Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.11
  1.6.11 is the current stable release, tagged May 20th. It adds a few small features and fixes a few bugs. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.11 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.11.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.90
  1.7.90 is the current unstable release, tagged May 20th. Since 1.7.10, there have been quite a few bug fixes, and a few new features, including new JMX monitoring options [1], [2], remote poller maps, SVG map enhancements, and reporting enhancements. A full list of changes is in the release notes.
• Unstable: Remote Poller Maps
  Donald and I fixed some more bugs in the remote poller maps. There’s still more to do, but it’s starting to solidify nicely.
• Unstable: Logging Updates
  Seth spent some time on our logging infrastructure. The plan is to be able to do some more useful logging of things at the “element” level, rather than the thread/daemon level. IE, the ability to have one place to see all the logging related to a node, or interface, or notification, etc. That part isn’t done yet, but now it should be easier to work on such things.
• Unstable: Provisiond
  Matt did more work on Provisiond, fixing up handling events from discovery. It can now be configured to replace capsd (or not).
• Unstable: SVG Maps
  Antonio did more small feature and bug work on the SVG maps.
• Unstable: RANCID API
  I did a few small NPE and cleanup fixes to the RANCID API code.

Bugs Fixed Since Last Week

• #3354: debian init.d script and packaging
• #3658: Context Menu in the bottom of the mapPanel are out of the map panel
• #3701: JasperException when accessing ifindexes on switches
• #3745: PDF availability reports fail to render
• #3756: Linkd fails, keeps ONMS from starting.
• #3768: Rrd Queueing Threads don’t identify themselves
• #3771: Redundant configuration in snmp-graph.properties

OpenNMS 1.8 Release Candidate 1 (1.7.90) Released

That’s right, we finally got a 1.8 release candidate ready and released. Here is a list of everything major that has changed since 1.6.

Architectural Changes

DAO Updates

Many more parts of the OpenNMS data access layer have been updated to be compatible with Hibernate and database abstraction.

Database Versioning

The OpenNMS upgrade process now uses LiquiBase for managing schema changes between versions.

OSGi Preparation

Some daemon architectural changes have happened to support an eventual integration with OSGi (post-1.8).

Spring 3.0

OpenNMS was updated to use Spring 3.0.

Test Framework Updates

A number of handy annotation-based test framework changes have been made, using JUnit 4.

New Features

Core and Infrastructure

Pinger

A new multithreaded, high-performance ping infrastructure was added used by all subsystems that talk ICMP.

RADIUS Authentication

A RADIUS authentication provider has been added.

RANCID Integration

An integration with RANCID has been added. If configured, extra data about node configuration, etc. will be available in the node UI and maps.

RESTful Interface

A number of interfaces to OpenNMS data have been made available through a RESTful interface, using the Jersey API.
This includes simple web API access to alarms, events, nodes, notifications, and outages, and it is expected that this will be expanded in future releases.

Discovery and Capability Scanning

Provisioning

A complete replacement for Capsd, called “Provisiond” is introduced in this release. It allows you to define specific behaviors for detecting services and attributes of devices in manual, automated, and semi-automated ways, with simple APIs for writing your own custom scanning behavior and detectors. This includes a highly-scalable, highly-parallelizable threading architecture which will be used for other parts of OpenNMS in future releases.

DNS Importing

Provisiond is able to provision nodes based on a DNS zone transfer.

Automatic Map Creation

Provisiond can automatically create maps and link nodes together when they are provisioned.

New Capsd Plugins

JDBCQueryPlugin, JMXSecurePlugin, WebPlugin, WmiPlugin, XmpPlugin

Monitoring and Data Collection

Mobile Sequence and SMS Ping Monitors

A new pair of monitors have been added that have the ability to perform monitoring of cellular networks with phones attached to the OpenNMS server.

Remote Poller

The remote poller has been enhanced to communicate with the OpenNMS server through HTTP (which makes it proxyable).

TCP RRD Strategy

A data collection strategy that allows pushing collected data over the network.

SNMP Poller

A service that let you snmp poll the interface operational and administration status (up/down) for selected interfaces

WMI Support

Support has been added for polling and datacollection from Windows Management Instrumentation.

XMP Support

Support has been added for the XML Management Protocol (Cartographer).

New Poller Monitors

BSFMonitor, JDBCQueryMonitor, JMXSecureMonitor, MemcachedMonitor, WebMonitor, WmiMonitor, XmpMonitor

Events, Alarms, Notifications, and Acknowledgement

Acknowledgement Daemon

A daemon for interacting with acknowledgements programmatically has been added. This will open up APIs for acknowledging alarms through cell phone, IM, e-mail, and so on.

Asterisk Notification Support

It is now possible to send notifications through Asterisk.

User Interface and Reporting

Upcoming Events

• June 11th-12th, 2010: Antonio will be speaking at the Conferenza Italiana sul Software Libero (Italian Conference on Free Software)
• June 11th-13th, 2010: The OpenNMS Group is a diamond sponsor of the Southeastern Linuxfest to be held in South Carolina. Since it’s close, we expect a lot of the OpenNMS crew will be able to make it.
• July 7th-9th, 2010: Ben will be speaking at OpenStreetMaps’ State of the Map 2010, in Girona, Spain.
• July 21st, 2010: Tarus will be giving his “So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business?” talk at OSCON
• July 26th-30th, 2010: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2010 will be held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN

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

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, criticism, or missing documentation that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, tagged May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.6
  1.7.6 is the current unstable release, tagged August 3rd. Since 1.7.5, there have been a ton of bugfixes, as well as updates to the RESTful interfaces, inventory report updates, syslogd updates, collection updates, new OpenManage and Cisco IP-SLA monitors, thresholding updates, provisiond updates, map updates, and probably more stuff I’m missing. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: Ackd Updates
  Dave spent a bunch of time writing docs and doing work on Ackd to finish up the javamail acknowledgement support, among other things.
• Unstable: SMS Pinger/Request-Response API
  Matt, Donald, Jeff, and I have spent more time getting the SMS stuff working. Matt’s been doing more plumbing work on the SMS backend, and Donald and I got a basic ping SMS monitor put together on Friday. Jeff’s been working on getting USSD support added to SMSlib.
• Unstable: Plugin Updates
  Jason Aras did a little more work on his updated plugins in his branch.
• Unstable: iPhone Updates
  I did a lot of work on the iPhone app this weekend. I’m almost finished converting everything to CoreData as the backing store. Pulling from the REST service is as fast, but feedback is better, and once you’ve gotten outages/etc. from the OpenNMS instance, you will be able to view anything you’ve clicked through offline.
• Unstable: ACL Updates
  Massimiliano did a few more updates to the ACL branch. I still need to find some time to look it over.

Upcoming Events

• Sept 19, 2009: Tarus Balog to speak at Atlanta LinuxFest on the topic of running an open-source business.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

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, criticism, or 8-bit OpenNMS theme song you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi.

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, tagged May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.6
  1.7.6 is the current unstable release, tagged August 3rd. Since 1.7.5, there have been a ton of bugfixes, as well as updates to the RESTful interfaces, inventory report updates, syslogd updates, collection updates, new OpenManage and Cisco IP-SLA monitors, thresholding updates, provisiond updates, map updates, and probably more stuff I’m missing. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: iPhone App Development
  I made a lot of progress on the iPhone app over the weekend, I’ve got about half of it converted to doing asynchronous REST calls and storing things using CoreData, so it’s extremely responsive, even hitting an OpenNMS server over the Internet, rather than just connecting to my local test instance.
  I hope to have that finished up in the next day or two so Tarus can show it off at OpenSource World.
• Unstable: Bugfixes
  A number of bugfixes have gone in this week, including a fix for Net-SNMP 5.4+ and Linux 2.6, more MIB definitions, and a few other things.
• Unstable: SMS Pinger/Request-Response API
  Matt, Donald, and Jeff have gotten a lot more done in the SMS API, including working on a basic prototype that uses the RXTX and SMS APIs to send and receive messages.
• Stable: OpenNMS OTRS Plugin 1.1.0
  Jonathan Sartin put out an updated version of the OTRS plugin which should fix issues escalating to OTRS 2.4.
• Unstable: ACL Updates
  I’ve been doing some prep work to review the updates to the ACL code that’s in a branch, including fixing up some of the database upgrade code. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to look it over this week.
• Unstable: Ackd Updates
  Dave did some more work on Ackd this week. Additionally, I was able to acknowledge, escalate, and clear alarms through the Ackd RESTful interface from the iPhone app, so the core is definitely working. Looking forward to some interesting Ackd plugins.

Tarus at OpenSource World

As I write this, Tarus is winging his way to San Francisco for OpenSource World (and eating free cake, apparently it’s the 70th anniversary of American Airlines’ Admiral’s Club). He’ll be giving a talk called “The Open Source Management Stack” on Wednesday — make sure you stop by and say “hi.”

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSource World: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• Sept 19, 2009: Tarus Balog to speak at Atlanta LinuxFest on the topic of running an open-source business.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

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, criticism, or OpenSource World secret handshakes you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi.

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, released May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.4
  1.7.4 is the current unstable release, released June 8th. Since 1.7.3, more work has gone on in the Provisiond code, as well as ACLs, RANCID reports, thresholding fixes, enabling maps by default, and an entirely new way of creating the OpenNMS database under the covers. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: Modularizing the Web Build
  Donald has been continuing his work on breaking up the webapp build.
• Unstable: SMS Poller
  I spent a little time trying to mock up some code for the SMS poller feature.
• Unstable: ACL UI Work
  Massimiliano Dessì has been wrapping up his ACL UI work in his branch.
• Unstable: Alarm Cleanup
  Dave modified the database to automatically remove alarms when the node they are related to are deleted.
• Unstable: RANCID Updates
  Rocco made some changes to the RANCID API code.

Copyright Changes

In case you don’t follow Tarus’s blog, he announced some great news that’s been a long time coming: The OpenNMS Group has purchased the rights to the original OpenNMS 1.0 code.
If you don’t know the backstory, OpenNMS was first developed by PlatformWorks, which became Oculan, who distributed appliances based on the OpenNMS codebase. OpenNMS was developed as an open-source platform, but Oculan eventually stopped working on the OpenNMS code to focus on the appliance exclusively.
The OpenNMS open-source project was then continued by Tarus Balog, who grew the project into what you see today. (All the dirty details are in Tarus’s post if you’re interested.)
What does that mean for you? In the short term, not much. Our first order of business is trying to figure out where it makes sense to add the classpath exception to allow importing OpenNMS classes without GPL infection — for example, to be able to write a trouble-ticketer plugin that talks to a proprietary ticketing system’s Java API.
Step one is to clean up our horrible mishmash of copyright notices in class files and such. =)

SourceForge Community Choice Awards: OpenNMS is a Finalist – Vote Now!

There’s still time to vote for OpenNMS in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards. If you haven’t already, please vote for OpenNMS here!
We put together a video featuring some members of the OGP introducing themselves and discussing the reasons why OpenNMS should win this award. Have a watch!
If you don’t have ten minutes to spare, check out the one-minute trailer instead.
Either way, don’t forget to vote for all of your favorite projects!

Vote Now!

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSourceWorld: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

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, criticism, or OpenNMS-themed fireworks display you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi. Also, we’ve still got room for more Order of the Blue Polo members if you’d like to send your own testimonial. (Of course you would!)

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, released May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.4
  1.7.4 is the current unstable release, released June 8th. Since 1.7.3, more work has gone on in the Provisiond code, as well as ACLs, RANCID reports, thresholding fixes, enabling maps by default, and an entirely new way of creating the OpenNMS database under the covers. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: ACL UI Work
  Massimiliano Dessì has continued his work on a GUI for the ACL plumbing that has been implemented in OpenNMS.
• Unstable: Provisiond Bugs
  The provisiond bug we were working on last week has been fixed, and imports (as well as the quick Node Add) are working again.
• Unstable: Monitor Updates
  Jason Aras got his Bean Scripting Framework monitor working last week, and was able to create a test monitor in Groovy.
• Unstable: Code Cleanup
  My code cleanup work in a branch was merged back into trunk alongside the provisiond fixes. We’re now down to under 2000 Eclipse warnings instead of over 3000. Some of those come from Castor-generated code, so it’s actually looking quite a bit better, but there’s still plenty to fix up.
• Unstable: Build System Fixes
  Somewhere along the way, the java.net maven repository changed URLs, and some of the dependencies we are using in Maven were pointing to their old URL. The java.net folks put a 301 redirect from the old host to the new, but Maven doesn’t actually honor it, and was writing HTML files to the .pom and .jar files in the local build directory. This has been fixed now in trunk.
• Unstable: Modularizing the Web Build
  Donald has been continuing his work on breaking up the webapp build.

TMForum Team Action Week

TMForum is the TeleManagement Forum, a consortium of telecom and other vendors who work together on standards of integration.
This week Matt and Craig went to Baltimore to meet up with the other TIP folks at Team Action Week. The goal was to try to hammer out a bit more of the specification for TIP, the TMF Interface Program. The idea is to have a standard interface for various management components like trouble-ticketing tools, fault detection systems, performance monitoring, etc. OpenNMS hopes to develop the reference implementation for these protocols, once they get finalized.
A lot of politics were involved, but we’re hoping that the process will move forward enough for us to start an actual implementation. Although the process isn’t great, the concepts are interesting, and should give us a good basis for modularizing OpenNMS in the future, as well as a tighter way to interact with other systems than we do even now. Keep your fingers crossed, and feel free to add toes if you think it will help.

SourceForge Community Choice Awards: OpenNMS is a Finalist – Vote Now!

I posted this last week, but it’s so gosh-darn important, I thought I’d repeat.
Thanks, everyone, for helping to nominate OpenNMS for the Community Choice Awards!
Now that we are a finalist in the Best Tool for the Enterprise category, it’s time to vote!
As Tarus mentions in his blog, they asked us finalists to do a little extra and create a video talking about the project and why we feel we should get your vote — I mean, besides the obvious reasons, like that our users are the best, most wonderful, handsome, beautiful, and successful people in the IT and open-source world, and obviously they deserve recognition for that…
Ahem, anyways, as I was saying, they asked us to do a video, the results are up at YouTube — or if you just want the funny bits, we’ve got a short trailer.
Anyways, thanks again everyone for your nomination. All that’s left is to go back and vote on the finalists. Good luck to everyone not in the Best Tool for the Enterprise category! <grin>

Vote Now!

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSourceWorld: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

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, criticism, or XML configuration file obfuscator you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi. Also, we’ve still got room for more Order of the Blue Polo members if you’d like to send your own testimonial. (Of course you would!)

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, released May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.4
  1.7.4 is the current unstable release, released June 8th. Since 1.7.3, more work has gone on in the Provisiond code, as well as ACLs, RANCID reports, thresholding fixes, enabling maps by default, and an entirely new way of creating the OpenNMS database under the covers. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: Modularizing the Web Build
  This week Donald did more work on chopping the webapp build system into little tiny pieces. Progress has been made (in a branch) but it’s not finished yet.
• Unstable: Code Cleanup
  I’ve gone on a janitor kick this last week, and spent a ton of time cleaning up old warnings in the code, fixing stuff to use generics, and other tedious-but-nice-when-it’s-finished work. Some of it is in trunk, but most of it has been going on in a branch. I hope to merge it sometime this week.
• Unstable: Monitor Updates
  Jason Aras did a bit more work on his JDBC monitor, as well as a refactoring of the HTTP and HTTPs plugins and a monitor that will let you use the Bean Scripting Framework for creating custom monitors.
• Unstable: Provisiond Bugs
  We’ve found some issues in the scheduling of provisiond threads. One was a Maven issue that gave us 2 different (incompatible) versions of Apache MINA in the OpenNMS library directory. With that fixed, we’ve seen a few other issues with the new import architecture that we’re working through. Donald and Matt did some work last week on figuring it out, and I’ve been tinkering with it still this week.
• Unstable: RANCID Updates
  A few more fixes have been made to the RANCID integration. We are up to release 0.96 of the full integration tarball on SourceForge.
• Unstable: ACL UI Work
  It wouldn’t be a TWiO without talking about Massimiliano Dessì’s work on a GUI for the ACL plumbing that has been implemented in OpenNMS. Work is still ongoing, but he’s committing at a furious pace.
• Unstable: SMS API
  Jeff started work on a low-level SMS API which we’ll use for future SMS integrations, in a branch.

SourceForge Community Choice Awards: OpenNMS is a Finalist – Vote Now!

Thanks, everyone, for helping to nominate OpenNMS for the Community Choice Awards!
Now that we are a finalist in the Best Tool for the Enterprise category, it’s time to vote!
As Tarus mentions in his blog, they asked us finalists to do a little extra and create a video talking about the project and why we feel we should get your vote — I mean, besides the obvious reasons, like that our users are the best, most wonderful, handsome, beautiful, and successful people in the IT and open-source world, and obviously they deserve recognition for that…
Ahem, anyways, as I was saying, they asked us to do a video, the results are up at YouTube — or if you just want the funny bits, we’ve got a short trailer.
Anyways, thanks again everyone for your nomination. All that’s left is to go back and vote on the finalists.
Good luck to everyone not in the Best Tool for the Enterprise category! <grin>

Vote Now!

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSourceWorld: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

Bye for Now

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment, criticism, or HOWTOs on rigging SourceForge voting systems you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi. Also, we’ve still got room for more Order of the Blue Polo members if you’d like to send your own testimonial. (Of course you would!)

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, released May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.4
  1.7.4 is the current unstable release, released June 8th. Since 1.7.3, more work has gone on in the Provisiond code, as well as ACLs, RANCID reports, thresholding fixes, enabling maps by default, and an entirely new way of creating the OpenNMS database under the covers. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: ACL UI Work
  Massimiliano Dessì has continued working on the ACL/Custom View UI webapp. Hopefully this will be finished up before 1.8 goes final, but if not, it will probably be included in a later 1.8.x release.
• Unstable: Bug Fixes
  I spent most of the week going through the backlog of bugs for 1.6 and fixing what I can. I ended up fixing some bugs opened as far back as 3 years ago. So please! Open bugs, even if they’re low priority. They will get looked at eventually.
• Unstable: JICMP Port to JNA
  We have an upcoming project involving native support for interacting with serial devices, and we’re planning on using RXTX to do it. One problem with RXTX is that it has a native component, and is a bit of a trick to distribute as-is. Matt has been experimenting with porting JICMP to use JNA, as a test for implementing it in RXTX for the future to ease platform support.
• Unstable: Web Application Build System Cleanups
  One of the banes of doing OpenNMS development is how long a full build takes. Some of that comes from our build system having been slowly converted from a huge monolithic ant-based codebase into smaller modules, built using maven. Since the dashboard is made with GWT, it has to do some code generation, and right now it is run as part of the monolithic “opennms-webapp” module, even though the dashboard code changes rarely.
  Donald has been working in a branch to chop up the webapp module into smaller, more manageable pieces, which will facilitate turning less-often-changed parts of the build off for common usage.
• Unstable: JDBC Monitor
  Jason Aras made more progress this week on his JDBC monitor, which will let you evaluate full SQL queries for monitoring and data collection.

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSourceWorld: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

Bye for Now

As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment, criticism, or SNMP haikus you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi. Also, we’ve still got room for more Order of the Blue Polo members if you’d like to send your own testimonial. (Of course you would!)

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, released May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.4
  1.7.4 is the current unstable release, released June 8th. Since 1.7.3, more work has gone on in the Provisiond code, as well as ACLs, RANCID reports, thresholding fixes, enabling maps by default, and an entirely new way of creating the OpenNMS database under the covers. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: ACL UI Work
  Massimiliano Dessì has continued working on the ACL/Custom View UI webapp. Hopefully this will be finished up before 1.8 goes final, but if not, it will probably be included in a later 1.8.x release.
• Unstable: Unified Groups
  Daniele Piras has been working (in a branch) on some code to unify the way we handle grouping of resources in OpenNMS, in an attempt to resolve the schizophrenic way we deal with surveillance categories, groups, and other stuff.
• Unstable: RANCID Updates
  Rocco committed some more changes to the RANCID integration, and shortly afterwards I released the 0.94 version of the RANCID pack on SourceForge.
• Unstable: Database Schema Management
  Thanks to some great feedback from a few users on the LiquiBase transition, I made a few bugfixes, which made it into the 1.7.4 release.
• Unstable: Thresholding Fixes
  Alejandro did more work on fixing up thresholding. A few more bugs were fixed and his work is in the 1.7.4 release.
• Unstable: Map Updates
  Antonio did a few updates to the maps, and also as of 1.7.4, they are enabled by default! Yay!
• Unstable: Memcached Monitor
  I added a MemcachedMonitor which will check if it is able to run the “stats” command, and store some of the numeric results in RRDs for thresholding and so on. (See $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/examples/ for samples on how to configure it.)

OpenNMS 1.7.4 Released

OpenNMS 1.7.4 is out as of today (June 8th). It includes a number of bugfixes, and a few updates and new features, most notably maps are now enabled by default in the UI.
The biggest change under the covers is the switch to using LiquiBase for managing our database schema. Previously we’d been using some very crazy cobbled-together code which compares raw SQL to the current runtime schema, and transitions the data accordingly. This was occasionally error-prone (especially in large databases, where we could run out of memory creating temporary tables) and definitely not as, let’s say, deterministic as it should have been.
HOWEVER, if you are upgrading from an existing OpenNMS release, you are encouraged even more than you usually are to back up your database before upgrading to 1.7.4. I’ve tested plenty of combinations of source schemas, but this is still very new and not all possible upgrade paths have been tested.
Also, on the first upgrade to a LiquiBase-controlled schema, the OpenNMS `install` command will take longer than usual, and spit out some errors that may look a little strange, like so:

Jun 8, 2009 11:55:32 AM liquibase.database.template.JdbcTemplate comment
INFO: Changeset 1.6.0/tables/service.xml::1.6.0-service::rangerrick::(MD5Sum: e2513f723746da99580f1dc60ee8559)
Jun 8, 2009 11:55:34 AM liquibase.ChangeSet execute
INFO: Marking ChangeSet: 1.6.0/tables/service.xml::1.6.0-service::rangerrick::(MD5Sum: e2513f723746da99580f1dc60ee8559) ran due to precondition failure:
Not precondition failed

These are NORMAL and part of the upgrade process. LiquiBase expects your schema to have been created by LiquiBase. For upgrade purposes, I created a LiquiBase change set that basically works like this:

1. I want to create the table “events”
2. As a precondition, before creating the table, make sure the table does not exist
3. If the precondition fails (“Not precondition failed” — ie, the table does exist), then pretend the change set has already been run by LiquiBase
4. If the precondition passes (the table does not exist), then run the change set, which creates the table

As long as `install` does not kick you out, you are fine.
Once this has been done, and LiquiBase “owns” the schema, future upgrades will go much faster, and only do new changes.

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSourceWorld: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

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, criticism, or pirated RRD files you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi. Also, we’ve still got room for more Order of the Blue Polo members if you’d like to send your own testimonial. (Of course you would!)

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, released May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.3
  1.7.3 is the current unstable release, released May 3rd. It fixes a number of 1.7.2 bugs, and is the first public release including the new ACL code. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: Database Schema Management
  The new LiquiBase implementation for database upgrade/install is now live and integrated into the opennms `install` command. It’s working in the test conditions I’ve been able to set up, but please, give it a shot and let us know if you run into any issues with it.
• Unstable: ACL UI Work
  Massimiliano Dessì has been tooling along on the ACL/Custom View UI webapp. Hopefully this will be finished up before 1.8 goes final, but if not, it will probably be included in a later 1.8.x release.
• Unstable: Provisiond Updates
  Donald has been running into some strange issues with Dhcpd trying to get the DHCP detector working. Matt is continuing his work on refactoring and finishing up Provisiond. Right now there’s an issue with interfaces sticking around even if they’ve been removed that’s holding up further development.
• Unstable: JDBC Monitor
  Jason Aras has been working on a proper JDBC monitor (which lets you do data collection and run arbitrary queries) in a branch.
• Unstable: Ackd
  David and Matt did some more work on getting Ackd finished up.

OpenNMS 1.8 Timeline

Unofficially, we’ve been shooting for a 1.8 beta before June. Well, here we are at June, and clearly we don’t have a 1.8 beta yet. =)
Some interesting corner cases, bugs, and other things have gotten in the way of release, but the luxury of open source is that we don’t have to push out a broken release just for the sake of meeting shareholder and marketing timelines. That said, we do have our eye on the prize and want to get 1.8 out as soon as possible.
We plan to get a 1.7.4 release out the door, which will fix a number of annoying bugs (including the dreaded event/alarm/notification acknowledgement UI bug) and then go from there. Keep on the lookout for that hopefully by the end of the week, and 1.8 on the horizon!

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSourceWorld: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

Speaking of Timelines…

…Another TWiO out the door, on time!
As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment, criticism, or network management fanfic you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi. Also, we’ve still got room for more Order of the Blue Polo members
if you’d like to send your own testimonial. (Of course you would!)

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.5
  1.6.5 is the current stable release, released May 16th. It fixes a number of bugs, and adds a few features. For a full list, see the bugzilla 1.6.5 milestone. This is a non-critical but recommended upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.5.
• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.3
  1.7.3 is the current unstable release, released May 3rd. It fixes a number of 1.7.2 bugs, and is the first public release including the new ACL code. A 1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.
• Unstable: Database Schema Management
  The new LiquiBase stuff is working, and now I’m going to be integrating it into our current installer this week.
• Unstable: RANCID Updates
  Guglielmo has RANCID HTML and XML reports working in trunk.
• Unstable: Thresholding Rework
  Alejandro has merged his in-line thresholding and latency fixes into trunk. The changes should be available in the latest 1.7.4 nightly snapshots.
• Unstable: Provisiond Updates
  Donald has been continuing work on bringing the detectors available in provisiond in-line with the existing Capsd plugins, so that everything Capsd can detect, Provisiond can detect. Matt has been doing some refactoring and scoping out what needs to be done to support discovered (non-foreign-source’d) nodes in Provisiond.
• Unstable: Alarm, Event and Notification Acknowledgement Fixed
  1.7.3 shipped with a rather annoying bug in acknowledging alarms, events, and notifications in various places in the web UI. These have been fixed in trunk.
• Unstable: ACL UI Work
  Massimiliano Dessì continued his work on the ACL/Custom View UI webapp. Hopefully this will be finished up before 1.8 goes final, but if not, it will probably be included in a later 1.8.x release.

SourceForge Community Choice Awards

SourceForge has once again opened nominations for the 2009 Community Choice Awards. These annual awards provide a chance for the larger open source community to recognize the projects that they get the most out of. The OpenNMS project has made a strong showing in past years in the “Best Project for the Enterprise” category: a crowded field to be sure, but we think the most appropriate for a product that spans so many of the other categories.
If you use and love OpenNMS, you can help by nominating the project yourself — just click below, then select “Best Project for the Enterprise” from the drop-down list. Thanks in advance!

Upcoming Events

• August 12, 2009: Tarus will be giving a talk at OpenSourceWorld: DM4: The Open Source Management Stack.
• September 21st-25th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

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

See Ya

That’s it for this week.
As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future TWiO, or you just have a comment, criticism, or crazy and/or embarassing dream you’d like to share, don’t hesitiate to say hi. Also, we’ve still got room for more Order of the Blue Polo members if you’d like to send your own testimonial. (Of course you would!)