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From: announce-admin@opennms.org
To: announce@opennms.org
Subject: [OpenNMS-Announce] OpenNMS Update v2.12
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 22:01:53 -0500 (EST)

====================
   OpenNMS Update
====================
  Vol 2., Issue 12
====================
   March 20, 2001
====================

   In this week's installment...
     * Project Status
          + A Moving Experience
          + Servers Moved
          + New Build Stuff
          + Event Subsystem: Changes Afoot
          + Coding Projects Underway
     * Upcoming Road Shows
     * Early Adopter Program Status
     * The Wish List


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

A Moving Experience:

     Our office move is currently underway, so my apologies in advance
     if this is either too brief or late. We're in that inevitable limbo
     where everything we need (except my laptop and this lamp, and
     that's all I need) is on a truck somewhere across town. With a
     little luck, that truck will be here sometime this evening and
     unpacked in time to still eat dinner tonight.

     As you might guess, things are in varying states of disarray
     pending our magic arrival at a new location, so our productivity
     has been somewhat impacted as well. Best case, we've lost a day.
     Worst case, well, let's not think about it.

     So as promised/forewarned, this will be brief, taking a broad-brush
     approach to some of the more current developments. Enjoy.


Servers Moved:

     Hopefully, some of our server availability problems should be
     behind us. Ben successfully migrated our servers over to new
     hardware this week, amidst getting things ready for our move as
     well.

     If you at any point had trouble reaching us over the last week,
     this is probably why. If it's not the real reason, let's just say
     it is and go on with our lives.

     Should you have any problem with anything (Bob Tanner already
     caught us sleeping at the anonymous CVS wheel), let us know and
     we'll get it fixed.

     Thanks for your patience through this often frustrating process.


New Build Stuff:

     Ben has just been the busiest little beaver this week.

     Over his eventful weekend, while waiting for DNS changes to
     propagate around the world, he converted all of the build stuff
     from Ant 1.2 to Ant 1.3, which he says "rocks".

     Developers will now have the ability to specify where the build
     gets installed to, which has been a pain up until now.

     Documentation building has been impacted as well, since with Ant
     1.3, you don't have to do the XML-to-HTML conversion on a
     file-by-file basis, but can specify a whole subset. Maybe this is
     really only helpful for us, but it's cool nonetheless.

     And this migration was a win for Ben as well, since his 60K
     build.xml file is now only 40K, and should be far more
     maintainable.

     And God bless maintainability.


Event Subsystem: Changes Afoot:

     Earlier today, in a hasty pre-move maneuver, Sowmya announced that
     her new code to provide some flexibility and advanced configuration
     capabilities for incoming traps/events is now checked into a
     testing branch.

     These changes include a couple key pieces of functionality that
     will be pretty cool, including:

     * Unique event configurability based on any combination of UEI,
       service, source, host, interface, node id, trap ID, or SNMP host.

     * Rudimentary correlation, including cancelling events and duplicate
       suppression (aka: singlification)

     * An updated, somewhat-more-intuitive-(or-maybe-not) DTD for events.

     Obviously, this one means some serious changes for us, so give us
     some time to get it tested and benchmarked (a little anyway), and
     we'll have it checked into CVS in no time flat.

     And in case you have forgotten, Sowmya is the goddess of all things
     Java. Thanks for all your efforts on this!


Coding Projects Underway:

     * CDP/L2/Mapping -- Way too early to tell. Watch this space and the
       [discovery] mailing list for updates.

     * Snort Integration -- Matthew Lehman has got his act together on
       this one. Things are progressing nicely and we should have a
       detailed story to tell soon. Also received some information from
       someone else interested in IDEMF.

     * Solaris Port Postgres Procedures -- No update.

     * Testing of Various Components on NT/2K -- This is outside our
       current scope, but we're willing to help out someone out there
       wanting to try this.

     * SNMP Poller/Data Collection -- Recent discussions on thresholding
       with the SNMP poller. We'll see...

     * Event DTD -- G.S. (Goddess Sowmya) is all over this one.

     * User Interfaces -- Larry is chock full o' updates. Jeff is testing
       them as fast as Larry can code them.

     * New Pollers -- Lots of interest in how to write pollers, as well
       as CORBA management. Is this of wide-spread interest?

     * Maji Prelim Work -- Rick is building Perl code that is
       successfully parsing MIB files. Check him out, in all his glory,
       on the "events" list.

     * Configuration -- Trading emails with a faithful member of the
       mailing list interested in perhaps open sourcing some libraries to
       aid in our configuration management processes. I'll keep you
       posted.

     * Swing Interface -- Back-burnered right now.

     * Discovery/CAPSD/Database Review -- Mike is still championing this
       one and finding various "issues". Jeff also found a bug in how the
       ViewCategory Manager was determining group membership and outages.
       Sowmya found the culprit and was fixing it.

     * Agent Technologies -- Progress on the Agent front. Craig Trader
       (OpenNMS fellow and all-around good guy) has stripped the the
       instant messaging code out of the Jabber server, optimizing it for
       our needs. He's now in the process of architecting the basic
       message flows between agent-server-server. Keep on rockin' in the
       free world, Craig!


===================
Upcoming Road Shows
===================

   I'm sitting in the new office and still can't get a DHCP address.

   So, on with the road shows...

     * May 5th - Twin Cities LUG, Minneapolis, MN

     * May 10th - Boulder LUG, Boulder, CO

     * June 1st - NOVALUG BBQ!! Fire-eaters Unite!!

     * June 2nd - Northern Virginia LUG (NOVALUG), Alexandria, VA

     * June 11-15 - OpenView Forum 2001, New Orleans, LA

     * July 23-27 - O'Reilly Open Source Convention, San Diego, CA

   For additional details on these appearances and others, check out the
   web site at http://www.opennms.org/sections/opennms/events


============================
Early Adopter Program Status
============================

   Still hearing good reports on 0.7.1, and getting some GREAT feedback
   on the Web UI (like where's the outage information within the
   categories?)

   Also had an unfortunate withdrawal from the program this week. I don't
   fully understand the situation, but when management marches in and
   says the company is defunct, here's your cardboard box and a severance
   package, people don't seem as interested in the EAP. In all fairness
   to the people involved, we wouldn't wish this on anyone and we
   appreciate your participation to date. Keep in touch and when you land
   those cushy jobs as e-Consultants, remember all us little people. All
   our best wishes go out to you.


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

   A whole lot of email this week (to me) with questions regarding CORBA
   management and asking how to write pollers. We're working on some
   poller doc, but I'm still curious as to how many people are doing
   CORBA management. Is it a growing area?

   And now, on with the list...

     * In the 0.7.x release (and CVS), checkout the TODO file

     * More Data Collection configs wanted for the DataCollection.xml

     * Any interest in more TCP pollers? Let us know (or better yet,
       build one yourself...)

     * LDAP/POP3/nmap Pollers

     * Documentation and development your game? How about a white paper
       on how to extend OpenNMS with custom pollers, custom configs,
       and/or your own scripts/code.

     * Any additional help we can get proving our documentation either
       right or wrong is appreciated. Thanks.

     * Got any creative applications for OpenNMS that we haven't
       considered? Let us know!

     * A Security analysis of OpenNMS?


=============
Afterthoughts
=============

   You have no idea how glad I'll be to get this move over with. The
   movers just left, so Ben and I are here setting stuff up and writing
   an Update, respectively--and we're both a$$ deep in boxes.

   Tomorrow, I'm sleeping in. Definitely. Or maybe not.

Whipped,

Shane O.
========
Shane O'Donnell
OpenNMS.org
shaneo@opennms.org
==================
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