so I wrote it down and figured I would call it a night and go to sleep.

But I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to enter that number into the BA delayed bag website. It said it was invalid.

(sigh)

Then I got a hint of inspiration and decided to enter in my first name as my last, and voila! I had a missing bag record.

BA Tracking Website - missing bag

That site said they had found my bag (the agent on the phone had told me it was being “traced”) and it also asked me to enter in some more information about it, such as the brand of the manufacturer.

BA Tracking Website - information required

Of course when I tried to do that, I got an error.

BA Tracking Website - system error

Way to go there, British Airways.

Anyway, at that point I could sleep. As I write this the next morning nothing has been updated since 18:31 last night, but I hold out hope that my bag will arrive today. I travel a lot so I have a change a clothes with me along with all the toiletries I need to not offend the other conference attendees (well, at least with my hygiene), but I can’t help but be soured on the whole experience.

This year I have spent nearly US$20,000 with American Airlines (they track that for me on their website). I paid them for this ticket and they really could have been more helpful instead of just washing their hands and pointing their fingers at BA. British Airways used to be one of the best airlines on the planet, but lately they seemed to have turned into Ryanair but without that airline’s level of service. The security breach that exposed the personal information of their customers, stories like this recent issue with a flight from Orlando, and my own experience this trip have really put me off flying them ever again.

Just a hint BA – from a customer service perspective – when it comes to finding a missing bag all we really want (well, besides the bag) is for someone to tell us they know where it is and when we can expect to get it. The fact that I had to spend several hours after a long trip to get something approximating that information is a failure on your part, and you will lose some if not all of my future business because of it.

I also made the decision to further curtail my travel in 2019, because frankly I’m getting too old for this crap.

So, I’m now off to shower and to get into my last set of clean clothes. Here’s hoping my bag arrives today so I can relax and enjoy the magic that is the OSMC.

Conferences: Australia, New Zealand and Senegal

Just a quick note to mention some conferences I will be attending. If you happen to be there as well, I would love the opportunity to meet face to face.

Next week I’ll be in Sydney, Australia, for linux.conf.au. I’ll only be able to attend for the first two “miniconf” days, and I’ll be doing a short introduction to OpenNMS on Tuesday as part of the Systems Administration Miniconf.

Then I’m off to Queenstown, New Zealand for the New Zealand Network Operators Group (NZNOG) conference. I will be the first presenter on Friday at 09:00, talking about, you guessed it, OpenNMS.

The week after that I will be back in Australia, this time on the other side in Perth, working with our new Asia-Pacific OpenNMS partner R-Group International. We are excited to have such a great partner bringing services and support for OpenNMS to organizations in that hemisphere. Being roughly 12 hours out from our home office in North Carolina, USA, can make communication a little difficult, so it will be nice to be able to help users in (roughly) their own timezone.

Plus, I hope to learn about Cricket.

Finally, I’m excited that I’ve been asked to do a one day tutorial at this year’s African Network Operators Group (AfNOG) in Dakar, Senegal, this spring. The schedule is still being decided but I’m eager to visit Africa (I’ve never been) and to meet up with OpenNMS users (and make some new ones) in that part of the world.

I’ll be posting a lot more about all of these trips in the near future, and hope to see you at at least one of these events.

2017 Cubaconf

I’ve just returned from Cubaconf in Havana, which was also my first visit to Cuba. It was a great trip and I’ve got enough material for at least four blog posts. Most of them won’t deal with free and open source software, so I’ll put them up on my personal blog and I’ll add links here when they are done..

Cubaconf is in its second year, and while I really wish they would have called it “Cuba Libré” (grin) it was a good conference.

There is a spectrum within the Free, Libré, Open Source Software (FLOSS) community, and this is often described by trying to separate the term “open source” from “free software”. If we define “open source” as any software with a license that meets requirements of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and “free software” as any software with a license that meets the requirements of the Four Freedoms, they are the same. You can map the ten requirements of the OSD onto the four requirements of free software.

Open Source is Free Software Chart

However, it can be useful to separate those who look at FLOSS as simply a development methodology from those who view it as a social movement. When companies like Microsoft and Facebook publish open source software, they are simply looking to gain value for their business that such sharing can create. It’s a development methodology. When people talk about free software, they tend to focus on the “help your neighbor” aspect of it, and this was more the focus of Cubaconf than simply creating new code.

The main thing I discovered on my visit was that Cubans face severe limitations on many things, but I’ve never met a people more determine to do as much as they can to make their situation better, and to do it with such passion. If I had to pick a theme for the conference, that would be it: passionate continuous improvement.

Cubaconf Registration

The three day conference had the following structure: Day One was a standard conference with keynotes and five tracks of presentations, Day Two had keynotes and more of a “barcamp” organization, and Day Three was set aside for workshops, as well as the obligatory video game tournament.

They did have the best lanyard sponsor I’ve seen at a technology conference:

Cubaconf Lanyard and Badge

I was in Cuba with my friend and coworker Alejandro, who used to live in Venezuela and is a fluent Spanish speaker, and Elizabeth K. Joseph, who promotes the open source aspects of Mesosphere. We shared a three bedroom “casa particular” in Old Havana, about a ten minute walk from the conference, which was held on the second floor (third floor if you are American) of the Colegio de San Gerónimo.

Everyone was together on the main room for the first keynote.

Cubaconf People in Room

While both English and Spanish were spoken at the conference, the presentations were overwhelmingly in Spanish, which was to be expected. I can get by in Spanish, but the first speaker, Ismael Olea, spoke fast even for the native speakers. At least I could understand most of the content in his slides.

Cubaconf Ismael Olea

Olea is from Spain and did a keynote on HackLab Almería. Almería is a province in the southeastern part of Spain, and with a population of around 700,000 people it is much smaller than provinces like Madrid (6.5 million) and Barcelona (5.5 million). As such, the region doesn’t get as much attention as the larger provinces, and so they goal of Hacklab Almería is to use technology at the “hyperlocal” level. They define themselves as a “collective of technological , social and creative experimentation” and FLOSS plays a large role in their mission.

After the keynote, we broke up into individual sessions. I went to one called “How to Make Money with Free Software” presented by Valessio Brito from Brazil. While he spoke mainly in Spanish, his slides were in Portuguese, but I was able to follow along. His presentation focused on how he used his knowledge of FLOSS to get consulting engagements around the world. This was pretty topical since in Cuba, as elsewhere, having strong software skills can be lucrative, and since a lot of proprietary software is either impossible to get or too expensive, having skills in open source software is a plus.

Cubaconf Valessio Brito

Also, I liked his shirt.

Our OpenNMS presentation was in the next time slot. I asked our hosts if they would like the presentation in English or Spanish, and when they said Spanish I asked Alejandro to give it. He did a great job, even though he had only a short time to understand the slides.

Cubaconf Alejandro Galue

The lunch break came next, and we walked a couple of blocks to the Casa de Africa, a museum dedicated to the African influence in Cuban culture.

Cubaconf Lunch Break

We ate sandwiches and talked out on the patio. This would be the location for lunch for all three days.

Cubaconf Maira Sutton

After lunch I watched a presentation by Maira Sutton called “Fighting Cyber Dystopia with Tech Solidarity and the Digital Commons” which is a long way to express the idea of using free software combined with working together to take back some of the power from large corporations. Her main example talked about the city of Austin, Texas, and its fight with Uber and Lyft. Austin wanted all ride sharing drivers to have to undergo a background check that included fingerprints. Sounds reasonable, but Uber and Lyft resisted, eventually leaving the city.

However, services like Uber and Lyft can be downright useful, so a number of startups filled in the gap, offering similar services that met the City’s fingerprint requirements. Instead of acquiescing to local laws, Uber and Lyft took their fight to the State legislature, which overturned Austin’s regulation.

Even though it is a sad ending, the example did demonstrate that combining technology and social action can result in solutions that can meet or exceed those provided by large commercial companies.

Cubaconf First Night's Event

For each night of the conference there was an event, and the one for Tuesday was held at a modern art gallery on the southern side of Old Havana. There was lots of food and drink, and I got exposed to a project called cuban.engineer. This is a group to promote technology careers within Cuba, and I had seen their shirts at the conference.

Cubaconf cuban.engineer shirts

In a lot of the world we take Internet access for granted. I can remember accessing the Internet from the night market in Siem Reap, Cambodia, on an open wi-fi connection. That doesn’t exist in Cuba. Cuba is one of the most disconnected countries in the world, which can make working with technology difficult. Access is controlled by an agency called ETESCA. To access the Internet you purchase a card which offers a certain number of hours of use, and then you have to locate an area with a wi-fi hotspot (usually near a park). The card has a number of digits for a username and a number of digits as a password, and once you get connected you hope you stay connected long enough to do what you need to do.

No one is exempt from this. Even in our apartment the owner would use one of these cards to enable access for the hotspot on the ground floor. So, if you are a technology business in Havana, your first job is to located your office near a hotspot, and then buy a bunch of these cards.

Thus you can imagine that sharing in a big part of the culture. People burn and swap CDs with software such as Ubuntu on them, and they tend to use Gitlab to make local mirrors of code repositories. While wi-fi equipment can be hard to come by, people have been able to set up their own, private wi-fi networks within cities like Havana to make sharing easier. There is no Internet access (I joked that it was Cuba’s “dark web“) but they can set up tools like Rocket.Chat to communicate and share.

Despite limitations in acquiring software, Microsoft Windows is still the most common operating system running on Cuban computers. An attempt was made to create a Cuba focused Linux-based distro called Nova. I was told that they even experimented with making it look as close to Windows 7 as possible, but people were still tied to using Windows. According to Wikipedia this distro is no more, which is a shame.

Cubaconf Mixæl Laufer

The second day started with the meter pegged at full on social justice, with a presentation by Dr. Mixæl S. Laufer, Ph.D., from Four Thieves Vinegar. They are a collective aiming to share information on how to create pharmaceuticals in places where they might not be available. If you live in the US than you probably heard of Martin Shkreli who as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals raised prices 5600%, and EpiPen maker Mylan who raised the price of this life saving device several hundred percent just because they could. Laufer showed how you could make your own EpiPen for around $30, among other things.

Now drug companies will say that they have to charge that amount to cover the costs of creating new drugs, but the EpiPen greed demonstrated that wasn’t true. Running health care as a “for profit” enterprise has always seemed inherently wrong due to the incentives being more toward making money versus keeping people healthy, but that is commentary for another time and place.

I had to leave after that presentation for something special. I make classic cocktails as a hobby, and one of our hosts asked me to speak to a school for bartenders (cantineros) on the great tradition of Cuba cocktails. It was a blast and I’ll write that up soon.

Cubaconf Wednesday Event

Wednesday night’s event was held, appropriately, at a bar in an area called Barber’s Alley. It was a fun gathering and I got a nice picture of some of our hosts.

Cubaconf Hosts

Left to right is Jessy, Pablo, pb, and Adalberto.

There was also a guy there who made pipes, specifically replicas of native American peace pipes, and one was passed around.

Cubaconf Peace Pipe

The third and final day was a series of workshops, but was started with a keynote from Ailin Febles, from the Uniōn de Informāticas de Cuba, a non-profit organization to bring together “all technicians, professionals and people related to information and communication technologies in a space that enables mutual support of the associates in the achievement of their professional, academic, scientific, cultural and personal objectives”.

Cubaconf Ailin Febles

Of course, a lot of their organization is driven by open source software.

Cubaconf Software used by UIC

I hope they switch to Nextcloud from Owncloud soon.

There was one morning workshop in English, ironically by a German named Christian Weilbach, on machine learning. I was interested in the topic since I keep hearing about it lately, and the fact that I would probably be able to understand it was a plus. To me machine learning is magic, and I wanted to dispel some of that magic.

Cubaconf Christian Weilbach

It worked. It turns out that machine learning is, to a large extent, what we used to call linear algebra. It just is able to work on much larger and more complex data sets. I’m still eager to play more with this technology, but it was nice to learn that it really isn’t all that new.

Cubaconf Old Car Taxi

After lunch we decided to spend our last afternoon exploring Havana a bit.

Cubaconf Brewery Event

The final evening event was in a brewery, and I enjoyed the beer. What I enjoyed more was the opportunity to talk with Inaury about race in Cuba. Cubans come in all shapes and sizes, from people with light skin, blond hair and blue eyes to people so dark they are almost blue, yet they all seem to interact and socialize with each other more so than any other place I’ve been. I plan to chat more about that in a blog post as well.

Overall I had a great time in Cuba. I love the fact that working in free software means I can make new friends in almost any country, and that even a place with limited resources can put on a great conference. If you get a chance to go to Cubaconf, you should take it.

CubaConf 2017

UPDATE: Today the United States administration announced tougher restrictions on travel to Cuba. While nothing has changed at the moment, there will be some changes in the next 30 days. This should not impact people attempting to go to Cuba for this conference as it should fall under the “professional” or “educational” travel categories. This may change again before November and I’ll be sure to post updates.

While tourist travel remained officially banned, Obama also allowed a broad category of “people to people” visits to Cuba. Trump’s new directive still allows individual travel in all but that category, and reverts to an earlier policy of requiring “people to people” visits only in a Treasury-licensed group.

Free and open source software is as close to a true meritocracy than anything else I’ve found. It doesn’t matter what is the color of your skin, your gender or where you live, your value is judged simply by your contributions to the project. I wrote up my favorite instance of that for opensource.com concerning my friend Alejandro who got involved with OpenNMS when he lived in Venezuela. He and his wife are now permanent residents in the US due to his work on our project.

I actually forget how I came across CubaConf, but I was immediately interested in attending. This is an annual free software conference held in Havana, Cuba.

CubaConf

It has been illegal for US Citizens to travel to Cuba since before I was born. Last year the Obama administration eased some of those restrictions, so it is now possible, under certain conditions, to travel to Cuba as well as to use US Dollars while there.

Cuba has been pretty isolated since the 1960s, and as it races to catch up with the rest of the world it will need access to modern technology, especially software. I see an opportunity for free software to play a huge role in the future of that country, and I am eager to meet the people who will help make that happen.

I want to use this post to encourage all of my free and open source software friends to come to CubaConf. This is a three-day event that follows a format similar to one we used for our OpenNMS user conferences. The first day is a normal conference, with various tracks and presentations set to a schedule. The second day is a “barcamp” style conference where the attendees will set the agenda, and the third day is a hackathon.

Presentations are welcome in both Spanish and English, so I’ve submitted two talks (both in English). One is on starting an open source business. This will be different from my usual talk as I want to focus on how someone in Cuba could both spread the use of free software while getting paid to do it, without as much focus on setting up a corporation or other formal business entity. The second talk is on OpenNMS. While business transactions are still difficult between the US and Cuba, I really want to bring the magic that is OpenNMS to their attention so that when things ease between our countries people will be familiar with it.

I plan to attend all three days, and Alejandro is coming with me to help with any language issues (my Spanish is passable but not nearly as fluent as a native speaker). Note that the Call for Papers is open until the end of August.

Since you might be hesitant to consider going to Cuba from the United States, I wanted to share with you how it works.

First, tourism to Cuba for Americans is still illegal. However, the State Department has come up with a list of 12 categories which qualify for visiting.

12 Visa Categories for Cuba

In the case of CubaConf, you will choose either number four “Professional research and professional meetings” or number five “Educational activities”. I guess number six might work “Public performances, clinics, workshops, athletic and other competitions, and exhibitions” since it is kind of a workshop, but I’d stick with the first two. Since I am a free software professional, I plan to use number four, as I consider this a professional meeting.

Note that Cuba could care less about why you are there – this is a requirement of the US government.

Second, once you have a legal travel category, you’ll need a visa. In speaking with my favorite airline, American Airlines (they offer direct flights to Havana from Charlotte, NC, and Miami, FL), once you book your travel they will outsource the visa process to Cuba Travel Services who will handle the whole thing via e-mail. The visa costs $50 and it looks like there may be a $35 fee, but I’m not sure if the fee applies if you are referred via the airline and it may be built into the price of the ticket.

Speaking of things included in the price, the third thing to consider is that all Americans traveling to Cuba must have non-US health insurance. This is included as a $25 charge when you purchase your ticket.

That covers much of the “getting there” part. The fourth, and in my mind most important thing to know is that Cuba is still very much a cash-only country. American banks are still not doing business there so your credit cards won’t work, nor will the ATM, so you’ll need to bring cash. I verified this with calls to Bank of America, Chase and Citi – currently none of those banks have cards that work in that country.

There are two types of currency in use: The Cuban National Peso (CUP) and the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) or “kook”. The CUC is pegged to the dollar and is the currency used by most visitors. Luckily, Havana is a pretty safe place, although I still won’t want to carry around a lot of money if I can avoid it.

I’m not sure where I will stay. Being a big Marriott fan I do have the option to stay at the Four Points Sheraton, but it seems to be pretty far away from the Colegio Universitario San Gerónimo where the conference will be held. Most people visiting stay in a “casa particular” which is a room in someone’s house, and it appears that Airbnb is also in Cuba.

I plan to use the open source way and just ask my friends organizing the conference where I should stay. It is very easy to do, as they have set up a Telegram channel for the conference. While Spanish is the main language in the channel, English is welcome, and if you are thinking about coming to CubaConf I would consider going there first.

I am very exited about the opportunity to visit Havana in November. Despite the modern history between the US and Cuba, I know I’ll make some new friends.

Software libre crea amistades inmediatas.

2017 Europe: Brussels and FOSDEM

This post is about a week overdue, but for the first time in my life I came down with a vicious case of “con crud”. This is a illness that you can get after attending a conference or convention (no reference since the top hits on Google all reference “furries“). This really knocked me out – mainly sinus congestion so severe that my head hurt so bad I couldn’t really sleep. It just laughed at my attempt to treat it with pseudophedrine, and nothing but time seemed to help. Luckily I feel better now and I’m eager to talk about my great time in Brussels at my first FOSDEM.

The Free Open Source Developers European Meeting is probably the largest free software event in the world. This year an expected 8000 people descended on the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and I believe every one of them walked by our stand. It was insane.

I arrived from Riga Friday night and made it to my hotel. My so-called friends had already abandoned me and headed toward the Grand Place and Cafe Delirium, the de facto pre-conference bar.

Cafe Delirium Crowd

Against all odds I managed to catch up with them in the alley outside the bar. Ronny and Markus had come over from Germany, as did Simon and Anya. Jonathan and Craig had come from the UK, and I finally got to meet the amazing Cyrille, a long time OpenNMS contributor who lives in Brussels. There was beer.

Our Gang at Cafe Delirium

We headed over to the university early on Saturday to set up our booth. While this was my first FOSDEM, I was told by a couple of long time attendees that the conference outgrew the venue years ago, with various suggestions for why: from “tradition” to “it’s free”. In any case, it does create an atmosphere that can only be described as special.

FOSDEM Stand

We had a stand in Building K on the second level. This was in a wide hallway surrounding a large auditorium where a number of sessions were held. From the start we got a lot of traffic to the stand, and unlike many conferences the people that stopped seemed genuinely interested in learning about OpenNMS and weren’t just there to check out the swag.

And we had really good swag. In addition to a number of stickers (including the awesome “Ulf Mate” sticker as a play on the “Club Mate” logo and slogan), we had, new for this show, OpenNMS keychain/bottle openers which were a big hit.

OpenNMS Keychains

I also got interviewed for Hacker Public Radio. I don’t remember much of what I said, but people seemed to be into it (grin).

It is seriously difficult for me to describe the crowds. When I needed the restroom, I had to make my way downstairs and then fight my way through a crowd so packed I think it rivaled that year I went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

FOSDEM Crowd

But it just lent to the energy and atmosphere of the place. I know from social media that a number of people I know were there that I just missed (looking at you Brian Proffitt) but I did get to see some old friends and I make a few new ones. One person I was happy to meet for the first time was Carol Chen. She is the community manager for ManageIQ, and I first learned about her when Jeff was invited to do an OpenNMS talk at the ManageIQ Design Summit.

Carol Chen and Ulf

She showed up at the stand on Sunday in search of one of our keychains, but we had run out. I had put one away for me but was happy to give it to her. After all, I can always get more.

One thing that sets FOSDEM apart from other open source conferences is the emphasis on “free” software, and some of the social justice causes that naturally follow. Heck, the University has “free” (as in freedom) in its name. Considering that the US President had signed a “Muslim Ban” the week before the conference, it was cool to see this sign on campus.

Refugees Sign

But not all of the fun happened at ULB. Brussels has some beautiful architecture, and just wandering around you might come across a stunning building like this church.

Brussels Church

Nothing is probably as striking as the Grand Place, or central square of Brussels. It is surrounded by tall buildings, some of which represent Guildhalls of various crafts. My friend Daniel pointed out to me that a lot of the money for those buildings probably came from Antwerp during the height of the Hanseatic League. Since the cities of Tallinn and Riga were key players in the Hansa, it kind of brought this European trip full circle.

That’s not to say there aren’t modern things in Brussels. I’ll post this picture without comment.

Mr. Ego Sign

We ended the conference on Sunday with a small group of us meeting for beers and then dinner. Dinner was held at Restaurant Vincent and it was quite good.

Dinner at Vincent's

At the table is Karen Sandler from the Software Freedom Conservancy, me, Lukas and Daniel Ranc from Paris (Daniel teaches at Télécom SudParis and his son is working on his Ph.D.), Cyrille Bollu, Ronny Trommer and Markus von Rüden from OpenNMS, and Spot Callaway from Red Hat.

My only wish is that we could have sat at a round table, since the long table caused conversation to be split into two. I really wanted Daniel and Spot to chat, as Daniel is working on some cool software for education for doing quizzes and surveys in class, and Spot is focused on higher education at Red Hat. But in any case I really enjoyed the conversation, especially one story that Spot told of his college days that I pretty much can’t top (and I pride myself on being able to hold my own when it comes to storytelling).

It was a nice end to an exciting week.

2017 Europe: Riga

Latvia is the 39th country I’ve been able to visit, and based on Riga it is easily in my top ten. I really enjoyed my short time here.

Getting off the bus from Tallinn, the first thing I noticed was that it was a little colder here. Both Helsinki and Tallinn are right on the water, but Riga is slightly inland. Still, it wasn’t a hard walk from the bus station to the hotel, and I got to see some of the Old Town.

Frozen Stream in Riga

I had the rest of the day to myself, so I decided to explore the City. One thing I noticed about Riga is that it is very clean. Granted, when you have piles of snow that don’t melt this doesn’t mean everything looks brand new, but I didn’t see the usual trash and paper on the ground like I might find in London or Paris. While the buildings may be old, they are well maintained, and some are quite beautiful, which is not how I imagined a former Soviet bloc country to look.

Riflemen Monument

Granted, there were a few reminders, such as the impressive “Riflemen Monument“. This was originally meant to honor those in the Latvian military who supported the Bolsheviks (the “red” riflemen) but I was told that now it also honors the opposition “white” riflemen.

The reason I came to Riga was to participate in a conference held by LATA (Latvijas atvērto tehnoloģiju asociācija or the Lativian Open Technology Association). LATA is a volunteer organization with only one employee, Ieva Vitolina, who was kind enough to invite me to speak.

Not only were the people in general in Riga very kind to me, the LATA people treated me like a diplomat.

Main Entry Hall for the LATA Conference

Before the conference I was introduced to Jānis Treijs, of the LATA Board. A very nice man, Jānis is very tall, and I had to joke that when I studied physics we used to say all people were two meters tall to make the math easier, but it is rare I actually get to meet someone that tall.

LATA conference room

The conference was held at the Latvijas Universitātes Dabaszinātņu akadēmiskais centrs (Latvian University of Natural Sciences Academic Center) which was a very modern facility, much nicer than many of the schools I attended in my youth. The morning program was held in this main room, and after lunch we would break out into another room as well (which was where my talk was to be made). About half of the program was in Latvian, with the other half in English.

IBM was a sponsor, and Andrzej Osmak from Poland gave a talk on IBM’s approach to open.

Andrzej Osmak

To be quite frank, OpenNMS would not exist without IBM. They are a main supporter of the Apache Foundation and most of the developers use Eclipse as their IDE. The only small criticism I would have about that talk was an emphasis on permissive licensing. I think permissive licenses are great in the proper context, but they aren’t the best choice for everyone.

This was followed by another talk in English by Dr. John O’Flaherty from Ireland.

John O’Flaherty

His focus was on “open data” and the different levels with which data can be made available. I am always amazed at what wonderful things people can create when companies and governments make data available in a usable fashion, and John gave several examples of those.

The remaining morning talks were in Latvian, so I just tried to understand them through the slides. The Clusterpoint presentation was interesting in that the slides were in English but the presentation itself was given in Latvian.

The morning ended with an awards presentation which had three categories: the most open institution, the most substantial contribution to technology promotion, and the best start-up.

Then it was the lunch break, which I spent talking about business and free software with Valdis, Ieva’s husband. It was then time to get ready for my own presentation.

There were two presentations in English about open source business. Including mine, Aleksejs Vladiševs the founder of Zabbix shared his experiences. It was kind of ironic that both of us work at pure open source companies and both of us work in the network monitoring space. Despite that, we tend not to compete, and it was interesting to see how similar our paths were.

My talk seemed well received, although I had a little less than 30 minutes so I didn’t have any time for questions. I was humbled that the winner of the LATA start-up award, Mihails Scepanskis, wanted to ask me some questions about open source business afterward, and along with his wife Anna and Vladis, we spent pretty much the rest of the conference talking. As usual, my favorite conference track turned into the “Hallway Track” once again.

National Library

That evening, the organizers of the conference took a group of us on a tour of the National Library of Latvia. This is a major landmark in Riga and it is easy to spot from many places in the city. It was planned for many years, but finally opened in 2014.

National Library Sign

The interior hosts a 400+ seat state of the art theatre, but the first thing I noticed was the central atrium.

National Library Atrium

Inside it there is a wall of books. These were books donated by the Latvian people to the library, and it stretches for several stories. We were also told an interesting story, when the library opened several thousand books were moved from the old location to the new building via a “human chain“. People formed a line over a mile long and passed the books hand to hand.

National Library Book Wall

The tour took us up through the building, and we got to see a number of the large (and not so large) reading rooms. One that caught my eye was dedicated to American culture.

National Library American Culture Room

I found it interesting that the books on display included ones by Noam Chomsky, James Carville and articles from the New Yorker.

Each floor was color-coded, and we were told that the colors corresponded to the “pre-Euro” Latvian currency, the Lat. The higher floors had colors that corresponded to higher denominations.

National Library

At the top was an interesting display. It was a Cabinet of Folksongs. This wooden cabinet holds over a quarter of a million Latvian folksongs written on small slips of paper.

Cabinet of Folksongs

The tour was followed by a wonderful meal in a restaurant in the Library itself. I got to spend more time talking with Aleksejs, Jānis, his wife and John, as well as drinking some nice beer over wonderful food.

The next morning Jānis’s wife had arranged for me to meet with the ITC department of the City Council of Riga. Riga firmly believes in Internet access for its population. The City has more free WiFi coverage than any other European City, and the Council is responsible for providing as many services as possible to its citizens to make sure the government is responsive to their needs. It was a refreshing conversation. They use a number of tools, including Zabbix, so I wasn’t expecting them to switch to OpenNMS, but I had a nice meeting learning about their environment and sharing a little bit about OpenNMS.

Corner House

We had a little time before lunch, so we made a quick visit to the “Corner House“. This was a beautiful apartment building that was taken over by the Cheka, a division of the KGB, and was the source of terror for many citizens of Latvia as late as 1991. It reminded me of the House of Terror in Budapest. Jānis’s wife told a story of her mother having to go to this building for an interview as the Cheka was interested in one of her relatives.

Corner House

It is a shame that a thing of such beauty could be used for such evil.

After that we met up with Jānis for a wonderful meal, and then I made my way to the airport for my trip to Brussels for FOSDEM.

As the airBaltic Q400 took off and got above the clouds, the cabin was suddenly filled with light. I realized that I had not seen the sun properly in a week. If Riga and its people can be this beautiful in the dark of winter, it must be a truly magical place in the summer. I hope one day soon to return.

2017 Europe: Tallinn

After a wonderful visit to Helsinki, it was time for the next leg of the journey: Tallinn. Estonia will mark the 38th country I’ve been able to visit.

To get to Estonia I took the Tallink ferry service. There are several trips from Helsinki to Tallinn each day, so I planned to leave around 10:30 to arrive around 13:00.

I’m not a boat guy. While I’m fine in planes I don’t do well in boats, but the ferry is quite large. Here is a picture of one heading the other way through a window on mine:

Tallink Ferry

It had ten decks, so I made my way up to deck nine and found a seat near the window.

Tallink Ferry Interior

It was a quite civilized way to travel. Even though the sea was a little choppy, the ride was very smooth. You almost didn’t realize the ship was moving.

When we arrived I took a taxi to the hotel, dropped off my bags and set out to discover the city. I was in the “Old Town” section of Tallinn which was quite beautiful. There were a lot of cobblestone streets and well maintained old buildings with plenty of shops and restaurants.

Street in Tallinn

One of the things I like to do when visiting a new city is to play Ingress. I know that sounds weird, but one part of the game involves completing “missions” which require you to walk around. These missions are often created by locals and it can give you a great overview of a new place. Tallinn was no exception.

Tallinn was only a degree or more warmer than Helsinki, but it made quite a difference. I had issues walking around Helsinki because in places the slush had refrozen into ice and it made walking a little slippery. The streets in Tallinn were mainly dry and I could move around a lot faster.

There is a great mixture of old and new,

Tallinn Grafitti

and I saw a lot of construction. I’m not sure but I think this was the demolition of a Soviet-era housing block to make way for a more modern building.

Tallinn Building Demolition

It also had a lot in common with other European cities, such as this huge flower market I came across:

Tallinn Flowers

I think if I lived here I’d stop by every day and buy some fresh flowers for home.

While I practiced a number of Estonian words (When I came into the hotel and said “Tervist” one person mistook me for the mailman and came out of the back office, so I must have nailed the accent), everyone seemed more than happy to talk to me in English, and I didn’t meet a single rude person the entire stay.

Which, alas, wasn’t long. I was only in Tallinn on my way to Riga, so the next morning I got up and made my way to the Central Coach Station to grab my LUX Express bus to Riga.

LUX Express Bus

The five hour journey was made in comfort. I was in the back section which consisted of just one seat complete with “seat back entertainment”. I thought about watching some movies (they were pretty much the same selection as the ones on the plane over here) but I decided I’d rather watch the countryside go by and to doze a little.

Inside LUX Express Bus

It was snowing lightly and as soon as we got away from the coast there were several inches of snow on the ground. It looked very peaceful. When we crossed the Pärnu River it was completely frozen, and off in the distance I could see people skating on the ice. I’d heard of frozen rivers before but this was the first time I’d seen one.

When I arrived in Riga the first thing I noticed was the cold. Riga is a few degrees colder than either Helsinki or Tallinn, and I was happy I brought my winter coat that I bought in Sweden a couple of years ago. I am eagerly awaiting the conference which is the reason I am here, and to see some friends again and make a few new ones.

2017 Europe: Helsinki

I am spending a week touring the eastern side of Europe, with the first stop being two nights in Helsinki. I should end up in Brussels next weekend for FOSDEM, and I am looking forward to my first time at that conference.

I’m here because I was invited to speak at an open tech conference in Riga, Latvia, and I couldn’t resist the invitation. Riga is home to Zabbix, a company very much like OpenNMS in that we both do network monitoring and we are both 100% open source. One might think this would make us enemies – quite the contrary. For some reason we really get along and also, for some reason, we rarely compete.

In trying to find a route from North Carolina to Latvia, I noticed a number of choices went through Helsinki. I had been to Helsinki once and really enjoyed it (despite it being winter). I also remembered from that trip that Finland is very close to both Russia and Estonia. You can be in St. Petersburg in three hours by train or Tallinn in two hours by ferry.

It was my goal to visit 50 countries by the time I turned 50 years old. I didn’t make that goal (I got to 37), but I figured I could use this trip to both visit Estonia and Latvia, adding two to the list.

My first flight out of RDU was canceled, so they routed me through JFK. I arrived in Helsinki three hours later than planned, but my bag made it with me so it worked out. It was dark and sleeting, but it wasn’t too difficult to take the new train into the city center and find my hotel.

HSL Train Helsinki Airport

I always like coming to Finland because it was the home of Linus Torvalds. Now I know he has lived in the US for many years and I also know he didn’t invent the idea of free software, but I still feel some sort of homecoming when I arrive since I doubt OpenNMS would be here if it weren’t for Linus.

There is an awesome company in Helsinki that is also an OpenNMS customer, so I was able to spend Monday visiting with them. Due to an NDA I can’t name them, but they are doing some amazing work in this part of the world. I got to learn more about their business as well as to share where we are going with OpenNMS.

Like many of our larger clients, they have an inventory system that they have integrated with OpenNMS in order to manage their monitoring needs. Since that system also contains customer relationships (which equipment is used to provide network services for particular clients of theirs) we played around with the Business Service Monitor (BSM). They should be able to export their network information into OpenNMS to create a customer impact topology, so that when there is an issue they can quickly determine the root cause. It is exactly why we created the feature and I’m eager to see how they use it.

They are also interested in using the Minion feature due in Horizon 19. This should allow them to easily deal with overlapping address space and any scalability concerns, plus they should be able to get rid of their current “manager of managers” solution. Exciting times.

They are looking to hire, so if you are in the area and have OpenNMS experience, send me your CV and I’ll be happy to forward it on to them.

Ulf and Hacienda Napoles at Liberty or Death

That evening, Ulf and I managed to indulge our taste for vintage and craft cocktails with a visit to Liberty or Death. This is a bar near my hotel that serves amazing cocktails in a very relaxed atmosphere. It was a nice ending to a very good day.

Ferry Terminal Statue

The next day will find me on a ferry boat to Tallinn. I don’t know of any OpenNMS users in Estonia, but I am still eager to see the city.

Emley Moor, Kirklees, West Yorkshire

I spent last week back in the United Kingdom. I always find it odd to travel to the UK. When I’m in, say, Germany or Spain, I know I’m in a different country. With the UK I sometimes forget and hijinks ensue. As Shaw may have once said, we are two countries separated by a common language.

Usually I spend time in the South, mainly Hampshire, but this trip was in Yorkshire, specifically West Yorkshire. I was looking forward to this for a number of reasons. For example, I love Yorkshire Pudding, and the Four Yorkshiremen is my favorite Monty Python routine.

Also, it meant that I could fly into Manchester Airport and miss Heathrow. Well, I didn’t exactly miss it.

I was visiting a big client that most people have never heard of, even though they are probably an integral part of your life if you live in the UK. Arqiva provides the broadcast infrastructure for much of the television and mobile phone industry in the country, as well as being involved in deploying networks for projects such as smart metering and the Internet of Things.

We were working at the Emley Moor location, which is home to the Emley Moor Mast. This is the largest freestanding structure in Britain (and third in the European Union). With a total height of 1084 feet, it is higher than the Eiffel Tower and almost twice as high as the Washington Monument.

Emily Moor Mast View

The mast was built in 1971 to replace a metal lattice tower that fell, due to a combination of ice and wind, in 1969. I love the excerpt from the log book mentioned in the Wikipedia article:

  • Day: Lee, Caffell, Vander Byl
  • Ice hazard – Packed ice beginning to fall from mast & stays. Roads close to station temporarily closed by Councils. Please notify councils when roads are safe (!)
  • Pye monitor – no frame lock – V10 replaced (low ins). Monitor overheating due to fan choked up with dust- cleaned out, motor lubricated and fan blades reset.
  • Evening :- Glendenning, Bottom, Redgrove
  • 1,265 ft (386 m) Mast :- Fell down across Jagger Lane (corner of Common Lane) at 17:01:45. Police, I.T.A. HQ, R.O., etc., all notified.
  • Mast Power Isolator :- Fuses removed & isolator locked in the “OFF” position. All isolators in basement feeding mast stump also switched off. Dehydrators & TXs switched off.

They still have that log book, open to that page.

Emily Moor Log Book

If you have 20 minutes, there is a great old documentary on the fall of the old tower and the construction of the new mast.

On my last day there we got to go up into the structure. It’s pretty impressive:

Emily Moor Mast Up Close

and the inside looks like something from a 1970s sci-fi movie:

Emily Moor Mast Inside

The article stated that it takes seven minutes to ride the lift to the top. I timed it at six minutes, fifty-seven seconds, so that’s about right (it’s fifteen seconds quicker going down). I was working with Dr. Craig Gallen who remembers going up in the open lift carriage, but we were in an enclosed car. It’s very small and with five of us in it I will admit to a small amount of claustrophobia on the way up.

But getting to the top is worth it. The view is amazing:

View from Emily Moor Mast

It was a calm day but you could still feel the tower sway a bit. They have a plumb bob set up to measure the drift, and it was barely moving while we were up there. Toby, our host, told of a time he had to spend seven hours installing equipment when the bob was moving four to five inches side to side. They had to move around on their hands and knees to avoid falling over.

Plumb Bob

I’m glad I wasn’t there on that day, but our day was fantastic. Here is a shot of the parking lot where the first picture (above) was taken.

View of Emily Moor Parking Lot

I had a really great time on this trip. The client was amazing, and I really like the area. It reminds me a bit of the North Carolina mountains. I did get my Yorkshire Pudding in Yorkshire (bucket list item):

Yorkshire Pudding in Yorkshire

and one evening Craig and I got to meet up with Keith Spragg.

Keith Spragg and Craig Gallen

Keith is a regular on the OpenNMS IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net), and he works for Southway Housing Trust. They are a non-profit that manages several thousand homes, and part of that involves providing certain IT services to their tenants. They are mainly a Windows/Citrix shop but OpenNMS is running on one of the two Linux machines in their environment. He tried out a number of solutions before finding that OpenNMS met his needs, and he pays it forward by helping people via IRC. It always warms my heart to see OpenNMS being used in such places.

I hope to return to the area, although I was glad I was there in May. It’s around 53 degrees north latitude, which puts it level with the southern Alaskan islands. It would get light around 4am, and in the winter ice has been known to fall in sheets from the Mast (the walkways are covered to help protect the people who work there).

I bet Yorkshire Pudding really hits the spot on a cold winter’s day.

Zabbix and OpenNMS

The network management application space is rather cluttered, with a number of “fauxpensource” offerings that can really confuse the landscape when people are looking for truly open solutions.

Two exceptions to that are OpenNMS (‘natch) and Zabbix.

According to the Wikipedia article, Zabbix was started in 1998, which makes it a little older than OpenNMS, which I’m told was started in July of 1999 although we use March 29th, 2000, as the official “birth date” since that’s when the project was registered on Sourceforge.

Despite being in the same space and about the same age, I’d never really used Zabbix or interacted with their community until 2009 when I met Rihards Olups.

Rihards is kind of “the Mouth of Zabbix” and I met him at the 2009 Open Source Monitoring Conference where he brought me some gifts from his home in Lativa. He repeated the gesture at this year’s OSMC, and I asked when would be his next trip to the US so I could return the favor. He pulled out his handy and said “Are you anywhere near Raleigh, North Carolina?”

Since that happens to be pretty much my home I was happy to find out that he was coming to town. Even though he was sick with the flu that had been going around, we managed to get a gang together for dinner.

Left to right, that’s Rihards (with the awesome beard), Eric (who was in town from Texas), Sarah, Seth, David, Me, and Ben.

We went to The Pit, which is an acceptable, local barbecue restaurant that is much more “presentable” than some of my favorite dives although the food isn’t quite as good, and then afterward we went next door to the “barcade” and played games.

I played pinball (one of my favorite things to do) and Rihards played his first game on a real pinball machine. Yes, I’m a bit older than him.

One of the things I like about my job is that I can go most anyplace and find like-minded free software people. It’s awesome and I always have a good time. I hope to visit Riga in September around the time of the OpenNMS Users Conference and meet more.