The OpenNMS Project

One of the strongest aspects of the OpenNMS Project is the community of users and developers that has grown up around it. I’ve made some good and lasting friends during my time on the project, but it’s especially nice when that friendship extends to include families as well as fellow geeks. Kathy and I were therefore delighted to accept an invitation from fellow OGP member Antonio, to join him and his family for a holiday in their summer house in Positano.

This was a particularly generous (some might say brave) offer, as Antonio had never met Kathy or our children, but it was typical of the OGP in general and Antonio in particular. Although I speak no Italian (“Ciao” doesn’t count, apparently), and Kathy’s grasp is limited, language turned out not to be the barrier that we had feared. Roberta and Antonio have excellent English, and the Children all speak fluent Nintendo, so we all muddled along with a mixture of English, smiles, gestures and Mario Kart.

We had a wonderful time. Roberta and Antonio were charming and generous hosts, and our children got along okay, though I still don’t think Verity has forgiven Salvatore for constantly stealing her shoes.

Eddie was very impressed with Antonio’s venerable Twingo, waving goodbye to it at Napoli airport with some regret. We left for cold, rainy England laden with good memories, stories to tell and bottles of tomato sauce made by Roberta and her family. We look forward to returning the favour and hosting the Russo clan in England when the pain has receded and they’re ready to spend some more time with the English.

Just a quick post to say that I have updated the OTRS package for OpenNMS. It no longer depends on the hard-to-find Perl SOAP::DateTime module and should therefore be a smoother install for new users. No new capabilities are added in this release so you can skip it if you’re already up and running. Thanks to Michiel Beijen of OTRS for the suggestion.

More details can be found in the OpenNMS wiki.

Eric S Raymond tells us that “when you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor”. Well, it’s been several years since I used RT or OTRS in anger, and I’ve not been backward in searching for competent successors, but as yet nobody has come forward to look after the plugins for these packages. I guess I’m destined to keep a watch over them for a while yet. Every now and then somebody has questions about one or the other, I feel bad, then have to remind myself of how they work so that I can answer.

It must be that time of year again. I’ve noticed some queries over on “OpenNMS-discuss” as to whether the plugins are broken in recent releases. After a few hours fighting with a tottering stack of Perl modules, I can confirm that OpenNMS 1.8 still plays nicely with those two bad boys of the trouble-ticket world.

As an aside, the lack of a sensible uninstall strategy for most Perl modules made Parallels a godsend for this work. I really must upgrade to the latest version sometime (donations are always welcome ).

Now, if I can only find someone else to “own” the plugins before the next set of queries come in.

So it’s 10:05 here in the UK, and I’m sitting in the kitchen, listening to verity coughing on the baby monitor, drinking beer and watching Bamboo chug through my latest commit. Not very productive use of a Friday night, I think an Amateur Developer SITREP is in order.

At Dev-Jam 2006, David was kind enough to hand me an assignment use case that, at the time, was more flattering than productive. I spent the best part of the week baffled by maven, Spring and the time zone change, and didn’t make much progress. I did make some lasting friends though, went home fitter than I arrived and also found out why urandom gets through so much lotion.

Anyway, the problem has been bugging me ever since. I think I’ve got it nailed now, but it’s been nearly 4 years. I’ve had intermittent goes at it, including an aborted attempt to completely rewrite the report code. At one point, it started to resemble my own small-scale Project Xanadu. In February last year, whilst “resting” between jobs, I changed focus and started work on an API that could eventually allow the existing reports to be replaced using Jasper Reports or BIRT. Some of the work made it into the 1.7.9 release, but I was effectively stalled.

Interestingly, the impetus to finish the work came from others. Ronny and Jay have been working on Jasper Reports integration, which is now up in the main 1.7 branch. Their efforts prompted me to get my act together, and with some help from Ben, Alejandro and others got the branch cleaned up and tracking 1.7.

I’ve got a deadline now, too. I’ve been accepted as a speaker at the OpenNMS User Conference Europe in May, so I’d better get the code merged up into a release before then. Early-Bird registration is still open, and on the plus side, there will be some proper developers and actual users present. There may even be beer.

In the meantime, it would appear that Bamboo has finally decided that the branch passes all our tests. So it’s probably time to say hi to everyone on #opennms before they quit for the weekend.

Expect another update from me sometime in 2011….

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.
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If you follow TWIO, you might have noticed that I’ve resurrected the reporting feature that I was working on a while back. There’s a lot of useful management information waiting to be unlocked in the database, and at the moment it’s difficult to do that in a way thats tightly integrated with the rest of OpenNMS.
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I attended a great talk at last weekend’s Ohio Linux Fest by Jorge Castro with Ubuntu about “Building a Community Around Your Project” based on his experiences with gwibber. My rough notes are below.

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We are preparing to reorganize the OpenNMS website to make it easier to use, and part of that process is to move my blog to its own site and to merge the developer blogs into one place: http://www.opennms.org/blog.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Well, The last day or two has been quite a challenge. I’ve made some significant progress on the refactoring of collectd, but got held up for two key reasons. One is that I had gotten past the completely mechanical refactorings to the more sophisticated and I realized that the tests I had (or didn’t have) were not going to do it. Soooo… I had to start figuring out how to write some collectd tests. The second hindrance to progress was the fact that I had been ‘pussy footing’ around the ConfigFactories. They all but stopped my efforts to write tests and were making the refactoring difficult because some of the functions in the factory need to be on other objects.

So all this to say that today, I started refactoring the CollectionConfigFactory to simplify it. This effort has been very educational and has helped to solidify in my mind exactly what a ‘configuration DAO’ needs to look like and how it should be implemented. Hopefully I will be able to complete this soon as this is a prerequisite to abstracting the RRD code out.

Anyway, stay tuned as there is much more to come.

Matt

Well I didn’t make it on Thursday and I had Friday off for the holiday weekend. So it’s now Tuesday and I’m finally getting back to things. I spent some more time Monday working on Collectd and feel like things have gotten quite a bit simpler in there. I’ve been working primarily with Collectd.java and CollectableService.java trying to ‘find’ a good set of objects that describes what is going on in this set of code. I’ve introduced a few objects that make the code seem quite a bit simpler. Still need to work on the event handling though as well as the scheduling. THEN there’s SNMPCollector. That will be where the fun really begins.

Oh yeah, I also wanted to mention that I found a few places in the main collector that assume we are only collectiong SNMP data so I’ll have to figure out what to do about that.

Anyway, more to come,

Matt