From: "Shane O'Donnell" <shaneo@opennms.org>
To: <general@opennms.org>
Subject: OpenNMS: OpenNMS Update v1.23
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 18:13:38 -0400

================
 OpenNMS Update
================
Vol 1., Issue 23
================

In this week's installment...

 - Project Status
   - Events: Shaping Up
   - Beta Plans Beginning to Take Shape
   - SQL Eats Shane's Lunch
   - Coding Projects Underway
 - Upcoming Tour Dates
 - The Wish List

================
Project Status
================

Events: Shaping Up --

Well, Monsieur Weave is still wussin' around with a broken arm. But somehow,
despite being wounded, he still makes time to do some brilliant things like
taking the sling off and offering his hand when greeting someone, and
crumbling in pain when they shake it. It's like a horrible car accident, you
want to look away, but you cannot.

Aside from Weave-abuse, there's been considerable progress on the
documentation front, with Steve contributing new revisions to both eventm
and reporting (both in pdf, one in html as well), and adding a new document,
uei10c, which describes how all of the goofy seemingly unrelated parts of
the event subsystem all come together into one well-oiled machine. And in
the end, there can be only one.

If you're looking for the docs, it's right where it has always been. Easily
accessible from the Information Superhighway (Thanks, Al Gore!) at
http://www.opennms.org/devdocs/


Beta Plans Beginning to Take Shape --

We had the good fortune to get together with some of our ardent fans over at
NC State late last week, including Andrew Mabe, the resident maven of all
things network management.

We're beginning to work through the plans for the how/when/what we will be
beta-testing for our upcoming release. Our initial findings, following this
first meeting, is that we (the OpenNMS crew) have been great at focusing on
product and functionality, and crappy at thinking through the logistics of
testing it. There are two basic reasons for this:

 - Building a product is fun.
 - Writing test plans sucks.

With this in mind, we've instituted a specific effort to build out the test
plans for the upcoming beta, whether we particularly enjoy it or not.

So why am I rambling about this? If you have ever beta tested a product, or
have been involved in a beta program that you felt was particularly
effective in the information it was targeting and/or how it collected the
information, we'd love to hear about it. Post your comments to the "test"
mailing list. And as always, thank you for your support.


SQL Eats Shane's Lunch --

The database is going through a number of iterations recently, mostly due to
the recent focus on the events subsystem. The table(s) related to storing
the events have been changing a lot lately, usually about 4 to 5 times a
day.

But I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I'm not a database guy.
Never have been. Never will be. And, I'll sell no wine before its time,
either.

So this means that the DB wonks amongst you should take a look at the
"create.sql" script and provide a little feedback, a la:

 - Will this thing work?
And yes, it successfully builds tables in both Oracle 8 and Postgres 7. I
_CAN_ check the easy stuff, ya know.
 - How will this perform?
You understand the nature of data flows in network/systems management, and
more importantly, you understand the flows in YOUR environment. How does the
design match up?
 - Performance?
Should the events table be in its own database? You tell me.
 - Integration capabilities?
Is this design flexible enough to allow you to integrate messages from your
management platform du jour?

Thanks for taking the time to give our design the ol' skunk eye...


Coding Projects Underway --

 - Events -- Rolling again. Sowmya's actually writing to the database. Rock
on!
 - discovery/capsd -- Internal testing is complete. I think somehow a broken
arm has impacted reading speed.
 - AWT <-> SWING Conversion -- Still in preliminary phases. Waiting on an
update from the community. Low priority item.
 - icmpd/Perl -- No update.
 - Service Control Manager -- Development underway. Current implementation
parses the config file and starts new threads.
 - Bug fixes for jReporter -- Development underway. Some rewrites were
necessary.
 - Extractors -- Initial coding is underway. Jacinta owns this one.
Currently handles parameter parsing manually, and will soon be converted to
implement getopts.
 - Java MIB Compiler -- We've got some code from a 3-year-old research
effort which should serve as a great base. Anybody interested in a great
Master's Thesis?

================
Upcoming Tour Dates
================

Since I can't actually _BE_ a rock star (not a lot of call for fat, balding
rock stars these days, except from Melissa Ethridge, but that's another
story altogether...), I'll at least act like I know the terminology.

So, on 9/8, we kick off the North American/European leg of our fall tour.
The roadies have the light show ready and the guitar techs are standing by
with an extra ax all tuned up in the wings. As for me, it's just a laptop, a
suitcase full of Jack Daniels, and all my adoring fans.

I can't do justice to the schedule in the newsletter (because I'm lazy and
I've already got the whole thing laid out on the web site), so if you are in
Colorado Springs, NYC, Seattle, or Chicago, we'll be heading out to rock
your local convention center/amphitheatre/conference room/brew pub sometime
in September.

You can find all of the details (and records of all the hotel rooms we've
destroyed) at http://www.opennms.org/engage.


================
The Wish List
================

Aside from rock-and-roll hair and a buttload of tattoos, all we really want
is a little help and input from everybody, maybe a little bit of your time,
and definitely some of your coding expertise, especially in regards to the
following:

 - Read up on the events subsystem in Steve's new doc and join the fun on
the "events" mailing list.
- Anybody interested in pitching in on adding SNMPv3 functionality to jSNMP?
- Parsing masters needed to implement the upcoming "Filtering" spec
- Java coders need to grab the event correlation spec and bring it to life.
- Anybody out there keeping up with OpenJMS? Keep us posted!

And we'll be sending along one of the women's undergarments tossed to us on
stage to Karl Pena for his efforts in helping us get the event correlation
spec converted to "open source friendly" technologies. Thanks Karl! Word to
the BBQ Crew!

And while we're on the topic of quasi-rock stars...I think it's only fair to
note that some rock stars have dimensions that you wouldn't necessarily
guess. For a great example, check out this link to
http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm.

Until next week, rock on.

Shane O.
========
Shane O'Donnell
OpenNMS
shaneo@opennms.org
http://www.opennms.org

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