To: discuss@opennms.org From: Pete Siemsen <siemsen@ucar.edu> Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 21:04:35 -0700 Subject: [opennms-discuss] a visit to OpenNMS I just spent a day and a half visiting the OpenNMS folks at their site in North Carolina. I thought I'd share some of what I learned, since some of it is stuff I didn't know even after faithfully lurking on this list. First off, it was a pleasure to meet the team. There are about 10 people in the group, and I was impressed with their experience, knowledge and general brainpower. This project is in good hands. As I assumed, it's a den of code development, with a casual environment and a free-access refrigerator to make any serious programmer happy. Before my visit, I had failed to install OpenNMS version 0.6 on my laptop (750Mhz, 256M, SuSE 7.0, 2.2.17 kernel). I brought the laptop along, and several hours of hands-on help produced a fully-functional version 7.0 system. I know I wouldn't have been able to get it running by myself. Along the way I learned some things: 1. Installation is a bear. They know this and are seriously hacking away at the problem. 2. If you've built your own kernel, as I had, you'll probably have to rebuild it to increase the maximum allowed tasks. The default when you build a kernel is 256, and OpenNMS uses more than 400 threads. Edit your include/linux/tasks.h file and rebuild. Users who run with the kernel that came with a popular distribution probably won't have a problem, as the distros are compiled with the value set high. 3. With the software up, a "ps" command is a little frightening, as it looks like there are 400+ processes on your machine. Don't worry, it's an artifact of Java's thread support, and your system will run fine. 4. For now, you have to run the software as root. 5. PostgreSQL, Tomcat and icmpd need to be running before you start OpenNMS. 6. It takes, like, 2 minutes to start or stop the software. For some configuration changes, you have to stop/start the software. This will get better in the future. 7. Put the distribution in your home directory, in a subdirectory named opennms-all. This is what the developers do. 8. You can use a JDK from Sun or from IBM. They use IBM, but don't know of a reason not to use Sun's. I have Sun's, so I'll find out. 9. There are two interfaces, the older "gui" or "Swing" interface and the quite new web interface. For now, you have to run the gui interface for configuration tasks like setting up users or defining the limits of IP discovery. Most of the time, you'll use the web interface to actually monitor your network. 10. Everything is configured by XML files. The gui interface provides a friendly interface, but it helps if you're comfortable with XML. Unix types may prefer to edit the files. 11. A functional system has several pieces: Java, OpenNMS, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, Xerces, RRD, Ant, etc. Versionitis is a problem. On my system, some components had to be upgraded because they were all of a month old! The team will bundle things for releases, but this problem will make life interesting for developers. 12. Although OpenNMS is designed to be distributed, for now the pieces all run on one box. I think this is a good thing, as it's complex enough without being distributed. Thanks to the team for all the help. I'll try to actually *use* the software soon, and I'm happy knowing that friendly expertise is so accessible. -- Pete _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list (discuss@opennms.org) To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your list options, go to: http://www.opennms.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss