We haven’t had an open registration training class for OpenNMS in a long time. The problem is that setting these things up is a real pain. You have to pick a date and place and hope that enough people sign up to cover costs much less enough to make a little money. The location is the main problem: hotels and training centers want you to commit to a class weeks if not months in advance with a large penalty if you have to cancel.

Thus we tend to structure our classes for businesses. Since most of our clients are larger businesses with access to training rooms, we fly in, train their people, and leave.

From left to right: Joel, Joe, Mike, Sean, Ronnie, Frank (eyes closed), Tina, Jay, Marv, Chad, Marty, Me, Bill and Shawn.

Last week we had an open class in Salt Lake City. Shawn Heisey of Mainstream Data supplied the room and bandwidth. This works out well for us since if we can’t fill the room we can easily cancel, and for supplying the room he gets to come for free. Ronnie Counts, a longtime OpenNMS user (I swear he was using it before I was) drove up from Arizona with a carload of routers, switches and servers so we’d have a lab environment to test against. In addition to the three of us we had 11 other people register, so the room was full.

It was a great class. I liked it because almost everyone had been using OpenNMS for some time, so we got to skip a lot of the “what OpenNMS can do” and focus on getting OpenNMS to do things. Unlike our business training, everyone was here because they wanted to be.

This was also the first class I did which was based on OpenNMS 1.3. Using Ronnie’s lab we even got the map working. I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a great time and hope to do it again soon.