The holidays are over, the hangovers have been recovered from, and in the meantime, a flurry of activity has been happening in the OpenNMS world. It's time for another This Week in OpenNMS!

Project Updates

• Stable: 1.6.2 Coming

  The goal is to release version 1.6.2 next week. There have been a number of bugs fixed (and a few small features added) since 1.6.2.

• Trunk: Provisioning

  Work continues on the new provisioning code at a frantic pace. We're not yet at a milestone where people can use it, but lots of pieces are coming together.

• Trunk: Acknowledgement Daemon

  Dave has begun work on Ackd, the OpenNMS acknowledgement daemon. This will allow API and user-interactive access to acknowledging alarms. The goal is to be able to acknowledge alarms through jabber, email, etc. upon receiving a notification of an issue.

• Trunk: Alarm Daemon

  Dave also worked on Alarmd, a daemon for managing persistence of alarms to improve event persistence performance and reduce delay in forwarding events to listeners.

  This immediately began discussions with a large Telco in Europe about their contributing a 3GPP compliant alarm strategy. Cool.

• Trunk: IRC Notification Strategy

  DJ committed a notification strategy that can notify you of events and outages through IRC chat.

• Trunk: Event Code Updates

  Antonio committed some updates to the event code allowing expanding varbinds in an event log message, as well as some changes to the event proxy.

• Trunk: Cross-Browser Map Support

  Antonio also committed a first-blush update of the OpenNMS map support that works with Safari and Firefox. It still needs some work, but is in a usable state now.

• Trunk: WMI Has Landed

  WMI support has landed in trunk! Thanks to Matt Raykowski for the hard work in implementing this much-requested feature!

  It supports polling and datacollection, and through the magic of j-Interop, it is completely platform-independent. You do not need to be running OpenNMS on Windows or have any kind of special proxy to collect WMI information from remote hosts, it's a pure-java client implementation using native DCOM to Windows hosts.

• Trunk: 1.7.0 Coming

  Alongside 1.6.2, we're looking forward to putting out our first unstable release in the 1.7 series. Considering all of the great work that has happened since 1.6 was branched, it was deemed time to make a release and get it out there for people to test. Look for it soon!

Order of the Green Polo Nomination: Matt Raykowski

In honor of his awesome WMI contribution, Matt Raykowski has now been added to the ranks of the Order of the Green Polo. The OGP is an organization of folks who have made a significant contribution to OpenNMS.

Welcome, Matt, and thank you!

Upcoming Events

• February 2nd-6th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group in Milan, Italy.

• February 9th-13th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

• March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

There has also been discussion of a user conference during the February training dates in Italy, but it's not yet been finalized. Stay tuned to the opennms-announce list for details when we have them.

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

Whew

That's it for this week. Tune in next week for another exciting installment.

Will we get 1.6.2 and 1.7.0 out on time? Will we create a provisioning system that can take down the Internet? Will we find out how Jeff was able to grown an extra set of hands to answer support tickets on two computers at once? Find out next Friday on This Week in OpenNMS!

If there's one thing I know about people who are involved in network management, it's that they're stats junkies. Case in point. (Hah, I mean, how cool is it to poll the weather in OpenNMS...) I put that to the test in the last week, most definitely.

I got slashdotted (and ars technica'd, and dugg) a few days ago, and despite being under the weather, it fired me up to do 2 things.

First of all, it got me excited about working on KDE more. I had a great time at the KDE 4.0 release event and for the first time got strong feedback from KDE folks on what I've been working on. I got a little bit of that at aKademy but I also still felt quite a bit like the outsider there. This time around there were a number of people who gave me great feedback, encouragement, and all-around made me feel like a part of the community.

As a result, the thing I'd hoped would happen most after getting the press did happen -- the kde-darwin IRC channel is hoppin' with people not only willing to help test things and give bug reports, but willing to dig into the code, and help out in other ways. (One guy is designing a sweet web site that will hopefully be at mac.kde.org when we can get the administrative stuff handled.) And as for testers... well, there've been at least 1200 people who have completed downloading the "everything" torrent!

Second of all, I obsessively watched my web page and download stats. I can't help it, I love watching the graphs go crazy.

We, of course, monitor my web site with OpenNMS. However, I've recently switched to a new server at my hosting provider and I hadn't noticed that I wasn't monitoring the new machine. So thanks, ars technica, for getting me to monitor my new server. The cobbler's children finally got some shoes. ;)

I also use Google Analytics for web-site tracking. You can see in the graph on the right the difference between last week and this week. (Last week is the little green bit at the bottom of the graph...) This week I've had over 13,000 unique visitors, when about 1,500 is the norm. That's just crazy!

And on that subject, Tarus and I were talking about a bug reported to the discuss list related to my recent changes to the OpenNMS RPM packages. Tarus joked that "at least two people are running nightly snapshots" which, of course, got me thinking, "Hmm, our Yum downloads aren't recorded on SourceForge, I wonder how many snapshot users we do have..."

I figured it would be maybe 20 or 30 people brave enough to run the nightly version of OpenNMS. Boy was I wrong. A quick grep through the logs shows that since we started doing snapshots, we've had almost 8 thousand snapshot downloads, from 900 unique hosts. That's not people running the latest release, that's people running whatever nightly code got checked in the day before. Granted, we do a pretty good job of making sure trunk is always usable, but "usable" is not the same as "regression tested" nor "proven in the field."

All I can say is, thanks to everyone willing to try things out, it's great to see that we've got that many people willing to be on the front lines making sure our software works.

Just a quick update, the KDE builds have been going well, I've been doing a bunch of cleanup on the info files, and making scripts to make it easier to manage 10.2-gcc3.3 and 10.3 concurrently (I actually generate the info files from a "common" set.) I'll probably be all finished up this weekend, and will be ready for a release along with the source, if things continue as they are. (yay)

And so, I'll leave you with this:

<RangerRick> now I know... uhh... a mac address
<Sortova> sshh
<Sortova> Everyone will want one

[Update:] Made more progress over the weekend, all that's left to do is make sure upgrading over the previous binaries works, and clean up some new dependencies, and I'm set. I also think I've fixed Qt so it works better with qmake projects.

* RangerRick sees the slashdot headline "NASCAR Coursebuilders, Drivers Consult Videogame Version" and wonders how much consulting there can be on figuring out new innovative ways to make an oval.
<RangerRick> just don't tell anyone from north carolina I said that, they'll kick me out of the state
<drm> shhhh
<bbraun> RangerRick: you don't have a mullet, do you?
<RangerRick> nope
<bbraun> do you have a mailbox as a hood scoop on your car?
<RangerRick> haha, nope.
<bbraun> what are you doing in north carolina then?
<RangerRick> irc'ing
<RangerRick> same as drm
<drm> you like NC barbeque, RangerRick?
<RangerRick> which part of NC? hah! I at least know that's a trick question.

They take their bar-be-que pretty seriously around here. Just don't let it get out that I think NASCAR is stupid. ;)

<TheWookie> I'm sitting here compiling stuff, fink is updating, i'm running nmap, and writing code in vim. A guy walks in, looks at my screen, and says "Can you actually understand that?" "Yeah" "Holy shit, it's like the matrix or something!"

<leviagpr> dear query,
<leviagpr> why are you so slow :(
<leviagpr> please answer,
<leviagpr> leviagpr
-!- zsazs is now known as query
<@query> it's because you've run me on MICRO$OFT $QL $ERVER
<@query> love,
<@query> query
<leviagpr> query loves me!!!

...for they are subtle, and quick to anger.

<Sortova> http://sourceforge.net/..._id=1&atid=200001
<Sortova> Got it back
<Sortova> I must promise not to be bad again
<Sortova> I guess they don't want anyone monitoring them ... cause I have 81000 freaking lost service events on their servers (grin)

<jkh_> fenestro: I'd say it's all pretty easy to summarize
<jkh_> fenestro: warrior: "One who is engaged aggressively or energetically in an activity, cause, or conflict: One engaged in acts of war or destruction"
<jkh_> fenestro: disk: "Where you keep your data"
<jkh_> hence "diskwarrior: A utility engaged in aggressively destroying your data"
<jkh_> what more is there to say?

<pogma> I figured putting cleanup code woulf be safe, exit(3) would call my cleanup function installed with atexit(3) and nothing would call dl* functions after that (hey! we are in exit), but on occasion c++ static destructors can get called after the cleanup code, and they might call a dl* function
<pogma> then dlcompat squats on my head and does a big poop

<Leimy> its not really a "bus" anymore I guess.... its a bit confusing
<Leimy> like I said... I want to read more about it :)
<Leimy> it might be a short bus

heh