KDE4/X11 Plasma Desktop on Mac OS X in Xephyr

Working KOffice file asociations

Actually, that was just the text saying that I was going to have big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff. Here's the real thing:

It breaks stuff!

But let me explain: it makes things better! Because of some esoteric stuff relating to case-sensitivity, existing packages, and bugs in Fink dpkg, there were issues on a number of people's systems with the existing KDE packages and conflicting paths. Of course, the root of the issue is that Fink didn't have a proper "/opt" type directory, so a number of packages for quite some time have been using "/sw/lib" for that purpose (/sw/lib/qt4-x11, /sw/lib/flex, etc.)

Since I was going to have to move things around anyways to fix this issue, I decided to do it right. As of Fink 0.29.7, the package validator accepts "/sw/opt" as a valid path to root packages. All of the KDE4 packages have been changed to use this new path, so when you upgrade to KDE 4.2.4, you will end up with a nice fresh clean KDE in /sw/opt/kde4/x11 or /sw/opt/kde4/mac (or both).

But wait, there's more!

I've also spent a lot of time fixing bugs and tweaking some fink-specific behaviors so that KDE integrates better with your Fink experience.

• Fink's kdelibs4 automatically knows about the usual locations for kde4 files, so all KDE4 apps will start properly without needing /sw/opt/kde4/{x11,mac} in the path. This includes KDE4 apps launched from the Finder.
• The kdebase-workspace package is now supported for KDE4/X11. That means you can start a full KDE desktop!
• As a test, I created proper Info.plist files for KOffice, so file associations actually work. Till Adam has been working on a more robust way of doing this in the future, but if I find the time I might work on setting up more associations for common KDE apps in the mean time. (Kommon apps?)

So, for those of you who have already tinkered with KDE4 in Fink, I'm sorry to say it all needs an upgrade. But, on the bright side, once you do, you'll have a much nicer KDE.

As always, if you run into any issues, please let me know.

Comments

Benjamin,

A question for you (and Tarus). Is this topic important to you because:

1. You believe it's an important marketing differentiator for the software you work on vs. competitors
2. You believe it's an important philosophical / moral issue worth evangelizing
3. both

Tackling a) involves traditional marketing objectives around branding, awareness, messaging, positioning, etc. Not necessarily a cake walk, but certainly possible to make progress.

Tackling b) involves changing the way people think and behave, which is much much more challenging.

My response is:

Definitely both.

From a personal point of view, I've been involved in open source software since before the phrase was coined, so I do feel that it is at least a personal philosophical issue. BUT I'm also a pragmatist, and I know that arguing purely for philosophy's sake will not convince anyone.

That said, that philosophy drives me to support the companies that I think are doing it "right." I work for OpenNMS not just because I think the software's great, but also because I love that we can compete with "the big guys" by having a better community.

Part of the reason that we get so passionate about it is that a lot of these "does it really matter?" conversations start with the implication that we're already failing to compete, which is just plain wrong. I'm sure that's why we probably often sound defensive when we are hoping to sound convincing. ;)

I'm the first to roll my eyes at the "true believers" -- while I think that in the end open source is a better way to do things in a "pay it forward" kind of way, I believe it's better from a philosophical and pragmatic way. It won't work for everyone, but it can work for open source projects as an alternative to big-money funding.

I am a child of the VC tech industry. I've worked at startups and I know what it feels like to work on software you think is great only to be shut down and have the IP sold off, just because the VP of sales didn't do his job. It's refreshing to work for a company that starts with community first, and grows by being truly profitable, rather than by incurring massive amounts of debt. (See: current economy.) It's refreshing to not be one of 10 companies the VC bets on, and if 9 of them fail, "eh, oh well, that's statistics."

Since we grow as we have profit, rather than funding, the biggest investment we can make is in our time, improving the software, and growing the community. There is nothing wrong with the "fauxpen source" companies' business model, they are welcome to write good software as best they can, and get market share, but in the end, we do differentiate by our openness and our interaction with the community. When they co-opt the phrase that was meant to be equivalent to "free software" to now mean "kind of free software," it does pure open source companies a disservice and it is a lie by omission that they equate their software to be "just as free" as ours.

Sure, that's competition, but that's why it's important for us to get the word out that there is a difference.

Comments

The Open Source Definition arose out of the ambiguity of the word "free" in "Free Software," as defined by the Free Software Foundation." In the English language, "free" is a loaded term that has two meanings: "freedom", and "costing nothing." It was created to get rid of some of the emotional baggage that came with the intense philosophical point of view of the FSF, but just because the OSD is more "business-friendly" does not mean that it doesn't have the philosophy and intent of openness behind it.

This friction comes from two very different approaches to open source that I think have been missing from a lot of the discussion regarding how open source applies to business models. I'm going to call these "community value" and "monetary value."

In some ways, this dichotomy reminds me of the GPL (GNU Public License) versus the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License). The GPL is a pure open-source license, which guarantees the user's freedom by making it so that no software that uses GPL software can hide or restrict that use in a derivative work. The LGPL, on the other hand, was a compromise, a pragmatic license which allows one to create free software, but it does not require free distribution of things that link to that software. The LGPL has always clearly been discouraged by the FSF precisely because it compromises the freedoms guaranteed by the GPL.

Open Core: Nurturing Monetary Value ("Lesser" Open Source)

Advocates of using the term "open source" to apply to open-core and similar business models approach open source from a monetary value point of view. It is an approach of pragmatism: you create a business plan, get venture capital to get going, and sell software licenses to (hopefully) eventually pay back the VC firms and continue to grow. In many ways, an open-core business is exactly the same as any other startup. Open Source is not a fundamental philosophical part of the business, it is instead used to cut costs, and to help grow "buzz" about what your company is doing, and perhaps even get some free QA, bug reports, etc. The focus is not on creating a community to draw customers indirectly by improving the product, but to draw customers directly by creating awareness. To meet the demands of the venture capital, it requires a fast-growth, high-yield business model, and the community model doesn't grow that fast.

In the end, how much work you do nurturing a community is directly a matter of how many you can convert to paying year-over-year for software licenses, or whatever other artificial scarcity you create. Once customers have decided they want the features only available in the up-sell ("enterprise") version of your software, they have more resistance to changing to another product.

This is growing monetary value. The open-source community in a "monetary value" business is a side-effect of a marketing push to draw licensed customers. If the community goes away, you still have an essentially standalone commercial business that can continue just as if the community never existed. This is not to say the community doesn't provide value, nor that it doesn't derive value from the open source portion of their software, only that the business plan itself doesn't hinge on the openness of the software.

Open Source: Nurturing Community Value ("Pure" Open Source)

On the other hand, "pure" open source business models (services & support, like my employer) approach business from a community value point of view. This is not to say that pure open source companies don't want to make money -- only that to be successful, we compete with much bigger companies by multiplying our value with that of the community. To be able to be competitive with companies with huge amounts of seed money, we can't afford to treat our community just as a resource to be mined; our community is what makes it possible to support a large user-base with a small number of employees. Our community are like-minded individuals, working on this project with us together.

Since we are not beholden to venture capital, we don't have to get quick returns to maximize stockholder returns. Instead what we need is to work with the community to make great software, and to continue to challenge ourselves to extend and expand our knowledge of that software, so we are able to provide our expert opinions as a service worth paying for. As long as we can pay the bills, give ourselves a comfortable salary, keep customers and the user-base happy, and grow the business, we consider ourselves successful. Our goal is to become the de facto network management platform, and we can do that better by not being in debt to venture firms for years.

On the surface, the value we and our community get from each other may not look that different from that of an open-core company, but looking deeper, there are a number of advantages to the "slow and steady wins the race" methodology we use:

Everyone Gets the "Enterprise" Version

You are not held ransom for features that are only in the for-pay version. You can evaluate the product as it truly is, without time-limited evaluation licenses, crippleware with features missing, or annoying shareware reminders.

No Software Licenses

The software isn't artificially limited, it is capable of whatever your hardware is capable of without an arbitrary restriction because the sales VP decided that's where to draw the line. Note that it's easy to think that Red Hat is a counter-example, since they charge licenses for installed hosts, but from a freedom perspective, you can install the code on as many hosts as you like (ie, CentOS) without restriction, the restriction is only on "official" support.

Everyone Benefits from Community Involvement

When the community adds value, everyone benefits. Users help each other with issues, provide patches, documentation, and so on. The community contribution to OpenNMS has been huge -- not only major features, but default configuration for large amounts of network gear, which OpenNMS now supports out of the box on every new install.

Everyone Benefits from Commercial Involvement

Since the code is 100% open-source, customers who pay for custom development not only get their own value from the transaction, but the software goes back into the mainline, and benefits everyone.

An anecdote: We had a support customer who paid for some custom development for a somewhat esoteric feature. It was originally done in a branch of OpenNMS something like 5 or 6 years ago. The OpenNMS code base has gone through huge upheavals, refactorings, and architectural changes since that feature was created, but since it was released back into the OpenNMS mainline, when they finally upgraded their production system to an up-to-date OpenNMS release, the feature continued to work. If a consulting company did that same custom work as an HP OpenView plugin, they would have to port/implement it all over again after 3 major version revisions of the upstream software.

100% Forkable

While we make a living supporting OpenNMS, we do not "own" the project. (Although, we do own the OpenNMS trademark -- the realities of business in the US require it if we want to be able to protect the name of the project.)

At best we are stewards, but the list of OpenNMS employees is a fraction of the number of "core" contributors, and the core contributors are a fraction of the number of users who have added value to OpenNMS over the years.

We run and guide the project, but only because the community trusts us to do so. Our job is to earn that trust, by upholding the principles I've outlined above. When we do so, everyone gets value from OpenNMS. If we fail to do so, the OGP will "vote us off the island," and if it becomes bad enough, the source is fully available so it can be forked to something the community approves of.

Either Approach is "Better," but Only One is Truly Open

In the end, it's like the difference between a stable community bank who personally knows every person it gives a loan to, and an investment bank bringing in money fast with high-risk derivatives; they are focused on providing value to two entirely different sets of people. Either approach is better depending on your point of view -- they each have their advantages. However, in the end, I believe it is disingenuous to claim that open-core and similar business models have as much right to the phrase "open source" as pure open source businesses.

Comments

Alright, folks, the bearding has commenced.

Now's your chance to make a pledge for the Carolina Hurricanes Kids 'n' Community Foundation. Just hit the "Pledge a Friend" button, and put in "Benjamin Reed".

If you know me, you know my dedication to never exposing my unfortunate double-chin to the horrors of sunlight. Don't let this sacrifice be in vain! Pledge now!

Comments

In the '05-'06 Stanley Cup run, I grew a pretty substantial playoff beard, just for the heck of it. (see fig. 1, pictured right)

This time, the Hurricanes are doing a great charity event for the Kids 'N Community Foundation: the Beard-A-Thon!

When the regular season games are over, I'm going to shave, and then grow a playoff beard as hard as I can.

Now, as I mentioned, it's a charity event, and I need you folks to help me out, by pledging at the Beard-A-Thon page. Don't forget to enter "Benjamin Reed" where it says, " There's a specific beard grower I'd like to support."

Comments

There's still a lot of rough edges, but it's definitely at least beta quality, and a lot of apps work great. It includes a number of fixes, including updated scripts to register all of the desktop files properly with ksycocoa on post-install, case-sensitive filesystem fixes, and a number of other packaging fixes. I've also finished packaging all of the "core" KDE distribution.

I've got Amarok working in my experimental tree, I just need to do a little more testing before I can release it (It's based on a snapshot of what will become Amarok 2.1.0, since 2.0.x has some build issues on Mac OS X that are difficult to resolve). Also, the KOffice folks just put out a release candidate that I'm working on finishing up packaging on. Hopefully I will have that out soon.

As always, please let me know if you run into issues. I've test-built on 10.5/i386 and 10.4/ppc so I'm sure some 10.4/i386 and 10.5/ppc users will give bug reports soon. ;)

Comments

One of the places my music is available for download is bandcamp.com, who offers up a nice little download/portal service where you can make your music available. You can get my music there for free at 128kbit, or if you want to support my music, or get a higher-quality format (all the way up to FLAC and Apple Lossless!), you can name your own price.

I was looking at my download/listen statistics, and I saw something strange. They do 60-day, 30-day, week, or daily graphs, along with defender graphs.

Defender?!

So I clicked on it, and I saw the coolest most useless statistics graph ever. You can play defender in your graphs. The little UFO flies around, there's people on the ground, and you can move your ship back and forth and shoot them. Awesome!

60-day graph:

Defender graph:

How cool is that!!?

Comments

Please give them a shot, let me know if you have any issues, if things don't work as expected. I know one major thing to look into still is to get document-opening working. Right now the KDE desktop files describe which apps should open different document types, but that is not being translated to OSX's document-opening APIs.

The following packages were released to unstable today:

• digikam-mac and digikam-x11
• kdeaccessibility4-mac and kdeaccessibility4-x11
• kdeadmin4-mac and kdeadmin4-x11
• kdeartwork4-mac and kdeartwork4-x11
• kdeedu4-mac and kdeedu4-x11
• kdegraphics4-mac and kdegraphics4-x11
• kdemultimedia4-mac and kdemultimedia4-x11

Big ones left on the hitlist are amarok2 and koffice2. Amarok2 I'm starting work on again as a snapshot of the 2.1.0 build, since there are some issues with 2.0.x building on OSX. KOffice is actually working pretty well in my experimental tree, but 2.0 release candidate is due out in the next week or so, so I'm going to wait to update to that before doing a release.

Comments

Without further ado, I present to you: This Week in OpenNMS. Same bat-time, different bat-channel.

RSS is still available, but the url has moved here, rather than getting everything through my blog.

Please, update your links!

Comments

As you can tell, I've been pretty busy having fun hacking on OpenNMS lately. While I have been keeping up with my Fink work to some extent, one major thing was still looming: finally getting all the work I did on KDE/Mac released in Fink, now that things have stabilized.

If you've been watching the commits for the last few months, you've seen the beginnings of that work. Updates to Qt, releases of support things like strigi and soprano... The big hurdle was getting D-Bus in a state where it plays well with KDE/Mac. After some initial hiccoughs, the D-Bus updates have been released to Fink now, and seem to be working well for people.

Today, I released the base packages for KDE 4.2.x into fink: kdelibs4, kdepimlibs4, and kdebase4.

Because of the cross-platform nature of KDE, I've released them in 2 variants: mac and x11, so you can run konqueror as an X11 app, or as a mac app. :)

Some things will only be present in one or the other, for various reasons (X11-specific features, etc.) One thing that will be in the X11 variant that is not there now is kdebase-workspace, so no plasma desktop as of yet. I've built it, but it doesn't act right currently, so I'm waiting to release until it's in a usable state.

This is still early test stuff, so if you run into issues with it, please feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I can't thank enough Orville Bennett and the other KDE/Mac folks. They have picked up the early work I did on porting and ran with it, helping polish it into a nice, buildable, and solid set of code while I was on my "hiatus" from KDE packaging. :) They have done a lot of great work in helping bring native mac KDE from "freakish mutant" to "used every day by KDE developers."

In the coming weeks I hope to get more of the base KDE packages done. I'm in the testing phase for koffice, amarok, kdeartwork, and a couple of others, and working my way through packaging more. I'll post as I get anything interesting.

Comments

I've decided to do This Week in OpenNMS on Mondays, instead of Fridays, since it's more likely that people will be around to read it on Monday, and since then I don't have to furiously write under a deadline Friday afternoon when I could be sitting out on the porch, sipping drinks and relaxing. Or something.

Anyways, welcome to This (well, Last) Week in OpenNMS!

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.2

  1.6.2 is still the current release, and while there are a few fixes pending since it's release, there are no immediate plans for a 1.6.3 yet.

• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.0

  Trunk continues to move at a furious rate. We're still hoping to get 1.7.1 out soon. Stay tuned for updates on that. In the meantime, feel free to try the nightly snapshots (if it's not on a production system, of course).

• Trunk: Build System Updates

  Work has begun on refactoring our Maven build system. We've been trying to move a lot of things out of the main build, to speed up building and to componentize things that should be "external" dependencies. The new structure has been introduced, and we're looking at eventually moving all of our code into this structure:

  • core: OpenNMS core. This will include event handling, basic daemon support, and other support code needed by all of OpenNMS.

    • api: Interfaces and basic APIs

    • lib: "Library" code (the majority of the core code)

    • runtime: Runtime code, ie, things only needed in a running OpenNMS instance

    • web: Web application code common to all of OpenNMS

    • doc: Documentation

  • features: Any feature of OpenNMS that can be modularized, and isn't part of the Core. This will include most of the daemons (Notifd, Provisiond, etc.) Each feature gets it's own directory, and will have a similar structure to the core module.

  • extensions: Any feature of OpenNMS that does not need to be built by default for a basic running OpenNMS installation (ticketing integrations, etc.) Each extension gets it's own directory, and will have a similar structure to the core module.

  • lib: Support "library" code used by any part of OpenNMS, which can be a standalone package. The lib directory is not built by default, but instead deployed to the maven repository as they are updated as if they were individual projects. Examples include the service-registration framework (DNS-SD advertising), our version of JoeSNMP, and the SNMP strategies.

  • assemblies: Assemblies in maven describe how all of these various components get packaged up together. The plan is to make multiple assemblies for a minimal system, full install, and so on so you can choose how much OpenNMS you want when building from source. Having multiple assemblies will also make it easier to run just a portion of OpenNMS for development and testing.

• Trunk: Provisiond

  Provisiond is solidifying, the only major word to be done is support for the newSuspect events to fully replace Capsd's functionality. Lots of performance work has been going on in it as well, so it should be able to very quickly scan networks that took a long time under Capsd.

• Trunk: RANCID

  Antonio and Guglielmo have been working hard on the RANCID adapter. I'm told the RANCID map integration is very cool, but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. It's in the latest snapshots.

• Trunk: DNS Provisioning Adapter

  I worked on Dave's provisioning adapter some, and got it working. Now whenever a node is added/updated/deleted, we can update a dynamic DNS server with the new hostname -> IP address mapping based on the node label in the provisioning group node configuration. It's a good example of how to make a provisioning adapter.

• Trunk: UI Enhancements

  Donald continues to make our UI more interactive, and handle large numbers of elements sanely. The node page is looking pretty sweet. :)

• Trunk: Event Parameter Name Extraction

  Jeff did a useful little feature to be able to use parameter names in %parm% expansions. See bug #3061 for details.

About the Inventory Scanner

Matt Raykowski has been working on a very cool feature in a branch called the inventory scanner. I asked him to send me a quick summary of what his goals are for the inventory scanner, and here's what he said:

Very cool stuff, Matt!

Upcoming Events

Note: April training has been pushed back to May.

• March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

• May 4th-8th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

• June 14th-19th, 2009: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2009, the annual OpenNMS developers conference, will be in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year.

If you have anything to add to the events list, or you wish to be a Dev-Jam sponsor, please let me know.

That's It!

That's it for this week. As always, questions, comments, non-sequiturs, gifts, and bribes are always welcome, feel free to e-mail me. And if you have a question about OpenNMS that you think would be a good topic in TWiO, please, let me know!

Comments

Anyways, since I've gotten a little sloppy, I'm going to make it up for you, with a feature on the new Provisiond, which is shaping up quite nicely. And to show my shame, I've dubbed this week's article: This Week (or Two) in OpenNMS.

But, to begin... What's been going on for the last two weeks?

Project Updates

New Node Page

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.2

  1.6.2 is still the current release, and while there are a few fixes pending since it's release, there are no immediate plans for a 1.6.3 yet.

• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.0

  Commits have been speeding by on trunk as Provisiond moves it's way into a feature-complete state. I'm still hoping we'll get a 1.7.1 release out soon so people can give it a shot, but, well, we have to stop to breathe first. In the meantime, feel free to try the nightly snapshots (if it's not on a production system, of course).

• Trunk: RANCID Updates

  Antonio and Guglielmo have been furiously working away on the RANCID integration, focusing on authentication, and the UI for the most part.

• Trunk: SNMP Refactoring

  Matt has spent some time refactoring some of the SNMP data so that it is instead in the snmpInterface table where it belongs, and it means no more 0.0.0.0 IPs where they don't belong. This cleans up our model a bit to be more sane. (A bit.)

• Trunk: Provisiond Updates

  Provisiond is nearing feature-complete, and is definitely at a point where it can be tried out on real-world networks. See below for a feature on Provisiond.

• Trunk: Node Page Updates

  Donald and Matt have both been working on updating the node page to be more dynamic. It's pretty slick now, offering tabs detailing various information related to the node.

• Branch: Inventory Management

  Matt Raykowski continued work on his inventory daemon. I'm still waiting for a more detailed update of what it does/will do, I'll try to get an update before next week's TWiO.

Provisiond: An Overview

Provisioning Groups: UI

Provisioning Groups: Edit Requisition

Provisioning Groups: Edit Foreign Source

A History Lesson

Architecturally, OpenNMS is very sound. It was written from the beginning with scalability in mind, by people who had been dealing with network management for their entire careers. However, Java, as a language (and as an environment), has grown immensely in power, reliability, and expressiveness since we started this project. Gone are the heady days of requiring IBM's 1.3 JDK because it was the only one that handled large numbers of open ports gracefully.

That does not mean all remnants of those days are gone, however.

Over the years, most of OpenNMS has gone through an architectural upgrade, under the guidance of Matt Brozowski. Whole subsystems were cleaned up, rewritten, and/or modernized. 3 glaring exceptions remained, until recently: Capsd (the capability scanner), Notifd (the notification engine), and the web UI (I don't know if it's web 1.0, or web 0.9, but well... it needs an upgrade.) Thanks to the recent implementation of Provisiond, I'm happy to say we only have two glaring exceptions to the wonderful architectural upgrades OpenNMS has gone through. Notifd: I'm coming for you next!

Capsd! Huugh! Good God, Y'all! What Is It Good For?

OpenNMS has three distinct phases when it comes to how it discovers and works with nodes:

1. Discovery (What's Out There?)

   Discovery is the beginning of the life of a node. OpenNMS does a ping sweep across the range of addresses specified in your configuration, and says, "did it respond?" If the answer is "yes," discovery shouts into the event bus, "HEY! I suspect I might have found a new node!" Discovery is not actually a requirement of OpenNMS, it is entirely possible to use it without doing discovery, either by sending your own newSuspect event (through a script, or the "Add Interface" link in the admin UI), or by using the model importer.

2. Capability Scanning (What Does It Do?)

   Capsd, the capability scanning daemon, listens for newSuspect events, and says, "Hmm, what is this IP address capable of?" It does service scans (based on the capsd plugins defined), checks for SNMP, and does some other things to determine whether it's a new node or part of another node, and what services are publicly listening.

3. Monitoring (Is It Still Doing It?)

   Once a node has been discovered and capability scanned, it goes into the queue to be monitored, based on the poller-configuration. At that point it becomes a part of the normal poll/data-collection/thresholding/notification cycle that you know and love.

The Model Importer

Some of our users are integrating OpenNMS into larger systems, or want tighter control over what nodes OpenNMS is aware of than can be provided by a ping sweep and Capsd scan. For that, we wrote the model importer, or "provisioner".

To use the model importer, you would create an import definition XML file, which describes the nodes, their interfaces, and services which you want to manage directly. Most folks who are doing this either export from some other internal database of managed nodes, or use the Manage Provisioning Groups UI and custom-build a set of nodes directly. You hit the import button, and voila! Your database is populated with the exact set of nodes, interfaces, and services you specified.

This is very powerful, but also very rigid. It's pretty much an all-or-nothing affair; there's no room for discovering extra information about provisioned nodes.

What Does Provisiond Do?

Provisiond replaces the functionality of Capsd, and replaces and expands upon the old model importer, by defining not only the nodes and interfaces you wish to monitor, but also adding the ability to distinguish how we should behave when importing these nodes. It has a pluggable architecture which allows for defining policies such as, "scan the imported node, and if it's in this IP address range, automatically put it in the routers category," and "scan the specified interface, automatically discover the SNMP interfaces, and if they are non-IP, don't bother putting them in the database."

Architecturally, Provisiond is chopped up into a number of subsystems:

• The Provisioner

  This is the meat of provisiond, it's responsible for managing a provisioning "lifecycle," which includes scheduling scans, listening for events, and kicking off the various parts of scanning and writing to the database. Matt has written a very powerful engine for doing these various tasks which I suspect will move into other parts of the code as we refactor them in the future. There's a lot more flexibility in determining when things will be scanned than Capsd's main loop.

• Detectors

  The detectors are the replacements for Capsd scanners, and they've received an upgrade over their Capsd counterparts as well. They've been rewritten with an architecture that allows them to run asynchronously, so service scans which take a while don't have to bottle up the scanning of other nodes. Additionally, the SNMP scanning has received an upgrade that lets us react to bulk gets as soon as a complete "row" of data is received, so node sub-interfaces discovered through SNMP will start showing up sooner.

• Policies

  Policies act as filters on the data as it's coming in. We've got a few simple ones in the first release, but since they're written with a very simple and pluggable API, it makes it easy for you to define your own business logic by creating an incredibly simple class and dropping it in the classpath.

A Bit More on the Model

The existing model importer had the concept of a "provisioning group," which is a collection of node/interface/etc. definitions, and was configured through the Manage Provisioning Groups UI. Each provisioning group had a "foreign source" which defined a discrete collection of nodes, so that if you removed a node from that foreign source, it would be deleted from the database as well.

In Provisiond, the foreign source is no longer just a tag that's a unique identifier, it's a definition of the behavior of the provisioner (ie, defines the detectors and policies). To that end, we've renamed the generic "provisioning group" to a Requisition. There is then a separate configuration for the Foreign Source which defines the policies which describe how the requisition is imported.

What Works?

At this point, almost everything. The only thing missing is the part that listens for newSuspects, so it doesn't completely replace Capsd as of yet. However, barring that, all of the functionality of Capsd is essentially implemented in Provisiond at this point.

How Do I Try It?

Grab a 1.7.1 snapshot or build from source, and fire it up. Provisiond is enabled by default now, and you can go to the Manage Provisioning Groups link in the UI to try it out. Did I mention this is unstable software? Really, it's unstable software. Don't do this on a production system! That said, it's cool. =)

Upcoming Events

• March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

• April 6th-10th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

• June 14th-19th, 2009: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2009, the annual OpenNMS developers conference, will be in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year.

If you have anything to add to the events list, or you wish to be a Dev-Jam sponsor, please let me know.

I'm Beat

Man, it was a lot of work to write that up. I'm so tired, I just might miss TWiO next week. We'll just have to see. ;)

As always, if you wish to berate me publicly, feel free to leave a comment on my blog, and if you wish to berate me privately, feel free to send me an e-mail. Until next time!

Comments

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.2

  1.6.2 is still the current release, and while there are a few fixes pending since it's release, there are no immediate plans for a 1.6.3 yet.

• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.0

  Trunk has been moving fast still, and I hope we'll get a 1.7.1 release out soon-ish, but we're still trying to get provisiond up to a demoable state first. In the meantime, feel free to try the nightly snapshots (if it's not on a production system, of course).

• Trunk: Javamail Updates

  Dave's been working on refactoring our javamail support into it's own module, to make it easier to reuse in different portions of OpenNMS.

• Trunk: RANCID Integration

  Guglielmo continued work on the RANCID integration; the API has stopped changing much and most of the work has been going on in the UI at this point.

• Trunk: Provisiond

  Matt has most of the provisiond code working, some simple scanning is possible now, there are just a few loose ends to tie up before there's a working prototype.

• Trunk: Node Page Updates

  Donald's spiffy new ajaxy node page is active, and lets you page through data related to the node directly in the node page.

• 1.6 Testing: Minor Updates

  Jeff, Bill, and a few others have done some minor updates to 1.6-testing (which of course are forward-ported to trunk as well) including IE rendering issues, additional MIBs, read-only KSC report support, and more.

• Trunk: Map Updates

  Antonio has continued work on the new trunk map code, which includes support for all modern SVG browsers (Safari, Firefox, and IE with the Adobe SVG plugin).

• Trunk: RESTful Support for Map Data

  Matt Raykowski submitted RESTful API support for map and related data (map elements, linkd data, etc.) which will be useful for future map work.

• Trunk: XMP/Cartographer Support

  Jeff merged Bobby Krupczak's Cartographer agent support for OpenNMS to trunk.

  Cartographer "implements a novel approach to managing distributed systems by automatically discovering and tracking the relationships between its component systems and applications. Cartographer does so via specially designed agents -- residing on clients, servers and (potentially) network devices -- that detect, identify, and track the inter and intra-system dependencies or relationships. Dependencies include network level services like DNS, DHCP, and SMTP as well as higher-level application abstractions like filesystems, databases, directory services, telephony, and middleware."

Upcoming Events

• March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

• April 6th-10th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

• June 14th-19th, 2009: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2009, the annual OpenNMS developers conference, will be in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year.

If you have anything to add to the events list, or you wish to be a Dev-Jam sponsor, please let me know.

If You Can't Love the Source You've Opened, Open the Source You Love

That's all for this week. I hope you all have a wonderful valentine's day if you're into that kind of thing. As always, feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions, comments, or if you wish to know my address so you can send me some mysterious white powder through postal mail.

Comments

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.2

  1.6.2 seems to be holding up nicely, although there have been some reports of issues with JMX thresholding that need to be investigated more deeply still. If you're having issues and can add some details to the bug on the subject, it would be appreciated.

• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.0

  Trunk is still moving crazy fast, so hopefully we'll be getting another 1.7 release out there soon when a few things settle down, so people can help test. In the meantime, feel free to try the nightly snapshots (if it's not on a production system, of course).

• Trunk: Acknowledgement Daemon

  Dave continues to make progress on Ackd in between crazy days at the TeleManagement Forum's Team Action Week (more on that later). Hopefully it will be ready for folks to test it out in the next few weeks.

• Trunk: Inventory Daemon

  Fresh off the heady high of getting WMI support in trunk, Matt Raykowski has started work on on inventory daemon, which intends to provide a more flexible interface to systems asset and inventory information than our current (anemic) asset system.

• Trunk: Provisiond

  Provisiond continues to progress towards something usable. Matt's been working on finishing the scanning code, and Matt and I both have spent some time this week making an optimized SNMP table tracker which will let us perform operations on collected SNMP data as it comes in, so scans of nodes with large numbers of interfaces will happen in a more timely manner.

  I also finished up this week a RESTful API to the Provisiond importer, which will let you edit and create model-import and foreign sources. The web UI is next, and will use this API for creating provisiond's configuration.

• Trunk: RANCID Support

  Guglielmo continues to flesh out the RANCID API. Work has begun on the OpenNMS web UI side of the implementation, and small changes are still being made to the RANCID java bindings.

• Trunk: Node Page Updates

  Donald continued his work on making the node page more dynamic.

TeleManagement Forum's Team Action Week

OpenNMS, represented by OGP members Craig Gallen and David Hustace, is participating this week at the TeleManagment Forum's (TMF) Team Action Week (TAW) in Lisbon.

Craig is leading the TMF Interface Program (TIP) Reference Implementation (RI) team and we will be creating open source implementations of TIP interfaces starting with Service Problem Management (SPM).

The artifacts created by the reference implementation team will be libraries that can be used to develop NGOSS-compliant components in service provider applications. OpenNMS has committed to working on the Service Problem Management (SPM) interface (Alarms), Inventory, Performance Management, and Trouble Ticket implementations. For more information see the interface program page on TMF's web site.

Upcoming Events

• February 2nd-6th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group in Milan, Italy.

• February 9th-13th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

• March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

• June 14th-19th, 2009: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2009, the annual OpenNMS developers conference, will be in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year.

If you have anything to add to the events list, or you wish to be a Dev-Jam sponsor, please let me know.

Cruisin'

That's it for now. We'll see you again, in a couple of weeks! As always, if you have questions, comments, or angry hate-filled missives to send, let me know.

Comments

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.2

  On January 15th, we saw the release of OpenNMS 1.6.2 which included a number of small bugfixes and feature additions.

  For the full list of what was changed, see the 1.6.2 bug milestone.

• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.0

  The 15th also saw the first unstable release since 1.6 went stable. It is a work-in-progress release from trunk which gives a preview of the features to come in the 1.8 series. As 1.7.x releases come out, the release notes in the New and Noteworthy section of the web page will be updated with an overview of the new features which will be in 1.8.0.

• Trunk: Provisioning

  Provisiond is moving along, with lots more commits. Matt has been working on the scheduler and other infrastructure, and I've been working on the data model for the requisition (what nodes/etc. to import) and foreign source (what to do with the information imported). Things are moving along, and hopefully we will be doing actual scanning of node data soon.

• Trunk: RANCID Integration

  Guglielmo has been working more on the integration with RANCID for Cisco router management.

• Trunk: Acknowledgement Daemon

  Dave is continuing his work on the acknowledgement daemon. It's approaching finished, and will hopefully be in a usable state in the nightly snapshots soon.

• Trunk: WMI Updates

  More work has been done on the WMI feature since 1.7.0 came out, including some architectural tweaking, and lots of new data collections.

• Trunk: Map Work

  More work has been going on in the OpenLaszlo map branch. From what I've been told, it's approaching a usable/demoable state. Look for updates on this soon!

  Also, Antonio did some bugfixes and updates to the Firefox/Safari SVG maps, as well.

• Trunk: Node Page Enhancements

  Donald has been working on some new spiffy dynamic node pages which will allow you to browse node data, do simple queries, and other neat stuff, using Ext JS.

• Trunk: Asterisk Notification Support

  Jeff added support for notifications through Asterisk.

Upcoming Events

• February 2nd-6th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group in Milan, Italy.

• February 9th-13th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

• March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

• June 14th-19th, 2009: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2009, the annual OpenNMS developers conference, will be in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year.

If you have anything to add to the events list, or you wish to be a Dev-Jam sponsor, please let me know.

Adieu

That's it for this week. As always, questions, comments, constructive and/or destructive criticism are always welcome. =)

Comments