Speaking of triaging the JIRA database, I’d like to re-post an article I wrote on my personal blog about reporting issues. The TL;DR version is: don’t be afraid to open an issue! Here it is in it’s entirety:

Schrödinger’s Bugs

Working on an open-source project teaches you a few things about dealing with software developers, and reporting bugs. I’ve been in the open-source world for a long time, and I remember when I first started out as a user of software, I felt glad to even have access to these tools at all, and I felt a reluctance to “bother” the developers with issues if I wasn’t sure it was only me.

The problem is, issues are a bit like Schrödinger’s cat: they don’t exist until the developer knows about them.

Since I’ve become a developer of open-source software and seen things from the other side, I have one request: err on the side of opening an issue. There’s nothing I love more than having an issue opened, and being able to fix it, and tell the user their problem is solved. It’s that kind of feedback loop that is one of the best parts of developing software without a marketing and sales department sitting between you and your users.

So without further ado, I’d like to point out a few comments in this vein. Note that when I say “issue,” it could be anything: a showstopper bug, an annoyance, or just a new feature you wish the software had.

Always Open an Issue

Sure, sometimes it’s a pain to figure out where the issue reporter link is, and create an account, and validate your email, and figure out what component it goes into… but don’t worry about it. If you get it in the wrong place, they’ll know where it belongs and (hopefully) triage it. But if you don’t open that issue, they may never know it’s a problem.

Don’t Worry If It’s a Duplicate

Of course, you should always try searching for your issue first, maybe someone else has reported it. Make a comment if someone has. But if you can’t find it, don’t worry that it might be a duplicate, go ahead and open that issue. As a developer, I’d rather close a million duplicates than to never know about the issue in the first place.

Don’t Just Describe the Issue, Describe What You’re Trying to Do

It may be that the issue you’re trying to solve is meant to work a different way, or is part of another feature you haven’t used yet, or has a workaround. Make sure when you describe the problem you’re having, also describe what you want to accomplish.

A Closed Issue is Not an Ultimatum

This is a corollary to “describe what you’re trying to do.” Just because an issue is closed does not mean it is closed for discussion. Sometimes the developer doesn’t realize what you’re trying to actually do, or the original issue was described in a way that doesn’t make it clear that the real issue is elsewhere.

For example, OpenNMS supports creating a “path outage,” which describes how particular nodes are related. There was an issue opened that said if you created a path outage, it would be wiped out when using Provisiond. It was closed, saying that you create path outage relationships with the “parent-id” tag in the provisioning group file. What the issue did not say is that these manually-created path outages were created through the UI. So the real issue is that the web UI path outage editor is not Provisiond-aware, and the issue should be reopened.

It’s Better to Be Too Verbose than Not Enough

Configuration files, logs, output from `dmesg` or similar, anything you can add that makes it easier to diagnose the problem. It’s a lot harder to fix a problem with a one-line error message than with 200 lines of context telling you what the software was doing just before the error. The more information you give, the more likely it is the developer will be able to figure out what’s going on when the issue happened.

Does this mean your issue will be resolved quickly? Not necessarily. Everyone has their own set of priorities, and their own time set aside for working on issues. I can say that a good issue report, with a lot of detail and a good description of what you’re trying to accomplish, will get a lot more traction than a 1-line report saying “it doesn’t work,” and it will get a heck of a lot more traction than no report at all. To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky, you miss fixing 100% of the issues you never report.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.14 (Red-breasted Nuthatch)
  1.8.14 is the current stable release, tagged 13 Sep, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.91 (Crumhorn)
  1.9.91 is the current unstable release, tagged 14 Sep, 2011. This release is not yet recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features, or for test environments to evaluate upgrades to 1.10 when it is released. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Upcoming Events

OpenNMS training will be held in Fulda, Germany, September 26th through 30th, 2011. It is done in conjunction with our partner, NETHINKS. You can register on their site, here.

Issues Resolved

Since the last TWiO, the following issues were resolved as “fixed”:

• [NMS-1322] – CAPSD loops infinitely on misbehaving ipAddrTable
• [NMS-2052] – small patch to add regex filtering of eventparms
• [NMS-2374] – When running the database checker rethrow any exceptions with details (e.g.: database URL)
• [NMS-2375] – Make the severity element in event configuration an enumeration and fix our default config files
• [NMS-2738] – Include a failure reason in data collection failure events
• [NMS-2812] – normalize radius code
• [NMS-2822] – PSQLException when discovering interface/address that has not yet been deleted from database
• [NMS-2889] – Move org.opennms.netmgt.ping.Ping and its dependencies into jicmp package
• [NMS-2907] – More reduction keys for APC events
• [NMS-2977] – Deleted node appear in KSC report creation
• [NMS-3005] – ONMS Version not display correct – Windows install
• [NMS-3066] – JavaMailNotificationStrategy fails when passing -nm
• [NMS-3073] – Weird redirect on login
• [NMS-3143] – GUI error if we remove Switches from Surveillance
• [NMS-3194] – Reporting is truncated by URL length limitation
• [NMS-3319] – HTTPS don’t support SSLv3-only servers
• [NMS-3515] – Broken paged grid in Select SNMP Interfaces
• [NMS-3540] – General node information not displayed using Internet Explorer 8 in IE7 Compatability view or IE7
• [NMS-3594] – provisiond does not create nodelabelchanged event
• [NMS-3606] – WMI/WQL Poller – Wrong text in event
• [NMS-3622] – Allow HttpCollector and PageSequenceMonitor to accept all SSL certificates
• [NMS-3651] – Create detectors for all protocol plugins
• [NMS-3785] – Provisiond crashes against Procurve 1810G
• [NMS-3823] – Clicking a Vlan interface (SVI) on a Cisco router throws Jasper Exception
• [NMS-3848] – Reasons Missing From nodeLostService events
• [NMS-3863] – provisiond has issues with two IPs on the same ifIndex – I think
• [NMS-3887] – webUI shows 100% availability although service is not monitored
• [NMS-3912] – Alarm Description in Dashboard not formatted
• [NMS-3959] – eventd logging missing file name
• [NMS-3979] – Notification Dashlet doesn’t format HTML message text
• [NMS-4020] – Too many CLOSE_WAIT on port 5817
• [NMS-4029] – dns provisiond – fqdn trailing dot
• [NMS-4040] – SNMPPoller is the cause of loss of snmpinterfaces during the re-import / synchronization Provision Groups.
• [NMS-4049] – Can’t provision a node with one IP address and a policy to avoid all IP address
• [NMS-4091] – Page Sequence Monitor and invalid SSL certificates
• [NMS-4157] – org.apache.mina.util.DefaultExceptionMonitor: Unexpected exception
• [NMS-4232] – Configure scheduling outages via RESTful Web Service
• [NMS-4390] – Nearly impossible to make head or tail of why Maven build is failing.
• [NMS-4475] – Provisiond fails with a Unable to return specified BeanFactory instance exception at startup
• [NMS-4502] – [patch] Show correct values in net-snmp CPU Usage graph
• [NMS-4526] – Remote Poller implodes with lack of WMI classes
• [NMS-4544] – Provisiond HOST-RESOURCES process detector
• [NMS-4593] – Report Issue – Surveillance Category Not Correctly Chosen
• [NMS-4673] – Discovery fails with JNA pinger
• [NMS-4675] – Resource Graph Resources – limited to 55 Resources or less
• [NMS-4683] – SNMP interface poller filtering not allowing data collection after provisioning group sync
• [NMS-4704] – Service monitored with 100% availability instead of Not Monitored
• [NMS-4749] – Requisition REST Service allows duplicate nodes
• [NMS-4754] – Event analysis report, missing legend in pie graph
• [NMS-4799] – Events generated from trapd are not associated with any node
• [NMS-4800] – Node.jsp – double clicking physical interfaces goes to interface.jsp instead of snmpinterface.jsp
• [NMS-4815] – Make Jetty headerBufferSize property configurable
• [NMS-4817] – Null (\0) characters in logmsg field of events causes org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8″: 0×00
• [NMS-4831] – notifd.log – Info if message was send
• [NMS-4833] – Poorly used INFO log message
• [NMS-4834] – Remote Poller state changes from Paused to Running
• [NMS-4838] – jmx collector does direct db lookup of nodeid
• [NMS-4839] – Check if a node is currently covered by a scheduled outage using Rest
• [NMS-4841] – OpenNMS Version not displayed correctly
• [NMS-4845] – RrdUtils.createRRD log message is unclear
• [NMS-4851] – Notification not being sent event if status=”on”, looks like notifd is not using the status in the config file properly
• [NMS-4853] – unit tests on windows creates directories outside of temp directory
• [NMS-4857] – StorageStrategy documentation does not match API in code
• [NMS-4861] – Runaway threads consuming CPU when rendering certain graphs
• [NMS-4871] – With Jetty + HTTPS, certain Web UI actions prompt browser to “Save As” JSP and HTML files
• [NMS-4872] – Show all nodes with asset info not working
• [NMS-4880] – java.lang.ClassCastException when building an event notification with a category filter
• [NMS-4882] – IP address formatting does not match
• [NMS-4886] – HttpCollector ignores “port” parameter from Collectd config
• [NMS-4895] – 1.9.90 newer graphics display inconsistency – node.jsp
• [NMS-4899] – notifd DEBUG message “supress” mispelling
• [NMS-4903] – base-url not used when viewing resource graphs
• [NMS-4913] – Change StorageStrategy to throw an IllegalArgumentException when the arguments (or parameters) are not properly configured on datacollection-config.xml
• [NMS-4914] – wrong implementation of org.opennms.netmgt.correlation.Correlator$EngineAdapter.getName() ?
• [NMS-4917] – update ksc page
• [NMS-4921] – after upgrade to 1.8.13 RadiusAuthMonitor gives exception “The RADIUS Server returned the wrong Identifier”
• [NMS-4923] – Add PostgreSQL 9.1 support
• [NMS-4926] – OpenNMS 1.8.14-1 fails to install on Ubuntu Server 10.04.3 LTS , reason opennms-db depends on iplike-pgsql91 which is not available at debian.opennms.org
• [NMS-4931] – Availability Miscalculated in NodeAvailabilityReport.jrxml (and others)

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

New Releases

It’s been a bit since we last did a release, we pretty much put all releases on hold until we could put a 1.10 release candidate out. That said, we found a couple of reasonably important bugs (in both 1.8.x and 1.9.x) and decided it was time to take the plunge. 1.9.90 is the first release candidate for the 1.10 series, meaning that we are feature-complete and plan only on fixing important bugs before 1.10.0 gets released. That said, Linkd should be still considered beta for this release. It’s gone through a significant refactor, but still has not reached parity with 1.6 (or even 1.8) Linkd. We will not release 1.10.0 until we have that parity, but for now, if you’re relying on Linkd, stick with 1.8. If you have the ability to help us test the new Linkd code against your devices, bug reports would be helpful, however.

Podcast

Jeff has been planning on making an OpenNMS podcast for a while now, but Dev-Jam was the perfect opportunity to get a few folks on the mic and talk about the state of OpenNMS and what happened during Dev-Jam. If you subscribe to the Planet OpenNMS RSS feed, then you’ve already seen this, but if not, please check it out!

• OpenNMS Audiocast (MP3)
• OpenNMS Audiocast (Ogg Vorbis)

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.13 (Northern Lapwing)
  1.8.13 is the current stable release, tagged 10 Aug, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.90 (Balafon)
  1.9.90 is the current unstable release, tagged 10 Aug, 2011. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features, or for test environments to evaluate upgrades to 1.10 when it is released. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

• [JICMP-4] – jicmp IcmpSocket.h byte swapping macros don’t work on OpenIndiana
• [JRD-7] – JRRD Report runs fine in iReport but has errors when running via Reportd
• [NMS-696] – Availability report time periods
• [NMS-1769] – columnName argument to AssetModel.searchAssets allows SQL injection
• [NMS-1802] – HTTP monitor nits
• [NMS-1865] – The installer should catch systems where TCP connections cannot be made to localhost
• [NMS-2079] – Opennms not honoring changes in opennms.conf
• [NMS-2893] – Node when deleted remains in performance report list
• [NMS-2995] – Trapd is not able to process SNMPv3 traps
• [NMS-3651] – Create detectors for all protocol plugins
• [NMS-3771] – reportd missing ability to select mailer from javamail-configuration.xml
• [NMS-3905] – reload of Threshold configuration does not work – only after restart OpenNMS new threshold are applied
• [NMS-4038] – translated events are displayed like the original event
• [NMS-4350] – spring/beanfactory issue Java 1.7.0 – pointcut issues
• [NMS-4668] – Create a poller monitor to “proxy” pings via the CISCO-PING-MIB
• [NMS-4725] – LDAP authorization fails – group to role mapping does not work
• [NMS-4745] – java.net.SocketException: Too many open files
• [NMS-4817] – Null (\0) characters in logmsg field of events causes org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8″: 0×00
• [NMS-4862] – Add command option to NRPE in provisiond
• [NMS-4873] – Upgrade bug when Linkd tables contain data
• [NMS-4875] – Older builds ov OpenNMS are not available for download
• [NMS-4877] – Typo in datacollection-config.xml

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

IPv6 Testing

I spent the first half of the week testing IPv6, making sure that the packaging is ready and that you can have a system with only an IPv4 or IPv6 stack (but not both) and have everything still come up correctly. Also, if you need to enforce the availability (or not) of either stack, some options have been added to $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/opennms.properties to take care of that.

# By default, OpenNMS will start up if either ICMPv4 *or* ICMPv6 are
# available and initialize properly. If you wish to force IPv4 or IPv6
# explicitly, set one or both of these properties.
#
#org.opennms.netmgt.icmp.requireV4=true
#org.opennms.netmgt.icmp.requireV6=true

Smoke Tests

We’ve had pretty good unit test coverage in general, but we’ve been lacking a few things, namely, UI testing, and a “smoke test” which makes sure that OpenNMS snapshots come up properly, don’t have nasty exceptions, and other similar things.

Our intern Philip was back this summer helping us out with a few things, and he’s been working on the smoke test infrastructure for the last few weeks. I spent a bit of time putting together scripts on the server side to let us bring up a snapshot and run the smoke tests against it, from Bamboo. As of this week, the smoke tests are not only running, but green. (Yay!) Tomorrow is Philip’s last day, and we’ve heard he’s going to try again to beat the Andy’s Big-A Challenge again this year. Last year, it didn’t work out so well. I swear, this is not a hazing thing, he volunteered. Anyways, wish him luck.

Other Code Cleanups

Alejandro is wrapping up making sure that there is a Provisiond detector for everything that has a Capsd plugin. Seth and I have both been working on cleaning up miscellaneous bugs and other stuff in preparation for 1.10. Donald has finished moving all of our Ext-JS code to use GWT instead, which has given us a number of spiffy controls.

I also spent some time profiling OpenNMS, and cleaning up some easy-to-fix-stuff, including working on moving the data collection configuration parsing to JAXB and changing that code to optimize usage of string data some. Data collection should use less memory now, and be a little faster.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.12 (Black-capped Petrel)
  1.8.12 is the current stable release, tagged 10 May, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.8 (Pulalu)
  1.9.8 is the current unstable release, tagged 10 May, 2011. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

• [NMS-1121] – threshd.log shows wrong nodeId in certain circumstances
• [NMS-1174] – SNMP collection on NAT’d interfaces produces ifIndex of -100
• [NMS-1316] – service not being marked up after interfaceUp event.
• [NMS-4038] – translated events are displayed like the original event
• [NMS-4856] – MSExchangeDetectorClient is too verbose on exceptions
• [NMS-4859] – OpenNMS doesn’t start

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Aaaaanyways, without further ado, here’s what we’ve done since, uh, well, May 16th. =)

Dev-Jam 2011

We had a total blast at Dev-Jam 2011. If you’re interested in catching up on what went on, check out Tarus’s Dev-Jam blog posts.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5

OpenNMS 1.10

We’ve been slowly working our way towards a 1.10 release candidate. The only things left are to go over the remainder of the IPv6 infrastructure (which I am spending this week on), and to then spend some time giving some attention to pending stuff in JIRA.

At the high level, there is a lot of exciting stuff coming in 1.10:

IPv6 Support

The obvious one: support for IPv6. We have done a ton of work to add support for passing around IPv6 addresses in the code at all levels, as well as adding specific support for ICMPv6.

We’ve actually got 2 different strategies for IPv6 ping:

• JNA – Uses embedded native code which is distributable. This means that ping will be supported from remote pollers!
• JICMP6 – A port of the our internal JNI ICMP code to support IPv6. This will be the default in 1.10 for polling ICMP, as it is faster than the JNA implementation.

Reporting

The new JasperReports-based reports introduced later in the 1.8 series has gone through a ton of improvements in 1.10, including a number of new reports, support for passing arguments to reports (date ranges, etc.), and other nifty stuff. Many other general updates to the reporting infrastructure have been added as well.

Installer Updates

The Liquibase database upgrade tools introduced in 1.8 have been updated to the latest (2.0.1) version, which is considerably faster than the 1.9.x version we used previously.

New XML Processing Infrastructure

While we haven’t finished converting all of our code to use it, we have started moving our Castor-based XML processing code to use JAXB instead. This provides a speed improvement when processing XML (including events posted to Eventd). This includes support for validation of inputs in the ReST interface.

Drools Support is Back

OpenNMS used to have support for using Drools for doing complex correlation of events. Due to dependency conflicts with other things we used in OpenNMS, it has been non-functional for quite some time. As of 1.10, this facility is working again, and will let you create code or scripts to do event correlation. Examples of a simple event correlation can be found in the $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/examples/ directory.

UI Updates

Many new UI changes have been made which give searchable controls for reports, nodes, etc., thanks to Donald’s new code for embedding GWT widgets in the OpenNMS UI.

Instrumentation Log Reader

Philip’s Instrumentation Log Reader tool has been updated with a number of new features, including sorting. It’s a great way to investigate data collection issues.

Syslogd Improvements

The Syslog infrastructure has been retooled to support a wider variety of input styles, as well as providing more optimized parsers for the most common Syslog formats. Using one of the specific parsers (Syslog-NG or RFC 5424) should provide performance improvements for handling large amounts of Syslog messages.

Data Collection and Thresholding Updates

Many improvements to data collection and thresholding have been made, including support for using regular expressions against column names when determining data to persist. Also, data collection configuration files have now been split like events are.

Many New Detectors

We’re adding detectors for everything that has a Capsd plugin, so you should be able to completely migrate to Provisiond.

Provisiond Updates

The provisioner has had a number of updates, including:

• UI changes
• Support for enabling or disabling polling and data collection through policies
• Support for scanning the IP-MIB ipAddressTable, which detects IPv6 interfaces on an SNMP-enabled device
• Updates to the DNS requisition import including IPv6 support, support for specifying the default services to apply to DNS-imported nodes, and the ability to determine how to compute the foreign ID (“ipAddress” or “nodeLabel”).

This is not an exhaustive list, but just what I came across doing some ‘git diff’ magic between the 1.8 and 1.10 trees. For a giant list of all of the issues closed against 1.10, see this link.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.12 (Black-capped Petrel)
  1.8.12 is the current stable release, tagged 10 May, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.8 (Pulalu)
  1.9.8 is the current unstable release, tagged 10 May, 2011. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

• [JRB-12] – Vertical labels disappear on a certain graphs
• [NMS-1275] – eventd truncates the length of trap messages to 256 bytes
• [NMS-2834] – Enhancement – Assets with clean date input
• [NMS-2895] – The method sanitizeString(String) is undefined for the type WebSecurityUtils
• [NMS-3164] – Implement PersistenceSelectorStrategy framework
• [NMS-3322] – XMPPNotificationStrategy (or JavaMailNotificationStrategy) does not utilise the “Numeric Message” field -nm
• [NMS-3516] – auto-clean=”true” suddenly is not working
• [NMS-3722] – Link with parentifindex -1 are not displayed in jsp pages
• [NMS-3956] – allow trapd to bind to specific address
• [NMS-3982] – Interface Deleted with SNMP supported and no ipAddrTable
• [NMS-3997] – Provisiond Deleting IpAddr On Nodes After Rescan
• [NMS-4034] – SNAPSHOT installer scripts are faulty
• [NMS-4039] – provisioning node with NodeCategorySettingPolicy policy in foreign source does not work if node has no SNMP available
• [NMS-4047] – Win32ServiceDetector fails to detect services
• [NMS-4106] – We need a WmiDetector
• [NMS-4114] – Support relativetime in graph URL
• [NMS-4208] – Memcached graph definitions left out of default configuration
• [NMS-4244] – threshd process wrong counter-type SNMP data after SNMP data collection failed or restored
• [NMS-4261] – In-line thresholder ignores scheduled outages
• [NMS-4295] – JRobin VDEFs sometimes do not work
• [NMS-4339] – Update Copyright Notice to include 2011
• [NMS-4375] – jetty allows directory listings
• [NMS-4376] – Problems adding nodes during discovery
• [NMS-4423] – Provisiond NodeCategorySettingPolicy. Nodes lose categorization in subsequent Synchronizations
• [NMS-4463] – SnmpAsset Adapter has dependency on Trapd
• [NMS-4483] – Services drop down list not alphabatized
• [NMS-4494] – SiblingIndexStorageStrategy does SNMP Queries and makes collection VERY slow
• [NMS-4500] – Collectd’s ServiceCollector class was erroneously changed to take Map<String, String>
• [NMS-4530] – IPAddress class overrides equals but not hashCode
• [NMS-4545] – Importer doesn’t log to correct log4j category
• [NMS-4546] – Provisiond silently fails to import an invalid model importer file but reports importSuccessful anyway.
• [NMS-4568] – Policy Rule using ipAddress with Match Snmp Policy does not work
• [NMS-4569] – ipinterface.jsp and snmpinterface.jsp does not show snmp poller data
• [NMS-4570] – link.jsp does not show interface details for some entries
• [NMS-4572] – Let the Snmp Poller send down event the first time an interface is found “Down”
• [NMS-4585] – hardware asset fields need more space and one more field
• [NMS-4590] – Node label changes ourside requisition editor on nodes with a foreign-source ID
• [NMS-4623] – Provision Groups do not synchronize on startup
• [NMS-4633] – Add an optional services field to the query string of the DNS URL
• [NMS-4655] – Returns directory of “opennms/admin/notification/” when required fields are not provided for notification destination paths.
• [NMS-4657] – Outstanding notice page not aligning correctly
• [NMS-4663] – Capsd may reparent duplicate interfaces from requisitioned nodes
• [NMS-4682] – Permissions on multiple files/directories are poor (allow world-write, have setuid)
• [NMS-4691] – OpenNMS GoogleMaps geo-enocder no longer functioning and creates a 503 error in UI
• [NMS-4692] – Email Notifications are not properly encoded when the message contains non us-ascii characters.
• [NMS-4694] – Better provisiond debugging
• [NMS-4695] – Provisiond allows duplicate nodes
• [NMS-4697] – Path not filtered correctly during build, etc/response-graph.properties
• [NMS-4698] – Surveilance part of WEB GUI crashes after all default categories were removed and custom ones were created
• [NMS-4700] – snmpStorageFlag=”all” is being ignored by the threshold procesing
• [NMS-4701] – Unable to add IPv6 address for discovery via web UI
• [NMS-4703] – Data Collection Broken for some nodes in testing
• [NMS-4705] – Add time it takes to persist the data to the ILR
• [NMS-4706] – Enable support for filtering the displayed data
• [NMS-4707] – Add ability for HttpMonitor to use node label as virtual host for HTTP polls
• [NMS-4708] – MicroBlog doesn’t support -nm
• [NMS-4710] – Erroneous text on a node resource graph selection page
• [NMS-4712] – Add the possibility to modify eventparms (as text) from Vacuumd
• [NMS-4717] – race condition in Provisiond IPv6 scanning
• [NMS-4719] – Persist and Error Messages do not Take Date into Account
• [NMS-4721] – DbHelper class should use dao’s
• [NMS-4722] – Add new opennms mib events definition
• [NMS-4728] – Sort by Stat
• [NMS-4734] – When using the GoogleMaps remote poller interface, unchecked markers are visible on initialization
• [NMS-4742] – Add Label to thresholds for display on “Edit Group” page
• [NMS-4752] – Event Analysis Report should be usable on postgres older than 8.4
• [NMS-4753] – Event Analysis report is missing in default configuration
• [NMS-4770] – Traffic Report for last month returns data from the current month
• [NMS-4772] – Add support for matching syslog messages by process name, severity, facility in ueiMatch
• [NMS-4776] – Alphabetize group names in the Users/Groups list
• [NMS-4777] – nodeList page fails to pass the foreignSource when “show interfaces” is selected
• [NMS-4778] – Time zone WEST is not able to cast in a postgres date
• [NMS-4779] – Split syslogd-configuration.xml
• [NMS-4783] – DNS provisioning expression matching matches hostname but not record data
• [NMS-4784] – Warning and Critical thresholds in InterfaceAvailabilityReport and SnmpInterfaceOperAvailabilityReport
• [NMS-4785] – Standardize the time zone format reports
• [NMS-4801] – DNS provisioning needs to allow foreign ID to be a hash of IP address instead of nodeLabel if administrator so chooses
• [NMS-4808] – ICMP concurrency issue in JnaPinger, JniPinger, Jni6Pinger
• [NMS-4809] – collectd log entries could be enhanced
• [NMS-4819] – SELECT tag not closed in asset/modify.jsp
• [NMS-4820] – Reportd JavaMailDeliveryService always copies address in sendmail-message “to” attribute or root@localhost
• [NMS-4822] – Trapd node-matching should prefer SNMP primary ifaces
• [NMS-4832] – AttributeGroup and SiblingColumnStorageStrategy are producing a StackOverflowError
• [NMS-4837] – Add a BSF (bean scripting framework) notification strategy
• [NMS-4846] – Provisiond leaks file handles, eventually causing “Too many open files” crashes
• [NMS-4847] – Upgraded to 1.8.12 and I started to recieve an error when I try to see node information
• [NMS-4850] – Convert Linkd to use Hibernate
• [RANCID-4] – RWS does not support inventory for ios-xr devices

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS. In the last couple of weeks we did lots more bugfixing, and of course more IPv6 work in preparation for a 1.10 release candidate.

It occurs to me that I should probably put the “new” content in TWiO before the boilerplate updates (“current version”, “issues resolved”) so regular readers can get the juicy bits right away. So here it is, the amazing new TWiO layout, courtesy of my friends, Cut & Paste.

IPv6 Update

First of all, I want to remind you that we’re looking for a few good nodes. If you’re interested in helping us monitor the hosts participating in World IPv6 Day, please Contact Dave and let him know you’d like to help out.

As far as IPv6 support, the major work is done in the 1.9 branch as of 1.9.8. Ping (ICMPv6) is fully supported on most major platforms. PLEASE help test, if all goes well, we will be doing a release candidate next month.

Upcoming Events

• 26th through 27th of May, 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe
• 6th through 10th of June, 2011: Ben will be at WWDC 2011. drop a note if you’d like to meet up and say ‘hi.’
• 17th through 18th of June, 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Americas
• 19th through 24th of June, 2011: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 6

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.12 (Black-capped Petrel)
  1.8.12 is the current stable release, tagged 10 May, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.8 (Pulalu)
  1.9.8 is the current unstable release, tagged 10 May, 2011. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

• [IPL-6] – install_iplike.sh script incorrectly hardcodes libdir
• [IPL-19] – postinst script looks for pg_config in wrong place
• [IPL-20] – Install of iplike-pgsql84 deb package fails on debian sid (possibly squeeze and others)
• [IPL-21] – Installation fails because of invalid “su” option
• [IPL-22] – post-installation script fails
• [JICMP-2] – use SOCK_DGRAM if available
• [JICMP-3] – use libkern/OSByteOrder.h if available
• [NMS-3656] – Exception in uncategorized log… trying to edit an uneditable map
• [NMS-3703] – Cpu Usage graph missing when using rrdtool
• [NMS-3902] – Unexpected error
• [NMS-4093] – outage editor problems
• [NMS-4118] – null pointer exception from Admin ? Instrumentation Log Reader jsp page
• [NMS-4289] – deadlock issue
• [NMS-4328] – org.hibernate.QueryException when click on ip interface under View Node Link Detailed Info
• [NMS-4346] – Patch for “CPU Usage graph missing when using rrdtool”
• [NMS-4363] – Enhance default JVM Monitoring configurations
• [NMS-4465] – System Report: only “full” is working
• [NMS-4472] – UI exception when deleting a service from an interface
• [NMS-4510] – EventBuilder setInterface needs to take an InetAddress rather than a String
• [NMS-4537] – Mail Transport Monitor deletes all mail
• [NMS-4553] – Quoting problems in contrib/maint_events.sh
• [NMS-4559] – org.opennms.netmgt.snmp.TableTracker writes to stderr.
• [NMS-4561] – Alphabetize the User List in the GUI
• [NMS-4565] – Report Issue – Average and Peak Traffic rates for Nodes by Interface
• [NMS-4587] – Remove ModelImporter stuff from log4j.properties
• [NMS-4591] – service search constraints show up as “null” when used to filter the event list page
• [NMS-4598] – Role provision has no effect
• [NMS-4616] – Report Issue – Total Bytes Transferred by Interface
• [NMS-4617] – Refactor ICMP Implementations and make sure that main works for JNA
• [NMS-4626] – Maven settings.xml CR & LF format
• [NMS-4631] – Too many open file – OpenNMS running over Debian into openvz Virtual Machine
• [NMS-4634] – refactor XSDs to not rely on common XSDs (types.xsd)
• [NMS-4636] – Convert snmp-config.xml code to use JAXB instead of Castor
• [NMS-4638] – Don’t print out the database administrator password during install.
• [NMS-4639] – Invalid asset field name in requisition causes node to lose interfaces, services
• [NMS-4643] – KSC reports “add graph” fails with a 404
• [NMS-4644] – Unable to start OpenNMS “An error occurred while attempting to start the “OpenNMS:Name=Eventd” service”
• [NMS-4652] – Deleted nodes are showing up in available nodes when creating/editing a surveillance category
• [NMS-4656] – Unable to select interface for data collection after provisiond sync.
• [NMS-4659] – Add MSCHAPv1 and MSCHAPv2 support to RADIUS clients
• [NMS-4660] – Inconsistent use of org.opennms.web.api.Util.calculateUrlBase( request )
• [NMS-4661] – Brocade resource-type and fcTable collection could be nicer
• [NMS-4662] – Default JDBC data collection config does not work
• [NMS-4664] – JNA library fails to work for IPv6 on Solaris
• [NMS-4667] – Make sure Installer and Manager use Pinger configuration rather than just using jni jicmp
• [NMS-4672] – Error updating large provisioning node lists via web ui
• [NMS-4676] – Node it is not added in DB at synchronization if added by import or by provision.pl
• [NMS-4677] – c-ping fails to configure
• [NMS-4679] – Add alarm-data annotation for Powerware upsDischarged trap event
• [NMS-4692] – Email Notifications are not properly encoded when the message contains non us-ascii characters.
• [RANCID-2] – RWS does not work with IOS-XR devices
• [RANCID-3] – RWS adds nodes to .cloginrc despite catchall

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.11 (Bald Eagle)
  1.8.11 is the current stable release, tagged 11 April, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.7 (Naqara)
  1.9.7 is the current unstable release, tagged 11 April, 2011. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

• [NMS-1112] – Ping behaviour for outage on remote network
• [NMS-1158] – deleted interfaces are included in polling package ip lists
• [NMS-2692] – nsclient-datacollection-config.xml only collects on 1st attribute in wpm group
• [NMS-2777] – Concurrency issues on multiprocessor systems cause collection outages
• [NMS-2868] – spring-mock is included in distribution
• [NMS-3411] – Debian Startup Script hides important Debian Specific Error Output
• [NMS-3500] – DemoUI – Leaving the search field blank causes an “Unexpected Error”
• [NMS-3933] – archive_events.sh still uses the old lib/scripts/* style initialization
• [NMS-4069] – Need to be able to acknowledge notifications through the ReST service
• [NMS-4110] – prevent automatic start after installation / upgrade
• [NMS-4168] – Rescans Not Happening for Default Nodes
• [NMS-4172] – ‘some’ matchType for WMI Poller matches 2 or more, not 1 or more as docuemented
• [NMS-4211] – Failed to load the required jicmp library
• [NMS-4230] – No services are registered in the database
• [NMS-4445] – HTTP Collector throwing exception “Host must be set to create a host URL”
• [NMS-4454] – Reports throughin Exception when doing traffic based reports and store-by-group
• [NMS-4509] – FilterDao calls need to return InetAddresses
• [NMS-4558] – Page Sequence Monitor (PSM) doesn’t appear to do retries
• [NMS-4578] – Debian init script not LSB compatible
• [NMS-4579] – [patch] add new asset fields for hardware configuration data
• [NMS-4580] – The attribute “totalCount” for OnmsNodeList is not well calculated
• [NMS-4583] – Filter rules tend to get all IP addresses, even if they are deleted
• [NMS-4593] – Report Issue – Surveillance Category Not Correctly Chosen
• [NMS-4595] – eventd cannot parse events which are missing an XML namespace
• [NMS-4596] – send-event.pl errors on IPv6 addresses
• [NMS-4597] – Primary keys are not set to not null
• [NMS-4603] – make ICMP implementation configurable
• [NMS-4604] – Add script execution, response times, logging, more to BSFMonitor
• [NMS-4605] – MailTransportMonitor POP3 javax.mail.AuthenticationFailedException, but without connection to host at all
• [NMS-4608] – Changing the default password in 1.9.7
• [NMS-4610] – Node Rescan -> node.jsp not found
• [NMS-4614] – Problem accessing /opennms/KSC/KSC/customGraphEditDetails.htm. Reason: Not Found – 404
• [NMS-4615] – add a No SNMP checkbox to the Node Quick-Add web page
• [RANCID-1] – Updated RANCID patch for opennms-rancid

OpenNMS User Conference America: Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Constituency?

We got a ton of folks expressing their interest in the OUCA, but so far it appears we haven’t had a lot of people confirm for the actual event yet. If you are interested, *please* sign up at the OUCA event page.

Current topics include:

• Monitoring Layer-2 port status with SnmpPoller
• JasperReporting with iReport and OpenNMS
• OpenNMS Remote Execution (Net-SNMP, SSH, CGI)
• Demonstration of OpenNMS IPv6 capabilities
• How to use provisioning
• How to manage events
• How to gather data and poll services

You will have access to many of the developers of OpenNMS to ask those “what if” and “how does” type questions. We are also open to suggestions as to what topics we should add. This is YOUR conference make it what YOU need it to be. Do we need more advanced or basic topics?

World IPv6 Day – Can You Manage It?

One of our goals in getting OpenNMS 1.10 out the door is to have IPv6 support ready for the masses, since IPv4 addresses are soon to become scarce. To help get the word out about being able to monitor IPv6 resources with OpenNMS, we’re working with the ISOC to provide management of the participants in World IPv6 day. Dave recently sent out a notice about needing volunteers to help us run remote pollers, but I wanted to reiterate it here, since the more monitors we’re running, the better.

Hello OpenNMS fans! We’re looking for volunteers to help us monitor the participants in World IPv6 Day with OpenNMS Remote Pollers connected to your IPv6 networks. If you are interested, please read on. If you’re not interested or can’t participate, it might be a good read for you anyway

As you may or may not be aware, a lot of work is being completed in the development branch (master, tagged as 1.9) right now to add support for IPv6 to OpenNMS. The key feature for the 1.10 release is IPv6 along with significant updates to Provisiond so that we can deprecate Capsd (or at least make Provisiond a more complete replacement). In other words, IPv6 is the impetus for making a 1.10 release and World IPv6 day, June 8th, 2011, is our target date.

There is still a significant amount of work to be completed in order to just tag our next stable release (1.10) and we’re making our best efforts. But, it could be that there just isn’t enough time to fully vet all the code changes for a release on that actual day. A release for that day would mean tagging fairly soon. More on that later…

In the meantime and more to the point of this message, we’re very excited to be actively supporting the World IPv6 Day participants and the ISOC. OpenNMS’ participation means that we will be providing a monitoring service that, by way of our remote pollers, will be monitoring the status of each hosting participant’s website. This will also help ISP participants better understand if there are location specific IPv6 issues.

There will be a status summary page on the ISOC’s website that links back to an OpenNMS server’s a page on the OpenNMS server, possibly the Distributed Status Map, showing the status of the IPv6 sites from all the remote monitoring locations that we’re able to define, based on the locations of volunteers from this community. So, we are asking for volunteers to run OpenNMS remote pollers on IPv6 connected hosts. I suspect that the polling intervals will be configured to about every 15 minutes and the polls will be HTTP service checks for each of the participant’s IPv6 and IPv4 address. We will probably also use the PSM and configure the ‘host’ attribute so that we can verify that IPv6 DNS checks are working, too. I’ll be creating a sample configuration and will solicit your feed back.

If you are interested in volunteering, please contract me directly (david <at> opennms.org) and we’ll start coordinating with you with respect to installation and testing (we still have a lot of setup to do on the backend). I suspect that we will be making OpenNMS 1.10 T-shirts to celebrate our 1.10 release. For your participation in World IPv6 Day, you’ll receive a special addition shirt “OpenNMS Fanatic” 1.10 T-shirt. (Something a long those lines… I leave the savvy slogans to “rangerrick” . I wanted to get this solicitation out to you, now, so that we can better plan the server side configuration (remote monitoring locations, server resources, etc.).

As far as getting 1.10 tagged and released around the time of World IPv6 day, we hope that as many of you as possible can begin running test a instance for the 1.9 snapshot code so that you can update frequently to the latest code and give us feed back in Jira (http://issues.opennms.org). Install OpenNMS via the snapshot yum/apt repos and let’s get 1.10 vetted for release ASAP.

• http://yum.opennms.org/#snapshot
• http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Installation:Debian#Unstable_.28Nightly_Snapshots.29

Thank you for this brief interruption and I return you to your regularly scheduled programs.

Upcoming Events

• 26th through 27th of May, 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe
• 6th through 10th of June, 2011: Ben will be at WWDC 2011. drop a note if you’d like to meet up and say ‘hi.’
• 17th through 18th of June, 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Americas
• 19th through 24th of June, 2011: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 6

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.10 (Loggerhead Shrike)
  1.8.10 is the current stable release, tagged 24 February, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading. A large number of bugs were fixed since 1.8.7, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to this release.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.6 (Barbat)
  1.9.6 is the current unstable release, tagged 24 February, 2010. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.
• Seth has been working on getting our ICMPv6 support integrated into the main codebase.
• Donald updated our DNS monitor to use the dnsjava library.
• Matt has been working on fixing Provisiond issues.

Issues Resolved

• [NMS-4251] – Exception when Provisioning an ipv6 address on a node with SNMP Enabled
• [NMS-4477] – Increase servicename in table service in the core schema to accomodate services with names longer than 32 characters
• [NMS-4488] – Poller not responding to nodeGainedService events when event interface is an ipv6 address
• [NMS-4555] – IP validation in web UI doesn’t handle IPv6
• [NMS-4575] – Physical Interface Page Doesn’t load on IE
• [NMS-4577] – provisiond needs to be able to scan the new ipAddress table, in addition to the (deprecated) ipAddr table, and handle IPv6 addresses

IPv6 Progress: Provisioning, SNMP, and Ping

This week a lot of IPv6 work went on in 2 major areas: SNMP in Provisiond, and ICMP. Seth has been working on integrating the work Matt did a while back on a new ICMP library which can handle IPv4 and IPv6 ICMP. It also uses JNA, rather than JNI, for doing the task, so it is likely to work on more platforms without work. (Plus, a few platforms will even let you send pings without needing to be a root or administrator account!)

I spent this week working on a couple of provisioning and SNMP-related issues, most notably, adding support for the ipAddressTable in the IP-MIB. This table supercedes the ipAddrTable we traditionally used to detect interfaces on a node, and supports IPv6 as well as IPv4. The code will still happily use the ipAddrTable in the cases where your equipment doesn’t support the ipAddressTable, so older hardware should continue to function as expected.

Reminder for Students: OpenNMS and Google’s Summer of Code

Thanks to OGP members Mike Huot and Matt Raykowski for administering our Summer of Code submissions, and to all of the folks who have offered to be mentors, we have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2011.

We look forward to working with any potential students about the ideas list found at:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011#Ideas_List

We would also be glad to talk to potential students about their own ideas. The list is pretty limited, but there are a lot of things that could be done to improve OpenNMS. Please sign up for the opennms-gsoc mailing list to discuss these ideas:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opennms-gsoc

If people in the community know of students that are eligible for GSoC, you might encourage them to apply. We would prefer students who are familiar with OpenNMS. Also if you see questions from students, please be kind, they are still learning about the community and OpenNMS.

Thanks and good luck to potential students!

OpenNMS Users Conference Americas

The OpenNMS Users Conference Americas (OUCA) is a go! Details are still being finalized, but we encourage anyone interested to keep an eye out here for updates. It is scheduled for June 17th and 18th at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, just before Dev-Jam 2011. The fee will be $65.

Upcoming Events

• 26th through 27th of May, 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe
• 6th through 10th of June, 2011: Ben will be at WWDC 2011. drop a note if you’d like to meet up and say ‘hi.’
• 17th through 18th of June, 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Americas
• 19th through 24th of June, 2011: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 6

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.10 (Loggerhead Shrike)
  1.8.10 is the current stable release, tagged 24 February, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading. A large number of bugs were fixed since 1.8.7, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to this release.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.6 (Barbat)
  1.9.6 is the current unstable release, tagged 24 February, 2010. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

• [NMS-4535] – Convert Event XML to JAXB
• [NMS-4547] – XSD definitions don’t need to be anchored
• [NMS-4554] – Trap events for Comtech EF Data CDM-625 satellite modems

IPv6 Milestone: Polling and Graphing

With the IPv6 work done last week, we’ve hit a significant milestone. I was able to provision a node with IPv6 addresses, monitor a service (DNS, in this case), and even get response time graphs!

There is obviously still a ton to do, including fixing handling of IPv6 addresses in SNMP, finishing up the ICMPv6 support for pinging, and plenty of UI tweaks to deal with IPv6, but this means a significantly large portion of the core of OpenNMS is dealing with IPv6 addresses properly. It’s looking like 1.9.7 will shake out as the first release where we can really have end-users start trying to do things with IPv6 and help us find issues and places where things still need work.

Reminder for Students: OpenNMS and Google’s Summer of Code

Thanks to OGP members Mike Huot and Matt Raykowski for administering our Summer of Code submissions, and to all of the folks who have offered to be mentors, we have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2011.

We look forward to working with any potential students about the ideas list found at:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011#Ideas_List

We would also be glad to talk to potential students about their own ideas. The list is pretty limited, but there are a lot of things that could be done to improve OpenNMS. Please sign up for the opennms-gsoc mailing list to discuss these ideas:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opennms-gsoc

If people in the community know of students that are eligible for GSoC, you might encourage them to apply. We would prefer students who are familiar with OpenNMS. Also if you see questions from students, please be kind, they are still learning about the community and OpenNMS.

Thanks and good luck to potential students!

OpenNMS Users Conference Americas

The OpenNMS Users Conference Americas (OUCA) is a go! Details are still being finalized, but we encourage anyone interested to keep an eye out here for updates. It is scheduled for June 17th and 18th at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, just before Dev-Jam 2011. The fee will be $65.

Upcoming Events

• 26 through 27 May 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe
• 17 through 18 June 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Americas
• 19 through 24 June 2011: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 6

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.10 (Loggerhead Shrike)
  1.8.10 is the current stable release, tagged 24 February, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading. A large number of bugs were fixed since 1.8.7, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to this release.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.6 (Barbat)
  1.9.6 is the current unstable release, tagged 24 February, 2010. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

• [NMS-1568] – Changes to make OpenNMS capable of Active Directory Auth
• [NMS-2847] – correlator service unable to start : java.lang.NoSuchMethodError org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.CompilationResult.getProblems()
• [NMS-4033] – Provisiond – simple TCP detector fails to detect services
• [NMS-4490] – JRobinDirectoryUtilTest is busted
• [NMS-4507] – OnmsMonitoredService getIpAddress returns a String rather than an InetAddress
• [NMS-4508] – OnmsOutage does not following the same getIpInterface pattern as OnmsIpInterface
• [NMS-4541] – New events for traps from Sun/Oracle ILOM cards

OpenNMS is a Part of Google’s Summer of Code!

Thanks to OGP members Mike Huot and Matt Raykowski for administering our Summer of Code submissions, and to all of the folks who have offered to be mentors, we are now officially accepted into Google Summer of Code 2011!

We look forward to working with any potential students about the ideas list found at:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011#Ideas_List

We would also be glad to talk to potential students about their own ideas. The list is pretty limited, but there are a lot of things that could be done to improve OpenNMS. Please sign up for the opennms-gsoc mailing list to discuss these ideas:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opennms-gsoc

If people in the community know of students that are eligible for GSoC, you might encourage them to apply. We would prefer students who are familiar with OpenNMS. Also if you see questions from students, please be kind, they are still learning about the community and OpenNMS.

Thanks and good luck to potential students!

OpenNMS Users Conference Americas

The OpenNMS Users Conference Americas (OUCA) is a go! Details are still being finalized, but we encourage anyone interested to keep an eye out here for updates. It is scheduled for June 17th and 18th at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, just before Dev-Jam 2011. The fee will be $65.

Upcoming Events

• 26 March 2011: Tarus to keynote the inaugural Indiana LinuxFest
• 26 through 27 May 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe
• 17 through 18 June 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Americas
• 19 through 24 June 2011: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 6

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Project Updates

• 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.10 (Loggerhead Shrike)
  1.8.10 is the current stable release, tagged 24 February, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading. A large number of bugs were fixed since 1.8.7, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to this release.
• 1.9: Current release is 1.9.6 (Barbat)
  1.9.6 is the current unstable release, tagged 24 February, 2010. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.
• Ben implemented another database pooling interface, using Tomcat’s jdbc-pool API.
• Seth did some cleanup on category display.
• Seth worked on creating a set of integration tests for the web UI, using the PageSequenceMonitor.
• Ben converted the database installation code to Liquibase 2.0.1, including creating Liquibase extensions for the PostgreSQL-specific code we used to use in our upgrade definitions. This also speeds up installation and upgrade quite a bit, especially when there are few, or no, changes since the last install or upgrade.
• Matt cleaned up a ton of warnings in the code, and bumped the JDK requirement to 1.6 or higher.
• Seth upgraded our embedded Jetty to version 7.3.1, and cleaned up our servlet dependencies.
• DJ created a command-line tool to do detailed validation of configuration file loading.
• Craig Gallen and Matt worked on the infrastructure work for implementing TMForum’s TIP interface in OpenNMS.
• Ben upgraded Drools to 5.1.1.

Issues Resolved

• [NMS-1377] – NullPointerException in org.opennms.netmgt.notifd.BroadcastEventProcessor.processTargets
• [NMS-1437] – Calling org.opennms.netmgt.eventd.EventIpcManagerDefaultImpl constructor with no args causes null pointer exception
• [NMS-2482] – NullPointerExceptions in node IP route information
• [NMS-2544] – Lots of NPEs ip if ping fails
• [NMS-2847] – correlator service unable to start : java.lang.NoSuchMethodError org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.CompilationResult.getProblems()
• [NMS-3997] – Provisiond Deleting IpAddr On Nodes After Rescan
• [NMS-4148] – send-event.pl timestamp is not parsed correctly
• [NMS-4180] – NullPointerException in DefaultUDPTransportMapping
• [NMS-4208] – Memcached graph definitions left out of default configuration
• [NMS-4336] – OpenNMS needs a way to do in-depth configuration testing without starting the daemon
• [NMS-4352] – Null pointer exception when listing outstanding notifications
• [NMS-4484] – PageSequenceMonitor double-URL-encodes query parameters
• [NMS-4495] – Don’t require all code to pass the PRESERVE_WHITESPACE constant to CastorUtils
• [NMS-4496] – Get rid of PostgreSQL-specific calls in installation/upgrade tools. (Upgrade to Liquibase 2.0)
• [NMS-4499] – NSClient data collection only reads the first tag
• [NMS-4527] – Someone left two q’s in the file ./WEB-INF/jsp/graph/chooseresource.jsp

Meet the New Drools, Same as the Old Drools

For a long time now, OpenNMS has had a little-known feature for doing event correlation, using the open-source Drools business logic engine. It is little-known because we have gone out of our way not to tell people about it — somewhere in the transition from OpenNMS 1.2 to 1.6, it broke because of a complicated chain of dependencies. Thanks to the work of the enigmatic Seth, Jetty and Drools are once again in agreement on their dependencies, and I’ve confirmed that it’s working as of this morning’s code (which should be available in tomorrow’s nightly snapshots).

The correlation engine lets you do complex workflows and event processing (including detection of flapping). We have a couple of examples of what can be done in the $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/examples/ directory. If you’d like to try them out, just copy the following files into your etc directory:

correlation-engine.xml

Configures the correlation engine daemon. Since the OpenNMS correlation engine is a generic API that could potentially be implemented using multiple business logic implementations, this configuration tells OpenNMS which engines are available. Currently, the only implementation is the Drools engine.

drools-engine.xml

Configures the Drools correlation engine. This file contains the Drools-specific configuration for event correlation. In it you define <rule-set> tags which refer to the code, events, and other variables that are relevant.

LocationMonitorRules.drl

An example Drools correlation rule which can detect flapping outages from remote pollers.

NodeParentRules.drl

An example Drools correlation rule which can do root cause analysis on node outages based on a node parent outage.

nodeParentRules-context.xml

A spring configuration file to provide extra resources to the “node parent” Drools rule.

Then, edit your $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/service-configuration.xml and uncomment the service named “OpenNMS:Name=Correlator” and restart OpenNMS.

Other than that, using Drools is not very well documented yet, but if you are a Java developer, you should be able to work out what’s going on looking at the rules and configuration files.

Google Summer of Code

We’ve put in an application to once again be in Google’s Summer of Code. We’ve started making plans for what interested students could help us work on, so if you’re a student and are considering applying for Summer of Code, keep us in mind. =)

OpenNMS Users Conference Americas

One of our OGP members, Mike Huot, has been spearheading a campaign to create an OpenNMS Users Conference Americas, on June 17th and 18th at the Unniversity of Minnesota, Twin Cities, just before Dev-Jam 2011. We are still working on finalizing arrangements, but should have this completed by mid-March. The fee will be $65.

We have a minimum threshold of attendees we need to get to before we can hold this event, so please sign up here to register your interest (no fee will be charged) and we can gauge whether we have enough folks to put together the event.

Upcoming Events

• 26 March 2011: Tarus to keynote the inaugural Indiana LinuxFest
• 26 through 27 May 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe
• 17 through 18 June 2011: OpenNMS UC Americas (Tentative)
• 19 through 24 June 2011: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 6

Until Next Week…

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.