Planet OpenNMS

#noapple – or There and Back Again

2011-12-19T19:30:41+00:00

Okay, so back in the summer I decided to attempt to wean myself from Apple and to migrate to a Linux desktop. This is a much overdue post on how that went and how it is going. The TL;DR version is that I used Ubuntu 11.04 (Naughty Nightnurse) and liked it okay, then was excited to upgrade to 11.10 (Onanistic Oedipus) only to be somewhat disappointed with many of the changes. So I tried out Kubuntu, got frustrated and ran screaming back to Apple. I upgraded to Lion, realized that Lion really, truly sucks – sucks enough to make me rethink my decision to switch back. Then I find out that Debian testing (wheezy) now supports Gnome 3, so I loaded it up and I am extremely happy with it (and I’ve downgraded all of my Lion partitions back to Snow Leopard).

Okay, first some background. I use three main systems: a Desktop at the office (a 24-inch iMac (iMac9,1 to be exact) and an identical iMac at home (I bought them both, cheap, from B&H in New York). When I travel I take a second generation Macbook Air (Macbook3,1). The key to being able to use three different machines is that most of what I do is centralized on servers that I maintain. I am e-mail centric, and IMAP makes it really easy to access the same information on all three machines.

In order to start this migration, I needed some more IMAP-like services for things such as Calendar and Contacts. I found a solution in the SOGo project, which I talked about earlier. I’m still a big fan of it after several months.

Now, when it comes to Linux Desktop operating systems, there are basically two main choices: Fedora and Ubuntu. Since I was “gettin’ my freetard on” I would have preferred Debian, but they tend to lag a bit when it comes to new and shiny. Since Red Hat is headquartered nearby and I know a lot of the Fedora folks, I started out there.

Now, back in 2001 when I first started playing with Linux desktops, I was much more of a fan of KDE than Gnome, so I loaded up the KDE spin of Fedora 15. Now the biggest hurdle with getting Linux installed on Mac hardware is that for the last few years the graphics card of choice has been NVIDIA, and until recently open source support on NVIDIA was lacking. I found out in short order that the kernel option “nomodeset” is your friend in such situations. With it, I was able to get Fedora to boot enough to add the RPMFusion repos so I could load in the proprietary drivers.

Things went well for a couple of days until Fedora released a kernel upgrade, which broke my drivers, and RPMFusion didn’t have updated packages available. This lasted several days and made me frustrated enough to try out Ubuntu.

So I loaded up Ubuntu 11.04 with its fancy Unity interface. Again, I had to use the “nomodeset” kernel option to get it to load initially, but Ubuntu makes it extremely easy to add proprietary drivers. Like it is advertised, Ubuntu really tries to take the Linux desktop to the masses.

I should note here that both Fedora and Ubuntu (or more specifically, KDE and Unity) are downright beautiful. Compared to the Linux desktops I remember, they are gorgeous, and I believe they give both OS X and Windows 7 a run for their money.

I liked Unity, but wasn’t in love with it. There are still a number of issues (sometimes I launch programs that don’t show up in the Launcher) and it is plain that they are trying to emulate to some extent the OS X dock.

After using Ubuntu for several weeks, I noticed that my now aging iMac was a little slow. So when woot.com offered up a nice HP desktop for $500, I decided to buy it. The main selling point was an ATI graphics card, so I figured that it would be easier to install and run as a Linux desktop, and I wasn’t wrong. What really struck me was how much power I got for $500. If you’ve been paying the Apple tax as long as I have, you don’t realize how expensive their gear really is. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the design and weight of my Macbook Air, but for desktops I’m not so sure the value is there.

Anyway, it was easy to migrate to the new system, and I was relatively happy until Ubuntu 11.10 was released. If you’ll remember, this was about the same time as the iPhone 4S was announced, and I could have cared less about that. With Ubuntu I was very excited, since I had become something of an Ubuntu fanboy, but I found 11.10 to be a disappointment.

They made a number of changes that impacted me negatively. First, Thunderbird, which worked well against SOGo in 11.04, was upgraded to version 7 on Mozilla’s questionable rapid release cycle. Unfortunately, SOGo isn’t able to keep its connector updated with so many releases and I lost my Address Book integration (Thunderbird doesn’t support CardDav and doesn’t appear to have plans to do so in the future). I also get frustrated with Ubuntu’s decisions to switch default apps somewhat willy-nilly. First it is Rhythmbox, then Banshee, and now apparently in 12.04 it will be Rhythmbox again.

For mail I tried to switch to Evolution, but for some reason I wasn’t able to get it to talk to SOGo either (that was probably an error on my end instead of Ubuntu, however). I was also surprised that they eliminated the screensaver, but I found out later that it was more a change to gnome-screensaver versus a decision by Ubuntu. Still, if you want to own the desktop market, a little stability is in order (and may arrive with the longterm release 12.04, Porky Paedophile).

In a fit of pique I decided to base the box and run Kubuntu. I always liked KDE and I figured that perhaps with the backing of Ubuntu for things like proprietary drivers, that would work for me.

So I set up Kmail, and Kontact and all that other good stuff (KDE has a specific option to connect to SOGo). I was a little shocked by how ugly Kontact was – they add these huge 800×800 pixel QR codes while not inheriting the system font size so the information you actually need is often hard to read, but overall the desktop was decent. If you like customizing your options to death, then this is the desktop for you.

However, I was frustrated by a number of little things. KDE kept complaining that it couldn’t connect to SOGo with these little, growl-like pop-up messages and I could not for the life of me figure out how to turn them off nor could I discover a log file that might help me diagnose the problem. All these things started to add up, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was a two hour stretch where I could not get a WebEx session with a client to work. This was impacting my productivity too much and I was so frustrated that I went and grabbed my old iMac out of the training room and resumed being an OS X desktop user.

Since I had decided that my experiment was a failure, I figured that if I was going to suck at the Apple teat I might as well go all in. I downloaded Lion and upgraded my systems, and sat back, a bit resigned, but knowing that my productivity was once again safe.

That was until I discovered that OS X Lion sucks.

I’m serious – I’ve been extremely happy with every release from Jaguar on (I missed Puma), but this one is just horrible. In Apple’s attempt to reduce the amount of thinking the user had to do, they’ve gone a bit overboard. Mail.app – my main application – seemed buggy and almost kludgy (I hate the way it defaults to threaded, or “conversation” view”). Since Apple wants to know all about your communications, they don’t add a way to encrypt your e-mail with GPG, or even a decent API. The folks over at GPGTools have responded by stripping almost every useful option out of their Lion release, which meant that I was constantly being prompted for my GPG key. Apple seems to insist on restoring every single session, application and tab once you close (or shut down) and to relaunch them with no visible method for disabling that behavior. Gone is the “Save As” function, now replaced by “Save a version” or “Export” in many programs, and be careful if you touch a file that hasn’t been accessed in awhile – it will be “locked” until you click a button in a dialog box. Sheesh – and they had the gall to knock Windows for having too many security pop ups – I touch numerous older files every hour and this gets annoying, fast.

And let’s not start in on the Address Book or Calendar. What’s with the vomit yellow-tan faux leather? The old apps were clean and sparse – making it easy to find what you need. Who actually uses a wall calendar anymore, much less needs to reminisce about flipping a page over to access the next month? What’s next, a rotary dial on the iPhone?

What I was pleasantly surprised about was the most talked about change in Lion – the “natural scrolling” feature. It is more natural, and I grew to like it almost immediately. But hey, want it in Snow Leopard? Download “Scroll Reverser“. Want it on X? Simply add a file to your home directory and restart X:

$ cat .Xmodmap
pointer = 1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

(note the “5″ and the “4″ are reversed)

So now I was in a funk. A certifiable bad mood™. The Linux desktop seemed to be a dead end, most of what I loved about OS X had been taken away from me, and I wasn’t about to try Windows 7 full time. I did spent a little time with Linux Mint 12, but I didn’t like it nearly as much as Unity, and I wasn’t in love with Unity.

But then my friend Gareth Greenaway mentioned on Google+ that Debian testing (wheezy) now supported Gnome 3. I had avoided Gnome 3 because of the large amount of negative comments, especially from people like Linus Torvalds. Linus is a smart man, much smarter than me, and if he felt the need to throw that much bile at something, it must be bad.

Now, I have a soft spot for Debian. It’s the distro that doesn’t get any respect, but it is doubtful projects like Ubuntu and Linux Mint would exist without it. I love the way it just works, even though it tends to be a little long in the tooth in some areas, even on release day. I’m an old guy – I don’t need the latest shiny – I just need something that is stable and works.

So I installed Debian (see my previous post) and you know what – I’m a little pissed at Linus. Gnome 3 is awesome. Yeah – it’s different – but I think it is a little ironic that detractors claim open source doesn’t innovate when Gnome 3 is about the most innovative thing I’ve seen in years. It gets me to where I need to be, and then it gets the hell out of the way. I even like Evolution – which for some reason under wheezy was a snap to integrate into SOGo. Epiphany I can take or leave (it doesn’t render Amazon.com properly, but then I always have the choice of Chromium or Iceweasel) but overall I think the desktop is pretty amazing. There are still a number of rough edges, but I finally have a desktop I’m comfortable with and I can run on all three of my main machines.

Well, I figure by this point I’ve lost my three readers and I’m talking to the guy who found this post by searching for the word “teat” and he’s still here, waiting for a porn picture.

Never one to disappoint – here’s some desktop porn:

How To Install Debian Wheezy on a Macbook Air

2011-12-18T20:11:30+00:00

Those of you who have been following my #noapple efforts this year know that I am trying to move away from OS X to a Linux desktop. Part of that project involved installing Linux on my MacBook Air laptop.

As someone who travels a lot, I love this little laptop. Weighing just a kilogram, it is powerful enough to do what I need it to do yet small and light enough that I can easily carry it wherever I go in the world. In preparation for upgrading it to Linux, I wanted to increase the stock storage from 128G to 256G, so I purchased an OWC Mercury Auro Pro Express SSD from Macsales.

Unfortunately, I could not seem to get any Linux I tried to install to recognize the hard drive. Fedora failed and Ubuntu failed, but Debian squeeze worked. The downside was that squeeze really didn’t support the kind of desktop I was looking for so it wasn’t an option, and I resigned myself to using OS X on it until it could be replaced.

Recently, Gareth Greenaway posted on Google+ that Debian wheezy (testing) now supported Gnome 3, which was one of the desktops I wanted to try (Jeff Gehlbach has been using it on his Macbook Pro on Fedora for months now). I figured that if squeeze worked, wheezy would too, so I should give it a shot.

Nope – wheezy wouldn’t recognize the drive either. However, being the industrious man that I am, I simply installed squeeze and then did a dist-upgrade to wheezy (yes, this is something I call “fun” – I’m weird that way).

I found out the issue was with the Linux 3.1 kernel. Whenever I tried to boot I would get an error like:

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 Sact 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata1.00: failed command: IDENTIFY DEVICE

followed during boot with errors like:

ata1.0: failed command: FLUSH CACHE EXIT

and then the system would just stop.

However, there was an option to boot to the 2.6 kernel and it would load fine, but with everything compiled against 3.1 I wasn’t able to get things like a video driver working.

Since my desire to run Linux was stronger than my desire to have a large … hard drive, I replaced the SSD with the old one and the disk errors went away.

The following are the optimized steps I took to get wheezy on my Macbook Air (MacbookAir3,1), and when I was successful (it took several attempts to get this to work exactly like I wanted – again, this is “fun”) I did the same install on my 24-inch iMac (iMac9,1 for those of you keeping score at home). The steps could probably be optimized a bit more, but since this works for me I wanted to write it down just so I wouldn’t forget it the next time I needed it, and perhaps it would prove useful for others. I relied heavily on the Debian documentation as well as this post by Mike Dentifrice which was extremely valuable. His was based on Debian squeeze and a lot of what he had to do by hand is now pretty much automatic in wheezy.

You’ll need:

Your Macbook Air
An external hard drive if you want to save your existing OS X install
Your OS X install disk/USB stick
An external USB CD or DVD drive (I got mine on amazon.com)
An external USB Ethernet dongle (not strictly required but helps immensely)
A DVD or CD with 64-bit Debian wheezy (testing)

Note: I’ll state below the differences for installing on the iMac, but the process is pretty much the same.

If you want to save your existing install, start off by using Time Machine to back it up to the external hard drive. Note how much disk space your install uses, since that will be necessary to know when we partition the drive in preparation for installing Linux.

Once that is done, insert your OS X install media and boot it. Choose your language and when you get to the first install screen, launch Terminal from the Utilities menu.

At this point I need to talk a bit about how Apple hardware boots. Instead of using BIOS, it uses EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). EFI based drives are partitioned using GPT (GUID Partition Table) which differs from the MBR (Master Boot Record) that has been the standard for decades. While I have been told that it is possible to boot Linux using EFI, most are still set up to use MBR, so we will use an open source tool called rEFIt to emulate the MBR.

The key thing to note is that MBR can only boot from a “primary” partition and there can only be four of them. Since EFI requires a small partition as well, that limits you to three operating systems (one on each of the remaining three primary partitions). While storage on my Macbook Air isn’t enough to support, say, a Windows partition, my iMac can and I’ll point out below the change I made for that install (so I plan to dual-boot my Macbook and tri-boot my iMac).

GPT does support a large number of partitions, theoretically unlimited, but systems such as Windows may limit them to 128, so as long as you don’t need more than three boot partitions you can have as many as you like.

For my Macbook Air I decided to have two partitions, a /boot partition and an encrypted root partition. I’ll add a swap file first thing after install. Since only the /boot partition has to be one of the three, I could have made a separate swap partition and a /home partition like I use with my desktop at the office. Having a separate /home partition is great if you upgrade or play around with distros a lot, but I simply didn’t want to have to type in my passphrase twice when booting.

Now, you can install Linux on your Macbook without OS X, but I still have a fondness for Snow Leopard and just in case there are any firmware upgrades I wanted the option to apply them (although one could always install OS X on an external drive and boot to it for that purpose). Since I am worried that I might end up in a situation where I need to boot into OS X (say that I am at a customer site and their VPN doesn’t work on Linux) I also wanted to keep it around for a fallback. But I wanted a really stripped down OS X so I decided to only reserve 30G for that partition.

My partition layout is thus: 30G for OS X, 256M for /boot and the rest for Linux. On my iMac, which I’ve upgraded to a 2TB drive, I’m using 700G for OS X, 256M for /boot, 300G for Windows and the rest for Linux. If you need more for your OS X install, change these values or remove some kruft from OS X (I’d start with Garage Band).

Now if you remember above I asked you to launch Terminal. We’re going to use the command line to partition the disks. On the Macbook Air I ran:

diskutil parititionDisk disk0 3 "Journaled HFS+" Mac 30G "MS-DOS FAT32" boot 256M "MS-DOS FAT32" Linux 50G

This will launch the Disk Utility and partition disk0 into three partitions (four if you include the hidden EFI partition). The first one will be labeled “Mac” with 30G of storage, the second will be labeled “boot” with 256M of storage and the last one will be labeled “Linux” with the remaining disk space. I just put in 50G because you’ll get an error if it is too large, but if it is smaller than the remaining disk space it will use all of it.

For my iMac I used:

diskutil parititionDisk disk0 4 "Journaled HFS+" Mac 700G "MS-DOS FAT32" boot 256M "MS-DOS FAT32" Windows 300G "MS-DOS FAT32" Linux 50G

Again, please note that the bootable partitions have to be in the first three, thus my “Linux” partition will not be used for booting.

This should run without errors and will display the final partition sizes, so you can check that the Linux partition is indeed larger than was you put in the command. Now quit out of Terminal.

The next step depends on whether or not you want to restore from your Time Machine backup or install a fresh OS X. I used this opportunity to downgrade from OS X Lion (which I utterly despise). If you want to restore from Time Machine, you can do so from the Utilities menu, and if you want a fresh install, just follow the normal install steps.

I had encrypted my hard drive under Lion, so when I did this the first time it yelled at me that I couldn’t install onto the Mac partition. A reboot back into the install media fixed that (there was no need to repartition).

At this point in time, you should have a working OS X install. You can do OS X-y things such a turn on FileVault and Software Update at this time if you so choose, but we really just need to use it to install rEFIt.

Download rEFIt and launch the installer package. Under “Customize” be sure to check the only unchecked box to make sure support for Linux filesystems is enabled. Once it is installed, launch Terminal and run:

sudo /efi/refit/enable.sh

which will “bless” the system to boot into rEFIt.

At this point in time I insert my Debian wheezy install media and restart.

rEFIt should recognize the media and offer it as an option, or you can simply hold down the option key after the initial “bong” and select it there, In any case you want to launch the Debian installer.

Follow the install prompts as you would normally. When you get to loading the network hardware you should get an error about missing firmware for the Broadcom wireless card. Here is where it would be possible to load in the firmware, but my time is valuable and it was much easier just to skip that step and use the external USB Ethernet dongle. This was the same on the iMac, but there I just used the built-in wired Ethernet.

When you get to the part about laying out the disk partitions, choose “Manual”. This will bring up the existing partition table. You should see the “hidden” EFI partition first, followed by the ones you created using the command line Disk Utility. There will most likely be some “free” space in between those partitions to make the logical layout match the physical one, and I’ve never been successful at choosing the right values to make those zero. They can be ignored.

Find the partition you labeled “boot” and set the O/S to use it as an ext4 partition mounted on /boot. Important: note the device label. On my install it was the third partition (after EFI and the OS X HFS+ partition) so it was /dev/sda3, but if you used a different layout this could change. We have to install grub into this partition so it is important to note and I had problems with the installer if I went back to check it later.

Next, find your Linux partition and set it up to be used as an encrypted filesystem. The step is optional but I am paranoid, especially when it comes to data on a portable device like a laptop. Unless you are super paranoid and have a lot of time on your hands, make sure the “erase” option is set to “no”. If you forget, don’t worry, you can change it later but if it is set to “yes” then the entire partition will be overwritten with random data before you can go forward and on large disks this can take forever (days on one 2TB drive I used).

When you get back to the partitioning menu, choose the option to set up encrypted file systems. You should be prompted to write current changes to disk, so choose “yes”, and if you forgot to change the erase option you’ll be prompted here and you can say “no” to save some time. Choose the option to set up encrypted partitions, choose the Linux partition and set it up to be ext4 and mount as “/”. You’ll be prompted to enter in your passphrase (don’t forget it or you are screwed).

Once finished, exit the partitioner, write changes to disk, and the install proceeds like normal.

When you get to the part about installing packages, leave the default options as-is, but I always check the SSH server option as well. Feel free to add others if you want, of course.

The next step will take some time depending on the speed of your network (at home this takes a little over an hour). Eventually you’ll be prompted to install the grub bootloader. It will mistakingly state that Linux is the only operating system on this computer (it does so because we haven’t enabled MBR emulation yet) so choose “no” when it asks if you want to install grub into the MBR. Instead, make sure it installs into your /boot partition (as noted above, /dev/sda3 on my system).

Finally, you should reach the end of the install, the media will be ejected and you can reboot.

This time when rEFIt comes up, use the right arrow to select rEFIt’s partitioning tool and allow rEFIt to update the MBR emulation. If everything has gone smoothly, this should work without a hitch. Restart the computer (right arrow over to the Restart icon). I’ve found that any time I run the rEFIt partitioning tool it is a good idea to restart, whether or not there are changes.

Now you should see an OS X option and a Linux option (there may be a grayed out Windows option if you created a Windows partition). Choose Linux and you should be rewarded with a grub menu. Before the 5 second timeout, hit “e” to edit the boot options.

Find the line that starts “linux” and ends in “quiet”. You’ll need to add the word “text” after “quiet” for this next step. On my iMac I also had to add the “nomodeset” option to prevent the graphics driver from hanging the system.

Both the Macbook Air and the iMac use NVIDIA graphics cards. The open source nouveau driver works on the Macbook Air but not on the iMac. Unfortunately, I could not get sleep to work on the Macbook Air under nouveau (which is a pity, since everything else seemed to work, and yes, I spent hours playing with quirks to see if that would help). So at this time I recommend installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

The “text” option will prevent the window manager from loading and give us a command line login. Log in as root. At this point I simply determine the current IP address with “ifconfig eth0″ and I ssh in from another computer. This lets me cut and paste, etc., but the command line works as well.

First off, we need to create a swap file. Since I have a Macbook Air with 4G of memory, I wanted to create an 8G swap file:

Type following command to create an 8G swap file (1024 * 1024MB * 8 = 8388608 block size):

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=8388608

Set up a Linux swap area:

# mkswap /swapfile

Activate /swapfile swap space immediately:

# swapon /swapfile

To activate /swapfile after Linux system reboot, add entry to /etc/fstab file. Open this file using a text editor such as vi:

# vi /etc/fstab

and append the following line:

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Next, since the proprietary NVIDIA driver is not free, add “contrib” and “non-free” to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main

Run

apt-get update

to load in the new sources.

Now, at this point in time, it is possible to install the NVIDIA drivers and there are a number of ways this can be accomplished. I used module assistant to build from source:

# apt-get install module-assistant nvidia-kernel-common

followed by

# m-a auto-install nvidia-kernel${VERSION}-source

Typing that command exactly as printed (without the leading # of course) should work.

Once the module is built, run

# apt-get install nvidia-glx

which looks like it will modify X to use the “nvidia” driver, but it doesn’t. I found out that I had to perform an extra step.

Run

# Xorg -configure

and it should throw a number of errors but create a file in root’s home directory called xorg.conf.new. Copy that file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and edit it. You should see some entries under “Device” that look like:

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz",
        ### <percent>: "<f>%"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "SWcursor"                  # [<bool>]
        #Option     "HWcursor"                  # [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoAccel"                   # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ShadowFB"                  # [<bool>]
        #Option     "VideoKey"                  # <i>
        #Option     "WrappedFB"                 # [<bool>]
        #Option     "GLXVBlank"                 # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ZaphodHeads"               # <str>
        #Option     "PageFlip"                  # [<bool>]
        Identifier  "Card0"
        Driver      "nouveau"
        BusID       "PCI:2:0:0"
EndSection

Remove all such sections (I had three) and add:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Device0"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "NoLogo"         "True"
        VendorName      "NVIDIA Corporation"
        BoardName       "GeForce 320M"
EndSection

At this point you should be able to reboot into all that Gnome 3 glory. Note that the BoardName is just a label, I used something similar on my iMac which is not a 320M.

From here on out it is just a little cleanup. On the Macbook Air I had to add support for the touchpad.

# apt-get install libmtdev1 mtdev-tools xserver-xorg-input-multitouch

and then I removed /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics to prevent conflicts. Now my touchpad works fine (use two fingers to right click). Reboot or restart X for this to take effect.

I also installed gnome-tweak-tool and reduced the font size from 11 to 8 to better make use of my screen real estate. These last two steps were not required on the iMac.

Finally, I installed the proprietary Broadcom drivers using module assistant:

# m-a a-i broadcom-sta

followed by:

# echo blacklist brcm80211 >> /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

and a reboot.

The only issue I have at the moment is that when I first start the wireless, it bounces up and down for a couple of minutes. When it finally connects, everything is cool. This happens as well with an external Asus USB-N13 I bought as a backup (since I had heard that Broadcom under Debian had issues) so something else must be going on, but I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it later.

[UPDATE: Turns out that the issue dealt with IPv6 support and my router. I disabled IPv6 in Network Manager and my bounce issues went away]

If you want to install Windows for a tri-boot setup, you can do it now. Just choose the Windows partition in the installer.

At this point, everything seems to work (well, for certain values of “work”). Bluetooth functions and I tested the camera with cheese.

One last trick – if you want rEFIt to boot Linux by default, edit /efi/refit/refit.conf and uncomment the default_selection:

# Set the default menu selection.  The available arguments match the
# keyboard accelerators available within rEFIt.  You may select the default
# loader using a one-character abbreviation for the OS name ("M" = Mac OS X,
# "L" = Linux, "W" = Windows).  You may also specify a digit between 1 and
# 9, in which case the Nth loader in the menu will be the default.  You can
# also select a rEFIt tool entry ("S" = EFI Shell, "P" = Partitioning Tool,
# "U" = shutdown).  This is intended as a quick fix to change the default
# boot choice until full configurability arrives.
#
default_selection L

This procedure is the result of about ten installs so I hope it saves others some of the time I spent. In any case, I am now much more knowledgeable about how things work, so in the end it was worth it. Plus, I’m on a much freer operating system than the one I left. It was fun.

Thanks to all those faceless documentation writers out there that made this possible. I have tried to embed links where possible to give you the credit.

Our First Ten Year Renewal

2011-12-12T14:29:39+00:00

The first OpenNMS commercial support customer was Children’s Hospitals in Minnesota, who purchased a support contract for OpenNMS 0.8 in December of 2001.

They just renewed for a tenth consecutive year.

While we do occasionally lose customers, it is very exciting for us to have earned the trust of a customer for a decade. I’m hoping to add many more as time goes on.

Course d’Escalade 2011

2011-12-03T21:21:14+00:00

The women’s run (30 to 43y): 2600 participants..!

http://photo.genevainformation.ch/Events/Course-de-lEscalade-2011/20397962_hc8Jg7#1614427198_hKq5hMH

Light!

2011-12-03T19:33:20+00:00

Directions.

2011-12-03T19:32:07+00:00

Palais des Nations

2011-12-03T10:01:19+00:00

Some Props for Gian at Microsoft

2011-11-19T17:27:27+00:00

It is rare that you hear the terms “open source” and Microsoft in a favorable light, but Microsoft has always been helpful to the OpenNMS project. One way they do this is by providing us with a subscription to the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN).

When ours expired this year, Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director of Open Source Communities (who I met in person at this year’s OSCON) jumped right in to get it renewed. In his words “Ask and ye shall receive”.

One might wonder why we would bother with supporting OpenNMS on Windows, but a quick look at our page stats from the last week shows that the Windows installation page is the third most popular one on the whole site.

We are currently working on a project to make OpenNMS support on Windows even stronger, and that wouldn’t be possible without an MSDN subscription.

License Plates

2011-11-17T17:12:07+00:00

Speaking of cars, I think the license plates in the OpenNMS parking lot are cool.

OpenNMS Race Car Update

2011-11-17T16:25:55+00:00

I wanted to post a quick update on our Spec E30 race car.

Our driver, Jason Tower, managed three podium finishes, including one first place, at the Carolina Motorsports Great Pumpkin Run.

Sweet.

Commute

2011-11-17T05:22:06+00:00

OpenNMS 1.9.93 Released

2011-11-15T21:32:19+00:00

OpenNMS 1.9.93 is the latest in a series of release candidates for the next stable iteration, OpenNMS 1.10. It contains a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements, including many fixes to Linkd. For a complete list of changes, see:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.9.93

OpenNMS 1.8.16 Released

2011-11-15T21:31:09+00:00

OpenNMS 1.8.16 is the latest in the current stable series of OpenNMS. It contains a few bug fixes. For a complete list, see:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.8.16

Horses in sunset :)

2011-11-10T18:08:21+00:00

TM Forum in Orlando

2011-11-07T11:04:03+00:00

Just wanted to post a note that Dr. Craig Gallen and myself will be at the TM Forum Management World conference in Orlando this week.

The TM Forum organizes proof of concept demonstrations called “catalysts”. We are participating in one with the auspicious name of “Alarm Management for Converged Networks”. For several years now we have been supporting the development of standardized management interfaces, and this catalyst will demonstrate one for dealing with alarms across large, diverse networks.

The main sponsors are Deutsche Telecom, T-Mobile, Vodafone and D2 GmbH. We are participating along with Comarch, HP, and Netage Solutions to demonstrate an implementation of the new interfaces.

Drop me a note if you happen to be at the conference, and I hope to see you there.

Red and green.

2011-11-06T17:16:46+00:00

Wuff.

2011-11-06T17:15:59+00:00

Debt Free

2011-11-03T18:50:33+00:00

This morning I went to the bank and paid off a rather large loan.

A little over two years ago David and myself put our houses on the line to borrow enough money to purchase the OpenNMS version 1.0 copyright from Raritan. We did this for a number of reasons, not the least of which was to insure that we never got into another situation like the one with Cittio.

It was scary, since both my personal and business philosophy is strongly against debt, but we figured the benefits outweighed the risks. The loan was a three year note, and we paid it off early, which I guess says something positive about the current financial health of the company.

Anyway, I’m in a great mood and felt like sharing, and I wanted to poke a little fun at the naysayers who think you can’t make money in open source.

Open for Business: Employees with Benefits

2011-11-02T16:29:18+00:00

My latest “Open for Business” column has been posted, in which I relate what we have done at The OpenNMS Group for employee benefits.

As usual, I hope folks find it interesting, and comments are welcome.

Dipping My Toe Into the Android Pond

2011-11-01T15:44:44+00:00

Apple has made me lazy. For my first purchase from the Google Android Market, I got scammed.

As part of my #noapple experiment, I will eventually give up my iPhone. The only real alternative would be something powered by Android, so when woot put a refurbished XOOM tablet on sale a few weeks ago, I bought one.

I didn’t have a need for a tablet. Between my Macbook Air (soon to run Ubuntu) and my phone, I didn’t need anything in between, but in the interest of exploring Android I figured this would be a cheap way of doing it.

So far I like the XOOM. It came with 64 GB of storage and it was easy to add another 32 GB with a microSD card. I immediately downloaded the K-9 mail client (one of the best F/OSS applications on Android) and was soon browsing my e-mail. Well, up until the point my IMAP server got upset and threw a “too many connections from the same IP” error since I was checking mail from my desktop, laptop, phone and now tablet all at the same time.

Now, one of my favorite games for iOS is Plants vs. Zombies from PopCap Games. Without thinking, I went to the “Store” section on the XOOM, typed in “Plants vs. Zombies” and bought the app for 99 cents. It downloaded pretty quickly but when I launched it all that was displayed was a screen with familiar PvZ images stating that it would take awhile for the “levels” to be downloaded.

That should have made me suspicious, but I was tired and I didn’t think about it until it was too late.

See, the Google’s Android Market allows you to return any purchase within 15 minutes, so if a scammer can keep you from returning it within that time period, it becomes very difficult to get your money back. By they time I thought to investigate, that time had passed.

When I did investigate. I saw that the “publisher” was a company called NCM, not PopCap. It seems they have but several well known “apps” into the Marketplace, and my guess is that they are all scams (clicking on the “publisher’s website” takes you to NCM.com, which appears to have nothing to do with Android software).

Once I visited the proper PopCap site, I saw that they sell their software on Amazon’s App Store for Android. The game I downloaded from there worked as expected.

Does this make me want to chuck my XOOM and go back to Apple? Not really. Dealing with Apple has made me lazy, but this doesn’t mean that there can’t be trusted places to buy software for Android. I’ve spoken a number of times about the idea of reputation in free and open source software, and from this experience my trust in Google’s Marketplace has gone way down, and my trust in Amazon’s App Store has increased. Plus, now when I shop on Amazon, it immediately checks the application’s compatibility with my device, which is cool and adds an extra layer of comfort.

One could defend Google, but while I can’t expect them to police every submission, one would think that high profile games such as PvZ could be monitored. While I have submitted a refund request to the developer, my guess is that nothing will happen and they are just hoping people won’t sweat losing a buck.

They obviously don’t know how stubborn I am.

If this charge isn’t refunded by the time my credit card statement shows up, I plan to dispute it. By providing a marketplace, Google is accepting some responsibility for the third parties for which it acts as proxy. I’ll let them and my credit card company sort it out. For example, on a recent purchase through Amazon from a third party, I received the wrong item. Amazon quickly sent me a shipping label and refunded my money, even though it was not their mistake. I’m sure they have some method for resolving things with the vendor, but as a consumer it is not my problem – unlike my experience with Google’s Market.

In the F/OSS world it is as much about service as it is software, and those companies with the highest levels of service will be successful in the long run. If the Android Market is the wild west, I guess the Amazon App Store is the new sheriff in town.

Long time without posts

2011-10-28T19:33:11+00:00

Well, a lot of things have happened

First, the job picked up a bit in pace and I’m spending again a lot of time on the road, between here and Switzerland..my radius has been extended to Zürich, and that’s quite far away.

But I have not been activity-less. I wrote a book, a novel this time. It’s closed, plot-wise, but I’m still listening to feedback. Currently I’m looking for a cover. I have followed Reto’s good advice and used crowdsource – and I’m impressed with the results. You can see the proposal I have received here.

It’s true that I have neglected the camera a bit in the last weeks, so I took it with me when I walked the dog this evening:

Export iPhoto Library to Folders

2011-10-26T16:02:16+00:00

Just a quick update on my #noapple efforts.

I work on three main machines: a desktop at the office, a desktop at home and a Macbook Air.

A couple of months ago I started using Ubuntu (Naughty Nightnurse) at work, and I figured I’d wait until 11.10 Onanistic Oliphant was out before upgrading the other systems. I need to write a long post about my decision to use Ubuntu and what I like and dislike about it (no screensaver in 11.10, seriously?) but I’ll have to save that for later. This weekend I got my iMac at home to tri-boot OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu.

But for now I want to talk about an iPhoto replacement. I’ve looked at several and I’m leaning strongly toward Shotwell. However, this requires that the image files exist outside of the iPhoto database. I tried just selecting and exporting all of them, but it appears that since several photos have the same name (the default numeric name provided by the camera) the newer files were overwriting the older ones. Kind of a pain when you have around 10,000 images to export.

Through the magic of Google I managed to find a nice little script that will export the images from the iPhoto database into Folders based on events. You can find it on Github, but basically just run:

curl https://raw.github.com/BMorearty/exportiphoto/master/exportiphoto.py > exportiphoto.py

and then

python exportiphoto.py ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/

I strongly recommend running it in test mode by adding a “-t”. I didn’t realize it, but my iPhoto database had some corruption, and yes, this was after all of the cleanup options available when starting iPhoto while holding down the Command and Option keys.

The problem was in the iPhoto AlbumData.xml XML file. Two of my images had a file type of “^@^@^@^@” instead of “JPEG”, but the real pain was that about 100 photos, around 1%, simply didn’t exist. While there was a thumbnail, there was no image file:

<key>ImagePath</key>
<string></string>

I hope they weren’t anything important.

Anyway, once I corrected the issues in the XML file, the script completed in test mode, and then it did it’s magic and exported all my photos into nice folders, all ready for Shotwell or whatever product I decide to use.

I’m too sexy for my shirt (part deux)

2011-10-25T13:25:18+00:00

Wearing my new shirt today:

Training Announced in London

2011-10-24T18:41:53+00:00

Just a quick note that we are delighted to be able to schedule our week-long OpenNMS training course for London, the week of 28 November.

http://www.opennms.com/training

Our host is the Girl Guiding Association, the UK version of Girl Scouts founded by Robert Baden-Powell, and also an OpenNMS user. The room we will be using for training is smaller than the one we had in Reading earlier this year, so space is limited. Hope to see you there.

Three of the Top 25 Most Powerful Financial Companies Use OpenNMS

2011-10-24T18:24:16+00:00

I saw this study (PDF) on Slashdot today talking about how 147 companies control 40% or more of the global economy.

On page 33 there is a list of the top 50, and I was pleasantly surprised to see three of the Top 25 were OpenNMS commercial support customers.

So, if you want to rule the world, use OpenNMS.

Livestong – the New York Marathon

2011-10-18T21:35:33+00:00

My good friend and our company president will be celebrating his 50th birthday by running in the New York Marathon (his first).

He is doing this to raise money for the Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” foundation.

Every little bit helps, so if you can contribute please follow the link.

Juniper Networks Includes OpenNMS in Junos Space

2011-10-18T12:06:23+00:00

We’re very excited to be able to announce that Juniper Networks has licensed OpenNMS through the “Powered by OpenNMS” program to bring Fault and Performance Management to their Junos Space management application.

The full press release is now online. We met with them at Dev-Jam this year in Minnesota, and things progressed rapidly from there. The fact that a company with such a solid reputation as Juniper would choose to make OpenNMS part of its product suite should go a long way to validating the work we’ve done with the project, and I look forward to working with them for years to come.

NetCologne

2011-10-17T19:32:04+00:00

I spent last week (the last of my three week trip to Europe) in the German city of Köln (Cologne). I’ll probably keep referring to it as “Köln” since I just figured out how to easily print special characters on my Ubuntu desktop. (grin)

I was working with a service provider called NetCologne, specifically on a project where they are rolling out a Fiber to the Building (FTTB) project. Ronny Trommer, one of our guys in the European office, did most of the heavy lifting, but I was there to help out (at least in the beer drinking capacity).

We needed to monitor and collect data from a growing number of remote devices, and when I last checked we were polling 26110 distinct devices and 51690 interfaces. One thing that came in handy with this deployment was the Instrumentation Log Reader.

If you haven’t seen this feature, you should check it out. Under Admin there is a menu item called the “Instrumentation Log Reader”. This will generate a very useful report from the instrumentation logs concerning how many devices are being scanned for data collection, how long it takes each scan to complete, the time period between scans and the number of failures.

At NetCologne with 300 threads (the default is 50) the system was not able to poll fast enough to provide five minute samples, so we needed to increase the number of threads. While it was not easy to do a weighted average, it seemed that a conservative estimate would be about 10 seconds per device to perform collection. There were some of them in the 20-30 second range, and quite a few below 5 seconds, but for calculation purposes 10 seemed like a good number.

This meant that each thread could collect on six devices a minute, or 30 devices per five minute period. Since we needed to collect on 26110 devices, that meant we needed a little over 870 threads. We made it 1000 just to be sure, and then data collection started performing well.

A lot of the time was spent integrating their internal systems with OpenNMS through the provisioner. Much like Towerstream, any service provider with this many devices needs to be able to automate adding and removing devices to their management system. I am certain that the strength of our provisioning system is the one major reasons large enterprises and carriers should consider switching to OpenNMS.

On my last night in Köln I was taken out to a brewery near the Cologne Cathedral, or Dom, to partake in large amounts of the local brew called kölsch.

I found out on Google Plus that a number of people have very strong opinions about the quality of that particular beer, but I liked it. It was very light and clean, which was helpful in that we drank quite a bit of it. It came to our table in a “ring” of glasses:

and we went through several rings (I lost count).

No matter what you may think of kölsch, I don’t think anyone can deny the beauty of the cathedral:

Even at night covered in part by scaffolding, it is a gothic, fractal masterpiece.

I had fun, and I look forward to the opportunity to go back as this project progresses.

OpenNMS 1.9.92 Released

2011-10-12T21:56:09+00:00

OpenNMS 1.9.92 is the latest in a series of release candidates that will eventually become the 1.10 stable series. It contains a large number of bugfixes including code cleanups, UI fixes, more Linkd work, and some IPv6-related fixes.

For a complete list of changes, see:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.9.92

OpenNMS 1.8.15 Released

2011-10-12T17:14:57+00:00

OpenNMS 1.8.15 is the latest stable release in the 1.8 series. It contains a few small monitor and UI changes. For a complete list of changes, see:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.8.15

Here In My Car, I Feel Safest of All

2011-10-10T03:45:55+00:00

This week I doubled the number of countries outside of the US in which I’ve driven a car.

Previously, I had driven in Canada and New Zealand. Canada doesn’t really count. Sorry to sound like a bigoted American, but the experience was no different than driving in the US. New Zealand was a much different story, since they drive on the opposite side of the road.

This trip I added Austria and Germany to the list.

As I’ve mentioned, I spent this week working with Antonio. He flew up for Uwe’s wedding and we drove down to Italy to do a Greenlight+ project. His flight back was at 06:00 Saturday morning, so we needed to leave Vipiteno and get him back to Germany Friday night. Considering that it was at least six hours and we were leaving at 16:00, I offered to drive so he could relax and maybe sleep.

Plus, I would get to drive on the autobahn.

Antonio drove for the first hour, getting us out of Italy and halfway through Austria. The weather was grey and wet, and as we climbed into higher elevations it started to snow.

Before we left, I asked for a few CDRs to burn some music. For some reason that escapes me, modern car manufacturers are still reluctant to put an AUX jack in their stereos. With so many people carrying portable music devices and being able to play music from a phone, you would think this would be a common practice. The reason I bring this up is that Antonio surprised me several years ago by breaking into song. This isn’t unusual for an Italian, but the song he was singing was “Supper’s Ready” by Genesis. It’s over 23 minutes long.

So that is how I found myself riding through the Austrian Alps in the snow while listening to that prog-rock classic “A Lamb Lies Down on Broadway“. Antonio also had to suffer through me singing along with James Taylor on his “Greatest Hits” album – one that I know every lyric, pause and breath having listened to it endlessly in high school.

Anyway, we were lucky that we left early enough that the temperature was above freezing and nothing was sticking on the roads.

When we crossed into Germany, I was finally driving on the fabled German highway without speed limits. This had almost mythical significance to me, as at one time in my life I was really into cars, so much so that I read Autoweek, and my friend John and I used to race to the mailbox so that we could read the Satch Carlson column.

Note: For those of you who have never heard of Satch Carlson, he is one of the best auto sports writers I’ve ever read. I would literally choke from laughing so hard at his stories. Unfortunately, he was involved in a scandal involving one of his students, and he pretty much disappeared after that. There is still an ancient website that is worth checking out if you want to see what was cool in websites 20 years ago.

Back to the autobahn. The experience did not live up to my expectations.

First, you have to understand that in most places the autobahn is two lanes. The right lane is where the trucks are, and they have a legal top speed of 80 kph. The left lane is where you can pass and go as fast as you want.

Or should a say “as fast as you can”. I wanted to go a lot faster.

Second, I was in a rented Mercedes A160. The car I usually drive is a supercharged C230, which is much faster than this car, so moving from the right lane to the left was not without a little risk.

If you look up the “0 to 60 mph” specification for the A160, Mercedes has written in the word “yes”.

Often I’d move over to pass only to see a set of headlights magically appear in my rearview mirror, prompting me to get back over as quickly as possible to avoid getting squashed. I swear some of those headlights were tinted blue.

Third, around the time we got to Ulm (birthplace of Albert Einstein) the amount of traffic had increased greatly and we were all forced to slow down. By Stuttgart, it was “stop and go”, or should I say “stop and go like hell”. There was a lot of construction, and coupled with the weekend traffic it was pretty high stress.

The way I dealt with it was the way I deal with any unusual situation in which I find myself. I find someone who looks like they know what they are doing and mimic them. So I’d get behind a car and do what they did – speed up when they sped, move over when they moved. Worked pretty well as long as I could keep up.

Finally, once the traffic started to thin, there were these road projects that would cause the entire highway to shift over to the left. Southbound traffic was limited to two lanes, while we took over the shoulder and one of their lanes. Separating our leftmost lane from theirs was a little temporary wall that stood about two feet high and looked like you could push it over with a finger. It was only as wide as the line drawn on the road, which meant that you were always perilously close to the oncoming cars as well as not having much room between that wall and the cars on your right. Seriously, the A160 is not a big car but at times it felt like I was driving a Winnebago. I wouldn’t have felt much more comfortable on a motorcycle.

Anyway, according to the GPS, Antonio had hit a top speed of 169 kph on the way down, so I was determined to top that. After driving for about a mile on a nice, flat stretch of highway with the pedal completely pressed to the floor, I managed a measly 170 kph, or a little over 105 mph. I was hoping to hit at least 200 kph, which is close to the highest speed I’ve ever driven (and that was on a motorcycle), but unless I was going to get a head start coming down a mountain with a decent tail wind, it wasn’t going to happen in an A160.

The Leitner Group

2011-10-09T09:16:32+00:00

It worked out that after the training week in Fulda, a new client of ours wanted to start the first week of their Greenlight Plus project, so I just stayed in Europe another week.

Headquartered in Vipiteno, Italy, the Leitner Group is one of the two largest producers of “ropeways”, what we would probably call ski lifts and gondolas. Through a number of mergers, their products have grown to include snow grooming equipment, other passenger transport (through their Sigma subsidiary, they built the cabins for the London Eye), as well as small wind turbines (with the awesome name of Leitwind).

It was because of this recent growth that OpenNMS was needed to replace their Nagios instance that just couldn’t be used to manage the 600 devices spread out across 60 or so locations. It was a fun project, made even more so by the fact that Antonio Russo, our go-to man in Italy, worked on it with me.

I am planning on writing up a more detailed post on the transition, but it was pretty straightforward. OpenNMS was used to replace Nagios, Cacti and Smokeping, and with only two exceptions we were able to replace the Nagios “check scripts” with built-in OpenNMS monitors. For the ones we couldn’t migrate we just used the General Purpose monitor and ran them as external programs. Since Nagios runs all of its checks as scripts, it must fork-exec each one which severely limits its scale. All of the OpenNMS monitors run inside the OpenNMS process itself (well, with the exception of the GpMonitor), and the fact that you can also do data collection and event management without extra integration steps was a bonus. Antonio took the Nagios configuration files and ran them through a script which automated moving the devices into OpenNMS using the provisioner, so it was pretty simple to get the nodes into our application.

Working at Leitner was fun for a number of reasons. First, the technology is cool. If you have ever been on a ski lift you know that the speed of the cabin changes when it reaches the ends so that people can get on and off, and this is usually accomplished by having the cabin disconnect and then reconnect from the main cable (which moves at a constant speed). The equipment that does this is pretty complex, not only due to the size and weight of the components involved, but also due to the safety concerns (don’t want to be dropping your paying customers).

Second, working with the client, Michele, was a lot of fun. I’ve often bragged about the fact that OpenNMS users are self-selecting. We don’t go out of our way to market the application, so the people who find it, download it, install it and decide that they want to spend money on services are pretty special. They are all amazingly bright people, friendly and witty, and without exception tend to be very good looking.

(grin)

Third, Vipiteno is an incredibly beautiful place. Nestled in the Italian Alps, it is a very clean and walkable town. It has a split personality, since for much of its history it was located in a German speaking country. Like Canada, almost all of the signs are in two languages, and when I am talking about it to Germans I have to refer to it by its German name of Sterzing.

The whole week I had to keep reminding myself that I was actually at work – getting paid to have this much fun seems criminal.

On Wednesday, Antonio drove us down to Bolzano to visit some of his friends. As you cruise down the highway, it was not unusual to see castles – old school, Holy Grail, storybook castles.

Whenever you saw one, you often could look across the valley and see another. I keep wondering if they ever went “Game of Thrones” on each other, and thought about the logistics of waging war in this terrain.

Yes, I’m a bit odd, I realize that.

Unfortunately, it got dark so I couldn’t enjoy much of the countryside. Most of the castles were illuminated with exterior lights, however, so they seemed to float in the air as we sped past.

Bolzano was a cool place – a much larger city than Vipiteno. One of Antonio’s friends works for the hockey team, so we got to see them practice.

According to Wikipedia, the Bolzano-Bozen Foxes “is the most successful team in the history of the Italian ice hockey league, with 18 championships.”

It was a fun visit, although we stayed out so late that it made getting up on Thursday a lot harder.

Thursday night we visited another city, Trento, about 50 kilometers further away than Bolzano. It was a business meeting with a potential client, and I hope to be able to talk about that project soon. Driving back it started to rain, and thus we woke up on Friday to see snow on the mountains.

Friday was my last day at the office (we had to drive back to Frankfurt that afternoon), so we spent the morning finishing up the migration. When it came time for lunch, I was expecting that we would take Michele out to a restaurant, but he had a surprise for us. We walked over to his house and met his family, and his wife cooked me the best meal I’ve had in Italy this trip.

Michele speaks at least three languages, his wife is fluent in five, and even his oldest son (who I think is around four or five) can speak three. I had a very nice conversation with him in English. Michele’s youngest son was sleeping, so I didn’t get to spend much time with him, but even at two he’s probably studying ancient Greek and Relativity. (grin)

It was a great ending to a wonderful week.

As I’ve mentioned before, there is something about the Open Source Way that brings vendors and clients closer than usual. I have even grown hate that term “vendor”, as I much prefer the term “partner”.

Or better yet, “friend”.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T07:48:20+00:00

I’m in Europe at the moment. I love visiting here, but the lack of easily accessible Internet access outside of my clients’ offices is frustrating. For example, this week I have the option of paying 5€ per hour for crappy hotel wi-fi limited to ports 80 and 443, or, thanks to my client, a somewhat okay connection via a Vodafone UMTS USB modem. Since I want to limit the amount of traffic that they get billed for, I only use it to check e-mail, and sporadically at that.

I just arrived at the office and learned that Steve Jobs has died.

I am saddened, of course. He was only 56, eleven years older than I am now.

I figured I’d try to capture my feelings while they are still fresh.

My first computer was a TRS-80 (model 1, ‘natch) which put me squarely in the camp opposite the Apple ][ fans. The reason I had a TRS-80 over an Apple was simple – there was a Radio Shack in my small town. I did have some exposure the the machine, and I especially liked the fact that the cover popped open and you could see inside it. While I spent a lot of time inside my TRS-80, I immediately voided the warranty when I did it.

My path did not cross Apple’s again for several years, when a friend of mine bought a Mac Plus. This would have been around 1986. He taught me how to use the interface, and I was impressed by the quality of the documents I could output from the machine. However, being a DOS/Windows user, I was often frustrated by the lack of a command line interface.

In 1988 I started working for Northern Telecom, which was a Mac shop. I think I had a Mac IIcx on my desk, but I forget the exact model. This was one of the first machines I used that was networked – not quite to the Internet but definitely to other machines within the company.

These were the twilight years for Apple. The machines were pretty, but they were expensive and prone to viruses. A friend of a friend was the Apple rep for Nortel, and I can remember that Terry came in one day to demo some new machines and he spent two hours disinfecting them.

Once I left Nortel, I didn’t work with Apple for a long while. I did date a woman with a (at the time) screamin’ SE/30, but I used it mainly to play games (Fool’s Errand, etc.).

Flash forward to January of 2003, and I started seeing all of these things called “Powerbooks” showing up at the local LUG. My company was doing well, so when the 12″ Powerbook was announced, I bought one along with an iPod.

I was hooked.

Here was a machine with a strong Unix base but an easy to use interface. Here was a machine that I could use to run all of my favorite open source software but I could also get a decent printer driver from the vendor. It even made me nostalgic for that old, original Mac, so when I saw one on its way to the dumpster, I rescued it and made it whole again.

Since then, I’ve been a Mac user and fanboy. None of this would have been possible without Steve Jobs.

He created great things, but what I like the most is that he showed it was possible for one person to make a difference. While my team doesn’t work along the dictatorial style he was known for, we are much smaller than the companies with which we compete. Steve showed that it was possible to successfully compete against giants. He took a company on the verge of bankruptcy and turned it in to the most profitable company in the world.

I couldn’t be honest with myself if I didn’t remind my three readers that I am parting ways with Apple. With its amazing success, Apple is moving in a direction that I don’t agree with. I am much more excited at the moment about the pending release of Ubuntu 11.10 (Onanistic Olifant) than I am about the iPhone 4S. I don’t like where Apple is going, but that should not take away from where they have been.

The best comment I’ve read so far is that Steve Jobs made it possible to have an emotional connection to technology. As I write this on a Macbook Air, I am not thinking about OS X or licensing, but I am imagining I am having a conversation with a few old, good friends about the passing of another. Steve, in part, made that possible.

I admire Steve Jobs, but despite his success, I would not have wanted to be him. Fifty-six is way too young. To quote Woody Allen, I don’t was to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.

So long Steve, and thanks for all the tech.

German Unity Day

2011-10-03T15:13:42+00:00

Today is German Unity Day, commemorating the day that East and West Germany, created after the end of World War II, were reunified into one country. I have friends who grew up in Germany before 1990 who remember a divided country, and while the process hasn’t been easy, it has made Germany one of the dominant countries in Europe. While our similarities bring us together, it is our differences that make us strong.

I, however, don’t get a holiday as I am in Vipiteno, Italy, working with a customer. To get here, Antonio and I drove down Autobahn 7, south through Austria. It is my first time in serious alpine country as well as my first long ride on an Autobahn. Here is Antonio in our noble chariot for the week, a rented Mercedes A160.

In the US, the Autobahn is this mythic highway without speed limits. While I don’t think it would work well in the US (our fierce independent streak seems to include a desire to ignore good driving practices, such as staying right unless to pass), it is pretty efficient in Germany. According to the GPS, our top speed was 169 km/hour , which I believe is close to 105 mph, and on several occasions we were passed as if we were standing still.

We also saw solar panels and windmills in abundance. Quite often several of the towering giants would stand sentinel over the highway.

As I mentioned above, the whole process is pretty efficient … up to a point. About halfway through our trip we saw the dreaded line of brake lights, and our progress slowed to a crawl. As there was no accident, the only thing I can figure is that with the holiday there were a large number of people heading toward the Alps, and it was a good ol’ traffic jam.

We took a slight detour through the country (where I paid 80€ for 50 liters of gasoline) and eventually the traffic let up, which was about the time we saw the mountains in the distance.

I’ve been in the Alps before, specifically in France, but this was my first time approaching them from Germany. It is impressive, since they rise from the ground like a forbidding wall. We entered a 1km tunnel and when we emerged, we were in Austria.

I’m glad Antonio was driving, because this is beautiful country and I got to watch it. I live in the Eastern half of the United States, and while we have mountains, they are relatively old. The highest mountain east of the Mississippi river is Mount Mitchell, and it is only 6685 feet (2037 meters) high.

These mountains are young, rocky and sharp, and a lot of people were out enjoying their beauty. Since there is almost no snow, the main attraction at the moment seems to be hiking, and I can only imagine the workout one would get.

We had missed lunch, so we decided to visit Innsbruck. Of course we brought Ulf, who seemed to be happy to be out of the car and in the mountains.

Innsbruck is a nice town – with a cold, fast moving river and brightly colored houses surrounded by the ever present ring of mountains. We found a nice outdoor cafe for a light meal, and as usual, Ulf was up to his old tricks.

This is Johanna, our waitress, who was kind enough to stop for a picture even though the cafe was very busy.

Ulf then introduced us to two young ladies sitting at the next table, Carina and Varina. They grew up together across the border in Germany, but are attending school in Innsbruck to study pharmacology. When I mentioned that my sunglasses were older than they were, Carina brought out her own pair of Wayfarers. They seemed excited to be in school, and we talked a lot about travel.

After lunch we hopped in the car for the drive through the Brenner pass into Italy. Vipiteno (Sterzing) is an interesting place, since it is a Germanic town in Italy. It kind of reminds me of Canada, as most of the signs are in both languages.

We got checked in to the hotel, which is lovely with the exception of the Internet connection. It is both 5€ an hour and limited to HTTP and HTTPS (sigh). The night ended with dinner, which was at a Thai/Japanese/Chinese/PIzzeria Restaurant. We thought the combination was so funny we had to try it, and I had hot and sour soup with a pizza.

A Wedding in Fulda

2011-10-02T20:26:59+00:00

I have been working with open source software for over a decade now, and I do hate it when people describe it as some sort of utopia, where wandering bands of freedom loving coders roam the countryside handing out gifts of free applications.

The fact of the matter is that most of my business transactions are simply that – business transactions. The client gives us money in exchange for services and we try very hard to deliver those services.

But there is something about open source that makes the whole experience much more personal. I consider almost all of my clients as friends, and a few of them very good friends. I never really got that when I worked in commercial software.

So it was with a feeling of honor that I was invited to the wedding of Daniela Barbaro and Uwe Bergmann.

As you may be aware, Uwe is an OpenNMS services partner in Germany through his company Nethinks, and he is the main sponsor of the annual OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe.

It was nice to be invited to an event that usually only includes family and close friends, and so we scheduled training in Germany the week before in order to make sure we would be in the country on the big day. Both David and I were invited, along with Antonio who came up from Naples.

I had never been to a German wedding before, especially one where the bride’s family was Italian, so while most of the service was in the German language, when the hymns were sung each verse would alternate between the two languages. Not being very fluent in either, I was pretty much equally lost, but I could easily understand the love and admiration that was in the room.

After the service there was a reception outside the church, complete with Italian sweets, German bread, champagne and gelato. When I got to the bride and groom they looked very happy.

I also ran into a few people from Nethinks.

The two gentlemen on the left are Michael Batz and René Kleffel. The are Nethinks OpenNMS consultants who helped out with the class this week.

The cute couple on the right are Jeri Ryan and Justin Timberlake.

Actually, it’s Christoph Seipp and his girlfriend Caroline. Christoph used to work at Nethinks but now he is working to get Cloud services like Google Apps adopted in Germany.

After the reception there was also an evening party. It was outside of Fulda in a town called Grebenhain-Bermuthshain. David wasn’t feeling well (he’s been on the road non-stop for some time) so he stayed back while Antonio and I drove out through the beautiful German countryside with Ulf, our Kiwi mascot.

Ulf wasn’t able to make it to the wedding, but he did have fun giving his best wishes to the bride and groom.

Antonio and I wandered around and met a lot of amazing people. Christoph introduced me to Kümmel, and I returned the favor by reintroducing him to the North American exports tequila and Jack Daniels.

Ulf seemed to have his own agenda.

I had a wonderful time, and the only thing that could have made it better was if my own bride had been able to join us. I used to travel a lot for business before working with OpenNMS, and I found it kind of lonely. Now am I always come back home richer for it, not just in money but in friendships, and I have a feeling I know which will last longer.

Water.

2011-10-02T16:08:46+00:00

We forgot to take something to give the dog water..turns out he’s perfectly happy with this solution (attention + water).

Machine!

2011-10-02T16:04:23+00:00

Snow machine in Orange, Haute-Savoie. One m³ of water results in approx. 2 m³ of snow. The snow needs to be compressed to be used, though – meaning that artificial snow is bad for the water balance in the alps. One solution to this is the use of GPS and ultrasonic devices to measure snow depth. The natural snow can be scraped off where there’s too much and put down where it is needed. Some ski resorts in the french alps have adopted this technology to reduce their water consumption. A side effect is better snow – and a better skiing experience

The Brotherhood of the Traveling Kiwi

2011-09-30T10:07:30+00:00

One of the favorite parts of my job is OpenNMS training. OpenNMS is a large, complex and powerful system (which is why I refer to it as a “network management application platform” instead of just an application) and it is difficult for someone new to easily get involved with it.

Perhaps you can imagine how much fun it is to watch interested people start out on Day One of our training course finally understanding the basics and end up on Day Five going “wow – OpenNMS can do a crazy amount of things”.

It’s a rite of passage and it can be a bit intense. So much so that at the end of the week I sometimes feel like I’m dealing less with a student and more with a brother.

This is stronger during our remote training courses. Uwe Bergmann, CEO of our German partner Nethinks, set up training this week at his office in Fulda. This allowed me to go out with the class in the evenings. Usually when I teach I have others things demanding my attention, but when I am overseas it is too much fun to pass up.

Last night we all went out to a local brewery in Fulda called the Wiesenmühle. They had an amazing “Swartz Bier” called “Dunkel” and after a few of those it is hard to say no to a shot of schnapps.

OpenNMS has turned a number of strangers into my friends, but I am more excited about seeing friendships evolve between members of the community.

At this year’s Dev Jam, Craig Miskell brought a stuffed Kiwi toy from New Zealand. He gave it to Ronny and Markus from Germany, and now “Ulf” is extremely well traveled – going wherever OpenNMS takes him.

I’m not sure what Ulf was up to last night, but on the left is a card from the Toro Negro Rodizio restaurant where we ate on Monday night, and the one on the right is a card for Stefan Junger, one of our students, featuring his photography website (may not be safe for work).

I can’t explain all the cash.

While not every student comes up to us afterward and says “this is the best training I have ever had”, a surprisingly large number do. It is rare that we do better than break even with training, but the long term relationships (and often future support customers) more than make up for it.

Our next training is scheduled for December. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

On the Nature of MySQL Closed Extensions

2011-09-28T14:50:38+00:00

Matt Raykowski pointed out a couple of notes about the recent announcement by Oracle that it would begin supplying closed source extensions to MySQL, which it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems (such as this one from Simon Phipps and this one from Monty Widenius)

I can’t say that the move surprised me, but I’ve been busy teaching this week and am newly obsessed with De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, which was rescued from obscurity by Poggio the Florentine when he found a copy at a Benedictine Abbey in Fulda, where I happen to be.

I believe I have tracked down that abbey, so I am now free to once again bore my three readers by discussing the open core business model.

First, when it comes to Oracle, one must surely realize that they are a commercial software company and their customers consist of people both used to and comfortable with buying proprietary code. I don’t really see this move as “open core” since Oracle has never, to my knowledge, described itself as an open source company. Instead, they join the ranks of Microsoft, Google and Apple who sell proprietary products based on open source code. There is no market confusion here, as the vast majority of companies who buy these products realize that they are buying commercial software.

I think it is more interesting to examine the role of commercially licensed software within the realm of an open source business.

To use MySQL AB as an example, I had no problem with the company both providing MySQL code under an open license as well as selling it under a proprietary license so it could be imbedded into commercial products. As long as all the bits are the same, I think it is a great way to fund open source development. We offer the same model with our “Powered by OpenNMS” program.

The problem arises when features are withheld from the “open” version. One of the powerful aspects of open source software is that the community of users and developers around it allow it to develop rapidly. OpenNMS is able to compete with products that have yearly R&D budgets in the tens of millions, mainly because features can advance rapidly due to a large, disparate development community.

This “withholding of features” is a key part of the open core model. It doesn’t work, and it is why open core companies are running away from it as fast as they can. Take Hyperic for example. Just recently on their messaging boards came a post asking about the next community release, since the “enterprise” release has been out for awhile now. Because the software has this separation, someone has to make the decision on how much of it to release as open. Thus, the decision on how to manage, test, distribute and improve the code has been removed from the community and placed in the hands of the vendor. The code is hidden until the vendor decides to release it, which all but removes the advantage of having it as open source in the first place.

Again, to contrast that to OpenNMS, anyone with access to the Internet can get to our git repository and see the latest and greatest code whenever they want. If they want to run our next stable release before its time, they can download testing (the next point release), unstable (the next major release) or snapshot (the raw, unrefined, latest code) which are built nightly.

The second major issue when talking about the role of commercial software within an open source business is the topic of copyright assignment. MySQL required that developers contributing code assign the copyright to them. Only the copyright holder can set the terms of the license, so Oracle would not be able to create a proprietary version of the MySQL database without it.

At OpenNMS, the discussion was lengthy when we were deciding on a copyright assignment strategy. We had been stung by the fact that a company had taken our code and turned it into a commercial product in violation of the license, and when we pursued legal action, that company’s response was that if they were using the OpenNMS code, it was from an earlier version to which we did not own the copyright. Now that The OpenNMS Group holds the entire copyright to OpenNMS, it makes such issues easier to defend.

We adopted, at the suggestion of DJ Gregor, the Sun contributors agreement, in which the copyright is assigned to the project but the contributor also maintains copyright.

There is one huge positive to this and one minor negative.

The positive is that the contributor retains ownership of their work. Think about it – supposed you wrote some part of MySQL and assigned the copyright to MySQL AB. Now you want to improve that code and submit it to another project. Since MySQL owns the copyright to the original work, you are bound by whatever license under which it is published. If it was published under the GPLv2, you wouldn’t be able to submit it to a project licensed under GPLv3 without express permission from MySQL. You don’t own your own work.

In the case of “dual copyright”, you still maintain ownership and you can license it any way you want.

The negative is that dual copyright may not be enforceable around the world, and it has not, to my knowledge, been tested in court. But this was the same FUD spread about the GPL in the beginning, and numerous court challenges have upheld the license’s validity. I am confident that should this ever be tested in court, it too will be found valid (just as if, say, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling decided to write a book together, they could each share in the ownership of the final product).

Publishing all the bits under an open source license (even if they are also sold commercially) and having a permissive contributors agreement that favors the developer are key to being successful as an open source business.

I’m afraid I have little sympathy for the developers of MySQL. They took their 40 pieces of silver when they sold themselves to Sun for US$1 billion. At that valuation, they had a ton of options, including an IPO, but somewhere along the way they made decisions that eventually led to Oracle owning the project.

I think this is more a lesson in foresight versus some strange and unexpected strategy by Oracle.

Open for Business: The Reputation Economy

2011-09-28T13:03:46+00:00

I’m off in Europe doing OpenNMS training but I noticed that my latest “Open for Business” column was posted.

This one is my take on what I’m calling “the Reputation Economy” around open source software.

As usual, I hope folks find it interesting, and comments are welcome.

Testing, testing

2011-09-20T19:29:26+00:00

Recently, a “Powered by OpenNMS” customer asked Matt Brozowski, our CTO, about the OpenNMS test plan.

I thought his reply warranted a blog post.

The way OpenNMS does testing is as follows:

We have extensive automated tests that run whenever code is changed.

The list of successful tests of the 1.10 release is here (as you can see there are 3743 tests)

Our automated build system does not create RPMs unless all of these tests have passed, otherwise it make a new RPM each night.

In addition to these tests, as a part of each build we also have a set of tests that run against an installed system (we call these Smoke Tests)

The Smoke Tests have automated scripts that install and configure a system and then uses the Selenium GUI emulator to validate that the GUI is functioning correctly. These tests are relatively new for us but I’m sure we will be adding to these tests of the coming months.

Lastly we release a milestone every month and we have a number of community members that install OpenNMS on systems in parallel with their production system and validate that the features that they are using still work with the devices that they have and report bugs as they come up.

After features are complete we make these milestones as release candidates and label them something like 1.9.9x and from this point on only bug fixes are allowed. Next week we will release 1.9.91 as a release candidate in preparation for 1.10.

This is the list of issues that are currently considered critical for release of 1.10 as a stable release.

Not all of these issues have been validated but these are the ones that remain to be considered.

After we release 1.9.91 these will be moved to 1.9.92 and so on until we get them fixed and can release 1.10.

I hope this helps give you an idea about the quality of our testing strategy.

This Week in OpenNMS: Who Bugs the Reporters?

2011-09-19T16:22:00+00:00

It’s time for These Weeks in OpenNMS. (See what I did there? <g>) In the last couple of weeks we fixed a lot more bugs in preparation for 1.10, and released 1.8.14 and 1.9.91. Seth also did a HUGE triage of the JIRA database, cleaning up a lot of duplicates, as well as un-closed issues that have actually been resolved in the past.

Speaking of triaging the JIRA database, I’d like to re-post an article I wrote on my personal blog about reporting issues. The TL;DR version is: don’t be afraid to open an issue! Here it is in it’s entirety:

Schrödinger’s Bugs

Working on an open-source project teaches you a few things about dealing with software developers, and reporting bugs. I’ve been in the open-source world for a long time, and I remember when I first started out as a user of software, I felt glad to even have access to these tools at all, and I felt a reluctance to “bother” the developers with issues if I wasn’t sure it was only me.

The problem is, issues are a bit like Schrödinger’s cat: they don’t exist until the developer knows about them.

Since I’ve become a developer of open-source software and seen things from the other side, I have one request: err on the side of opening an issue. There’s nothing I love more than having an issue opened, and being able to fix it, and tell the user their problem is solved. It’s that kind of feedback loop that is one of the best parts of developing software without a marketing and sales department sitting between you and your users.

So without further ado, I’d like to point out a few comments in this vein. Note that when I say “issue,” it could be anything: a showstopper bug, an annoyance, or just a new feature you wish the software had.

Always Open an Issue

Sure, sometimes it’s a pain to figure out where the issue reporter link is, and create an account, and validate your email, and figure out what component it goes into… but don’t worry about it. If you get it in the wrong place, they’ll know where it belongs and (hopefully) triage it. But if you don’t open that issue, they may never know it’s a problem.

Don’t Worry If It’s a Duplicate

Of course, you should always try searching for your issue first, maybe someone else has reported it. Make a comment if someone has. But if you can’t find it, don’t worry that it might be a duplicate, go ahead and open that issue. As a developer, I’d rather close a million duplicates than to never know about the issue in the first place.

Don’t Just Describe the Issue, Describe What You’re Trying to Do

It may be that the issue you’re trying to solve is meant to work a different way, or is part of another feature you haven’t used yet, or has a workaround. Make sure when you describe the problem you’re having, also describe what you want to accomplish.

A Closed Issue is Not an Ultimatum

This is a corollary to “describe what you’re trying to do.” Just because an issue is closed does not mean it is closed for discussion. Sometimes the developer doesn’t realize what you’re trying to actually do, or the original issue was described in a way that doesn’t make it clear that the real issue is elsewhere.

For example, OpenNMS supports creating a “path outage,” which describes how particular nodes are related. There was an issue opened that said if you created a path outage, it would be wiped out when using Provisiond. It was closed, saying that you create path outage relationships with the “parent-id” tag in the provisioning group file. What the issue did not say is that these manually-created path outages were created through the UI. So the real issue is that the web UI path outage editor is not Provisiond-aware, and the issue should be reopened.

It’s Better to Be Too Verbose than Not Enough

Configuration files, logs, output from `dmesg` or similar, anything you can add that makes it easier to diagnose the problem. It’s a lot harder to fix a problem with a one-line error message than with 200 lines of context telling you what the software was doing just before the error. The more information you give, the more likely it is the developer will be able to figure out what’s going on when the issue happened.

Does this mean your issue will be resolved quickly? Not necessarily. Everyone has their own set of priorities, and their own time set aside for working on issues. I can say that a good issue report, with a lot of detail and a good description of what you’re trying to accomplish, will get a lot more traction than a 1-line report saying “it doesn’t work,” and it will get a heck of a lot more traction than no report at all. To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky, you miss fixing 100% of the issues you never report.

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.14 (Red-breasted Nuthatch)
1.8.14 is the current stable release, tagged 13 Sep, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
1.9: Current release is 1.9.91 (Crumhorn)
1.9.91 is the current unstable release, tagged 14 Sep, 2011. This release is not yet recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features, or for test environments to evaluate upgrades to 1.10 when it is released. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Upcoming Events

OpenNMS training will be held in Fulda, Germany, September 26th through 30th, 2011. It is done in conjunction with our partner, NETHINKS. You can register on their site, here.

Issues Resolved

Since the last TWiO, the following issues were resolved as “fixed”:

[NMS-1322] – CAPSD loops infinitely on misbehaving ipAddrTable
[NMS-2052] – small patch to add regex filtering of eventparms
[NMS-2374] – When running the database checker rethrow any exceptions with details (e.g.: database URL)
[NMS-2375] – Make the severity element in event configuration an enumeration and fix our default config files
[NMS-2738] – Include a failure reason in data collection failure events
[NMS-2812] – normalize radius code
[NMS-2822] – PSQLException when discovering interface/address that has not yet been deleted from database
[NMS-2889] – Move org.opennms.netmgt.ping.Ping and its dependencies into jicmp package
[NMS-2907] – More reduction keys for APC events
[NMS-2977] – Deleted node appear in KSC report creation
[NMS-3005] – ONMS Version not display correct – Windows install
[NMS-3066] – JavaMailNotificationStrategy fails when passing -nm
[NMS-3073] – Weird redirect on login
[NMS-3143] – GUI error if we remove Switches from Surveillance
[NMS-3194] – Reporting is truncated by URL length limitation
[NMS-3319] – HTTPS don’t support SSLv3-only servers
[NMS-3515] – Broken paged grid in Select SNMP Interfaces
[NMS-3540] – General node information not displayed using Internet Explorer 8 in IE7 Compatability view or IE7
[NMS-3594] – provisiond does not create nodelabelchanged event
[NMS-3606] – WMI/WQL Poller – Wrong text in event
[NMS-3622] – Allow HttpCollector and PageSequenceMonitor to accept all SSL certificates
[NMS-3651] – Create detectors for all protocol plugins
[NMS-3785] – Provisiond crashes against Procurve 1810G
[NMS-3823] – Clicking a Vlan interface (SVI) on a Cisco router throws Jasper Exception
[NMS-3848] – Reasons Missing From nodeLostService events
[NMS-3863] – provisiond has issues with two IPs on the same ifIndex – I think
[NMS-3887] – webUI shows 100% availability although service is not monitored
[NMS-3912] – Alarm Description in Dashboard not formatted
[NMS-3959] – eventd logging missing file name
[NMS-3979] – Notification Dashlet doesn’t format HTML message text
[NMS-4020] – Too many CLOSE_WAIT on port 5817
[NMS-4029] – dns provisiond – fqdn trailing dot
[NMS-4040] – SNMPPoller is the cause of loss of snmpinterfaces during the re-import / synchronization Provision Groups.
[NMS-4049] – Can’t provision a node with one IP address and a policy to avoid all IP address
[NMS-4091] – Page Sequence Monitor and invalid SSL certificates
[NMS-4157] – org.apache.mina.util.DefaultExceptionMonitor: Unexpected exception
[NMS-4232] – Configure scheduling outages via RESTful Web Service
[NMS-4390] – Nearly impossible to make head or tail of why Maven build is failing.
[NMS-4475] – Provisiond fails with a Unable to return specified BeanFactory instance exception at startup
[NMS-4502] – [patch] Show correct values in net-snmp CPU Usage graph
[NMS-4526] – Remote Poller implodes with lack of WMI classes
[NMS-4544] – Provisiond HOST-RESOURCES process detector
[NMS-4593] – Report Issue – Surveillance Category Not Correctly Chosen
[NMS-4673] – Discovery fails with JNA pinger
[NMS-4675] – Resource Graph Resources – limited to 55 Resources or less
[NMS-4683] – SNMP interface poller filtering not allowing data collection after provisioning group sync
[NMS-4704] – Service monitored with 100% availability instead of Not Monitored
[NMS-4749] – Requisition REST Service allows duplicate nodes
[NMS-4754] – Event analysis report, missing legend in pie graph
[NMS-4799] – Events generated from trapd are not associated with any node
[NMS-4800] – Node.jsp – double clicking physical interfaces goes to interface.jsp instead of snmpinterface.jsp
[NMS-4815] – Make Jetty headerBufferSize property configurable
[NMS-4817] – Null (\0) characters in logmsg field of events causes org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8″: 0×00
[NMS-4831] – notifd.log – Info if message was send
[NMS-4833] – Poorly used INFO log message
[NMS-4834] – Remote Poller state changes from Paused to Running
[NMS-4838] – jmx collector does direct db lookup of nodeid
[NMS-4839] – Check if a node is currently covered by a scheduled outage using Rest
[NMS-4841] – OpenNMS Version not displayed correctly
[NMS-4845] – RrdUtils.createRRD log message is unclear
[NMS-4851] – Notification not being sent event if status=”on”, looks like notifd is not using the status in the config file properly
[NMS-4853] – unit tests on windows creates directories outside of temp directory
[NMS-4857] – StorageStrategy documentation does not match API in code
[NMS-4861] – Runaway threads consuming CPU when rendering certain graphs
[NMS-4871] – With Jetty + HTTPS, certain Web UI actions prompt browser to “Save As” JSP and HTML files
[NMS-4872] – Show all nodes with asset info not working
[NMS-4880] – java.lang.ClassCastException when building an event notification with a category filter
[NMS-4882] – IP address formatting does not match
[NMS-4886] – HttpCollector ignores “port” parameter from Collectd config
[NMS-4895] – 1.9.90 newer graphics display inconsistency – node.jsp
[NMS-4899] – notifd DEBUG message “supress” mispelling
[NMS-4903] – base-url not used when viewing resource graphs
[NMS-4913] – Change StorageStrategy to throw an IllegalArgumentException when the arguments (or parameters) are not properly configured on datacollection-config.xml
[NMS-4914] – wrong implementation of org.opennms.netmgt.correlation.Correlator$EngineAdapter.getName() ?
[NMS-4917] – update ksc page
[NMS-4921] – after upgrade to 1.8.13 RadiusAuthMonitor gives exception “The RADIUS Server returned the wrong Identifier”
[NMS-4923] – Add PostgreSQL 9.1 support
[NMS-4926] – OpenNMS 1.8.14-1 fails to install on Ubuntu Server 10.04.3 LTS , reason opennms-db depends on iplike-pgsql91 which is not available at debian.opennms.org
[NMS-4931] – Availability Miscalculated in NodeAvailabilityReport.jrxml (and others)

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

Mines de Sel, Bex

2011-09-18T06:59:47+00:00

Bex is in the swiss canton of Valais, in the Rhône valley. The salt mines have been operational for more than 400 years, evolving over time. It’s very impressive to see what men did with hammer and chisel under ground, advancing 5m per month into the depth of the mountain.

After a short walk into the mountain a little train takes us further inside. It’s nothing for claustrophobic personalities, definitely not. I felt a bit uneasy in the beginning, to be honest. If you know the London subway lines, the old ones where the walls are really close to the train: It’s just like that. Only smaller.

The salt can only be sold in the canton of Vaud. If you don’t know what a canton is: It’s like a state, only smaller, coming to county size rather than state size

What I did not know was that they get the salt out in water. They drill holes into the mountain, hundreds of meters deep.

Then water gets pressurized in, through a tube with an inner and an outer circuit. The inner circuit delivers fresh water into the rocks, the outer circuit brings it back up again. If the water has dissolved enough salt and comes to 30% of salt in water, it is delivered to the processing unit outside the mountain. If not, it takes another round down into the mountain.

Yeah, smartphones. Everywhere

Gallery

And Who Says Nixon Is the Only One Who Can Go to China?

2011-09-15T17:44:04+00:00

Please forgive me if this post is a little spacier than usual, but I was up from 2am until 6am this morning doing an upgrade at a client site.

When I came into the office, everyone was talking about a project Ronny Trommer spotted on Sourceforge called YbmNMS.

It appears to be a Chinese fork of OpenNMS.

I am always amazed at where our code ends up, and I think it is pretty cool that someone in China is using it. While I visited China in the 1990s (Guangzhou and Chengdu), I haven’t been back since, and we don’t have any commercial support customers in China.

I always worry, however, about whether or not projects that use our code obey the license. The code for YbmNMS seems to be hosted as the “Netcools” project on Sourceforge, and it appears that all that has been done, with respect to the copyright, is a global search and replace on the string “OpenNMS” and substituting “YbmNMS”.

From one file:

// YbmNMS(R) is Copyright (C) 2002-2005 The YbmNMS Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
// YbmNMS(R) is a derivative work, containing both original code, included code and modified
// code that was published under the GNU General Public License. Copyrights for modified
// and included code are below.
//
// YbmNMS(R) is a registered trademark of The YbmNMS Group, Inc.

Considering that not all of our code is there, YbmNMS may be focusing on just that functionality that is similar to IBM’s Netcool product, hence the Netcools name.

I tried to send an e-mail to the “mailto” link on their website (ybmnms@ybmnms.com) but it bounced, so I sent a note to Yin Bangmin to learn more about what he is doing and to get the copyright notice corrected.

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

-Oscar Wilde

OpenNMS 1.9.91 Released

2011-09-14T15:43:04+00:00

The second 1.10 release candidate, OpenNMS 1.9.91, was released today. It includes a number of bugfixes and a few small enhancements, including official installer support for PostgreSQL 9.1 and a fix for running on the 1.7 JDK.

For a complete list of changes, see: http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.9.91

OpenNMS 1.8.14 Released

2011-09-14T01:24:44+00:00

Release 1.8.14 is the latest in the 1.8 series of production-ready OpenNMS releases. Since 1.8.13, a number of small changes were made.

A complete list of changes is available here: http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.8.14

And the cold side of sunset.

2011-09-12T19:51:15+00:00

And at night.

2011-09-12T19:50:30+00:00

They have gas lanterns. Amazing.

Fribourg in sunset

2011-09-12T19:48:37+00:00

Place du Petit St. Jean

Some Thoughts on 9/11

2011-09-11T14:29:47+00:00

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC (and not to forgot the one foiled attempt that ended in Pennsylvania). The world changed that day.

I didn’t lose any friends that Tuesday, even though several lived near the attacks. One was at the airport at LAX heading to a meeting at the World Trade Center later that afternoon. His plane, of course, never left. But, I am thankful, that is about as close as it got.

The 9/11 anniversary is always an important milestone in my life, coming a day after my anniversary with OpenNMS. I didn’t know it at the time, but OpenNMS would also change my world, but in a much better way.

The goal of those involved in the 9/11 attacks was to inspire terror. Terror is an extreme form of fear, and I believe they met their goal of increasing fear. The 9/11 attacks led directly to things such as Guantanamo Bay, The Patriot Act, airport scanners and the seizure of electronics from citizens at the border. Not to mention the somewhat justifiable invasion of Afghanistan and the totally inappropriate invasion of Iraq.

As I write this, they are reading the names of the dead in New York. My guess is that they won’t be reading the names of the 6207 service men and women who died in those military operations.

Fear is the direct result of feeling powerless. The people who died in the Towers and who died in the Pentagon could have done little to save themselves. It appears that those people on Flight 93 turned that fear into action, and probably prevented the deaths of hundreds more people at the expense of their own.

I wish I could say that the actions of my country’s government were as brave.

Many years ago, my two year old cousin and his mother came to spend the summer with us, as his father was on an extended deployment with the Navy. I had not spent much time around children, so it was pretty cool to try and figure out what was going on in his fresh little mind.

I can remember one incredibly nice day, we had the windows open and there was a nice breeze coming through the house. As my cousin walked by a door, an especially strong breeze slammed it shut. It startled him and he reacted by smacking his hand against the door, as if to punish it for scaring him.

I classify a lot of the policies put in place after 9/11 as similar, and about as effective.

On one hand, government officials hate to appear powerless. Since it is nearly impossible to prevent other, similar attacks with threats of incarceration or bodily harm, we engage in security theatre. If you are inconvenienced at the airport (take off your shoes, put your liquids in a baggie) you get the impression that something is being done, and it is hoped that you don’t question its effectiveness.

On the other hand, there is serious money to be made in the terrorism business. Those airport scanners aren’t cheap, and what’s even better is that they are only used about 50% of the time in my experience. Thus the manufacturer still gets paid and they don’t have to maintain anything. Anyone remember those machines that would blow air around you and sniff for the chemical signatures of explosives? Yup, they are mothballed now but someone made a chunk of change when they were the hot, new anti-terrorist thing.

So, how does one combat fear? Not through current government policies, which seem to scream “Be Afraid and Buy Shit”. I believe one combats fear by transferring as much power to the individual as possible. When one feels in control of their own destiny, they are much less likely to throw their life away in a terrorist attack.

Thus, after several meandering paragraphs, we come to my tie-in between combating terrorism and open source software.

Open source is the ultimate expression of personal power, at least within the realm of computer software. If that seems a little limited, you can read Marc Andreessen’s essay on “Why Software Is Eating the World” or just look to how social networks (based on open source) were key to this year’s Arab Spring. People who feel empowered are less afraid, and when fear is lessened (if not removed) amazing things can happen.

I’ve been to both Syria and the United Arab Emirates. In both cases I was afraid for my life. My hosts were determined to entertain me to death. True Arab hospitality can be a frightening thing.

The only saddening part of my trip was that I saw a tremendous number of extremely poor people. For example, in Syria I can remember seeing a hut made out of stacked, corrugated steel sheets sitting in a field made of rocks. Under the desert heat it must have been unbearable, but it should have provided some protection from the cold desert nights.

Prior to that, my idea of an extremely poor person came from the peasant scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Even though they were knee deep in mud, they had trees and a thatched roof shack – making them kings to the poor in the desert (or at least an autonomous collective).

To truly prevent terrorism, we have to remove the sense of hopelessness that drive people to be willing to kill themselves. It seems to me that it would be hard to throw one’s life away if it was made worth living. Perhaps we can use open source to help pave the way.

With the advent of utility computing, in order to get someone online and coding should only take a small laptop, a network connection and some education. The horsepower can live elsewhere, and perhaps we could even use solar cells to power the laptop (and solar power is plentiful in the desert). In a perfect world, idle youth would spend their time building things instead of seeing destruction as their only option. Imagine how far we would have gotten toward this if we took the billion dollars we spent on airport scanners or the trillion dollars we spent on an unnecessary war and spent it on laptops and training?

I’m probably being silly and idealistic, but open source software changed my life for the better, and I can’t help but think it could change the lives of others as well.

Then maybe I won’t shed so many tears at the reading of names.

Ten Years with OpenNMS

2011-09-10T21:33:21+00:00

It was ten years ago today that I first drove to the Oculan offices in Raleigh as an employee, and began working on the OpenNMS Project.

Oculan built a network management appliance on top of OpenNMS, and that was their main business. However, there was enough interest in the OpenNMS platform by itself that I was brought on board to build a service and support business around it.

I worked on that until May of 2002, when Oculan decided to focus solely on their appliance business, as well as to stop working on OpenNMS. I saw enough potential in the project to ask to take it over. Thus I became the sole maintainer of OpenNMS and started my own business called Sortova Consulting Company (named after Sortova Farm, where I live).

Somehow, I managed to keep the project alive as well as pay my mortgage. I owe no small part of that to a group of strangers that formed the inaugural class of the Order of the Green Polo (OGP). Although we had not met (yet), through IRC and the mailing lists they keep me going, if not the project itself.

In 2003 the business grew to the point where my satellite internet connection just wasn’t adequate. It was the only affordable option I had at the farm for any form of non-dialup internet, and since a T1 circuit with internet connectivity was going to run me close to $1000 a month, I decided it would be cheaper to rent an office in town and just get DSL.

I did that, but then I needed to get a new ISP (since I couldn’t afford both the office and to keep my satellite connection at home). Always wanting to “buy local”, I called up the local internet provider called Blast, and opened an account. While I was on the phone I asked about their monitoring solution, and was told I needed to “talk to Lyle”.

Lyle Estill is one of more animated and driven people I’ve ever met, and we hit it off. Since Blast was mainly a services company, he suggested that I bring OpenNMS and come work for him. So for the first time in over a year I ended up with a salary, as well as other people to help share the work around the .com side of the OpenNMS Project.

Through Blast I was able to hire David Hustace, and shortly after that, Matt Brozowski. We now had a real team of people working full time on the project, and things were looking up.

In 2004 Lyle decided to focus his time on a (then) nascent biofuels project. Before he left Blast, the three of us approached him about buying back the OpenNMS business, which we did to form The OpenNMS Group. That has been my current employer since September 1st, 2004.

We had reached the profitability tipping point, and have been organically growing ever since.

Working on OpenNMS has put me in touch with some amazing people. First there are my coworkers, who have been there through the best of times and the worst of times. Second are the people involved in the project itself, mainly through the OGP, but also the people I’ve met through the mailing lists and at conferences. Third are my customers. My job would be a lot harder without such a wonderful group of clients. They not only understand the value of OpenNMS, their input has had a direct impact on the development of the code. I’d be a poor businessman if I ignored the needs of the very people willing to pay me to build it.

Finally, I’ve gotten to travel the world. As a farmboy in a rural section of North Carolina, I’ve been to places like Singapore, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Italy, the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Dubai, Portugal, and Mexico. I’ve been all over the US, including Alaska and Hawaii, and what I’ve found is that while the politics of our respective countries may differ greatly, people all over the world who love open source software are pretty much the same: bright, eager people who really enjoy having control over their software solutions.

Oh, I did I mention really good looking? Serious model potential here, yessiree.

This day did not come without some sad notes. I was looking forward to celebrating at the Ohio LinuxFest, with a number of those good people I mentioned above. Unfortunately, my usually illness free body betrayed me on Thursday, and with chest pains and a high fever I decided it was best not to travel. Things are better today and I should be fine, but it is still disappointing not to be there. Instead, I spent the morning watching David, my spouse and several of her coworkers in the Trooper Challenge Mud Run. It was a fun time, though not nearly as fun for me as the OLF. Oh, David finished 19th and plans to run the New York Marathon this year. He’s doing it for charity so if any of the three people reading this want to sponsor him, drop me a note.

Also today, Rackspace decommissioned server1.opennms.org. Rackspace Hosting is an awesome company and they have been both a client and a supporter of OpenNMS since 2002. When I started out on my own, they donated a server to the project, and it has hosted our mailing lists, website, FTP services, etc. over the years.

It was in their old datacenter in downtown San Antonio which is being closed, so they migrated us to a much newer and powerful machine out of Dallas. Still, it was like losing an old friend.

But on net, the number of friends I’ve gained in the last decade far outweighs that one loss. I am truly blessed to be able to make a living doing something I love, surrounded by awesome people who share similar goals.

Thank you.

They have landed.

2011-09-09T22:19:09+00:00

Lucky Number Seven

2011-09-01T21:03:34+00:00

It was seven years ago today that David Hustace, Matt Brozowski and myself started The OpenNMS Group.

I had been working on OpenNMS for several years under three different companies by that point in time, but this seems to be the one that stuck.

Those of us who were in town went over to the Brewery and ordered every appetizer and every dessert they had on the menu.

That’s supposed to be lucky, too.

Nagios Spreads FUD About OpenNMS

2011-08-31T00:01:17+00:00

It was brought to my attention that Nagios Enterprises has decided to go after OpenNMS by publishing a document called “How Nagios Compares to OpenNMS“. I am always flattered when companies feel the need to compare themselves to our project, especially when Nagios is considerably better known than OpenNMS, at least according to a quick look at Google hits (5.3 million to 453 thousand just now). I assume they feel that positioning themselves against our product is useful.

And I guess it could be, if they weren’t so wrong.

I would not pretend to make such a list from the OpenNMS viewpoint, since I don’t know all that much about Nagios, and what I do know comes from replacing it at a number of our customers’ sites. But let me correct some misunderstandings presented by this document.

Almost every missing check mark on the OpenNMS side is wrong. OpenNMS can’t monitor “Web Transactions”? What about the Page Sequence Monitor, used to insure the performance of such websites as papajohns.com? It doesn’t have “Google Maps Integration”? Well, not just Google Maps, but Mapquest and Open Street Map as well. It can’t do Active Directory Authentication? Please, I set it up all the time.

I really chuckled when I saw that the product can’t do Data Export, Advanced or Scheduled reporting, since I just spent a week doing just that at a large bank based in Chicago (one that caters to institutions and wealthy individuals).

With the JasperReports integration, OpenNMS can generate amazing reports, and since we’ve extended it to be able to mine JRobin/RRDtool data directly, we were able to get OpenNMS to report on a huge Virtual Machine server farm at the bank on things such as CPU utilization, process memory utilization and load average in a format that could be exported to Excel without the need to even glance at a graph. It was fully automated, including the report generation, distribution and even provisioning the devices to be included in it.

The kicker is that OpenNMS can run any Nagios checkscript, even using NRPE (although I strongly recommend using the Net-SNMP extend function versus that protocol for reliability), so I fail to understand where OpenNMS fails in the “Custom Plugins” department.

They even get our pricing wrong, even though we publish it online. The package they refer to as “1 year of standard support and one 1 week of consulting” maps to our Greenlight Project, which is $23,000 not $30,000 (that is for the Greenlight Plus Project, which includes two weeks of on-site services).

But if you are choosing to use Nagios XI based on price, I think you should go with with it. OpenNMS is designed to be a network management application platform, and as such has a much wider scope than Nagios, which, let’s face it, is at its heart a script management interface. I’m not sure how one provisions devices in Nagios, but since that was left off of their chart I must assume it isn’t a key feature, whereas it plays a huge role when you are trying to manage a network of any size, such as the one at Towerstream. Considering the scale at which OpenNMS is useful, our prices are a bargain when truly compared to competitors’ products.

Two years ago at the Netways Monitoring Conference I saw a presentation from Audi where they implemented Nagios. It took them over a year. We have done the same at similar sites in less than three weeks. If you have more than one thousand devices, you are going to be very unhappy with the performance of Nagios, whereas OpenNMS has a track record of monitoring tens of thousands of devices on a single server for numerous companies over several years.

And finally, every bit of OpenNMS code is published under an open source license. Nagios XI is not.

On Thursday, The OpenNMS Group turns seven. We don’t have a million customers, but considering how awesome our customers are, I know that I couldn’t find a million of their caliber.

And never once have we resorted to this kind of FUD to promote our products.

Towerstream

2011-08-30T11:40:22+00:00

One of our clients, Towerstream, a large ISP in New England providing 4G wireless services, was kind enough to share some of their experiences using OpenNMS and working with the OpenNMS Group.

If you are interested in such things, check out their story on our website.

Ready Player One

2011-08-29T17:04:04+00:00

Note: This is a somewhat long review of the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. The short version is that if you are over 40 and you self-identify as a geek, you’ll love this book. Even if you are not over 40, you should check it out, but it will really resonate if you were a teenager during the 1980s. The following is as spoiler-free as I can make it, but if you are a purist, you might want to skip it.

I was first introduced to Ready Player One on the blog of Patrick Rothfuss. Usually, that is enough to make me at least check it out, but it was also item number three in Entertainment Weekly’s top ten list, and that surprised me since EW isn’t exactly known for its coverage of science fiction/fantasy.

Now before you start teasing me about reading EW (or even referring to it as “EW”) I don’t do it to keep up with the latest antics of Brittany Spears (she’s such a little scamp, isn’t she?). In my job it is sometimes a good idea to have some handle on popular culture, so now I know about that nice young man named Ted Situation who lives in New Jersey with his sister Snookie and they do that charity work on the coast. Plus, I keep it in the bathroom, and I find that the articles are the perfect length for the amount of time I spend there. Assuming I’m eating right, I can get through an issue in about a week, which is how often it is published.

Anyway, the basic plot is as follows: it is the year 2041, and the world is not a pleasant place. World economies have collapsed, the environment is a wreck and energy is scarce. Most people escape the drudgery of their lives in a online simulation called the OASIS (think Second Life crossed with World of Warcraft with a dash of Gibson’s Cyberspace). The creator of the OASIS is videogame designer James Halliday, who quite naturally is also one of the world’s richest men.

When the story opens, Halliday has just died. Having no heirs, he has placed his entire fortune, including a majority stake in the company that owns the OASIS, into an Easter Egg (extra, undocumented code put into a game or application) hidden in the simulation itself. The first person to find it, gets it. The story follows one such egg hunter (or “gunter”) as he searches for clues, all of which are based on things from the 1980s.

With that premise, I expected a nice little stroll down memory lane with nostalgia.

I did not expect nostalgia to punch me in the gut.

The book brought up memories of things I haven’t thought about in decades. For example, Halliday’s first video game console was an Atari 2600. My first video game console was an Atari 2600 – which I still have, by the way (and in the original box). At one point in the novel the plot involves Dungeons and Dragons, specifically a module called Tomb of Horrors. I can remember playing Tomb of Horrors. I didn’t remember it before reading the book, but as the scene was described I was thinking to myself “isn’t that the module with the sphere of annihilation at the end of the first corridor?” and sure enough, there it is, in the next paragraph.

I can also remember coming home from school and turning the antenna toward Charlotte to bring in this UHF station that carried Japanese shows (yes, kiddies, back in the day television came in over the air and not in on a little wire). One I remember involved a giant gold robot/rocketship named Goldar and his wife, a silver robot/rocketship named Silvar. Apparently that was The Space Giants. There was also an animated show involving a World War II era battleship flying through space. That, apparently, was Space Battleship Yamato.

There were also copious references to 80s music and movies, all of which really resonated with me. At one point the video game Tempest is referenced, and I was once part owner of a Tempest machine when I was at Harvey Mudd.

Cline even uses the term “open source” on a number of occasions. The bad guy in the novel is the IOI corporation, a services provider that has made a lot of money in the OASIS. From the book:

Like most gunters, I was horrified at the thought of IOI taking control of the OASIS. The company’s PR machine had made its intentions crystal clear. IOI believed that Halliday never properly monetized his creation, and they wanted to remedy that. They would start charging a monthly fee for access to the simulation. They would plaster advertisements on every visible surface. User anonymity and free speech would become things of the past. The moment IOI took it over, the OASIS would cease to be the open-source virtual utopia I’d grown up in.

Now the OASIS is in no way an open source product or platform. It just isn’t, but I so much prefer someone misinterpreting the term to mean “freedom” instead of “well, all I have to do is just expose the code”. The heroes in the book do embody a lot of what is sometimes called The Open Source Way in their behavior, goals and interactions with others.

Cline claims that the first ever Easter Egg can be found in the game Adventure for the Atari 2600. He states that back then, game designers were never recognized or given credit for their creations. This changed when Warren Robinett hid his name in Adventure.

There is a secret room in the game. In order to get to it, a number of things must happen. First, you have to retrieve a tiny, one pixel object hidden in a maze. Second, in the room next to the hidden room, you have to bring a number of objects (I think it is three). When you do this, the objects will start to flash. That has nothing to do with the Easter Egg but is instead an artifact due to the processor in the console being so slow that it couldn’t refresh more than two objects at a time. It is the same reason that the aliens in Space Invaders sped up as you kill them – the processor could then make fewer aliens move faster.

Once the barrier on the side of the room is flashing, and you have the “grey dot”, you can pass into a room that looks like this:

That was taken from my Atari Flashback machine – I didn’t want to have to dig out the old CRT television to hook up the original one I have.

Since so much of my enjoyment came from the fact that I lived through this time period, I am not sure how younger people will find the book. At one point in time I thought I’d figured out a plot point that would have really disappointed me (think deus ex machina) but I was wrong. I think the story stands enough on its own that geeks of all ages will enjoy it.

Ohio LinuxFest 2011

2011-08-28T16:06:52+00:00

Just a reminder that I will be speaking (along with a lot of people much more interesting than me) at the Ohio LinuxFest the second weekend in September. On a side note, September 10th will mark 10 years since I started working on OpenNMS.

In any case, the organizers are offering a prize to the 1000th person to register for the conference. The Enthusiast level is free, so if you can be in Columbus, Ohio, you should check it out.

This Week in OpenNMS: Release Candidate Wants Your Votes!

2011-08-22T20:32:36+00:00

It’s time for This Week in OpenNMS. In the last couple of weeks we worked on smoke tests, fixed more bugs, and released 1.8.13 and 1.9.90.

New Releases

It’s been a bit since we last did a release, we pretty much put all releases on hold until we could put a 1.10 release candidate out. That said, we found a couple of reasonably important bugs (in both 1.8.x and 1.9.x) and decided it was time to take the plunge. 1.9.90 is the first release candidate for the 1.10 series, meaning that we are feature-complete and plan only on fixing important bugs before 1.10.0 gets released. That said, Linkd should be still considered beta for this release. It’s gone through a significant refactor, but still has not reached parity with 1.6 (or even 1.8) Linkd. We will not release 1.10.0 until we have that parity, but for now, if you’re relying on Linkd, stick with 1.8. If you have the ability to help us test the new Linkd code against your devices, bug reports would be helpful, however.

Podcast

Jeff has been planning on making an OpenNMS podcast for a while now, but Dev-Jam was the perfect opportunity to get a few folks on the mic and talk about the state of OpenNMS and what happened during Dev-Jam. If you subscribe to the Planet OpenNMS RSS feed, then you’ve already seen this, but if not, please check it out!

Project Updates

1.8: Current Release is 1.8.13 (Northern Lapwing)
1.8.13 is the current stable release, tagged 10 Aug, 2011. For a complete list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki. As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before upgrading.
1.9: Current release is 1.9.90 (Balafon)
1.9.90 is the current unstable release, tagged 10 Aug, 2011. This release is not recommended for production use, but for developers and users who want to try out the very latest features, or for test environments to evaluate upgrades to 1.10 when it is released. For a list of changes and updates, see the “New and Noteworthy” page on the OpenNMS wiki.

Issues Resolved

[JICMP-4] – jicmp IcmpSocket.h byte swapping macros don’t work on OpenIndiana
[JRD-7] – JRRD Report runs fine in iReport but has errors when running via Reportd
[NMS-696] – Availability report time periods
[NMS-1769] – columnName argument to AssetModel.searchAssets allows SQL injection
[NMS-1802] – HTTP monitor nits
[NMS-1865] – The installer should catch systems where TCP connections cannot be made to localhost
[NMS-2079] – Opennms not honoring changes in opennms.conf
[NMS-2893] – Node when deleted remains in performance report list
[NMS-2995] – Trapd is not able to process SNMPv3 traps
[NMS-3651] – Create detectors for all protocol plugins
[NMS-3771] – reportd missing ability to select mailer from javamail-configuration.xml
[NMS-3905] – reload of Threshold configuration does not work – only after restart OpenNMS new threshold are applied
[NMS-4038] – translated events are displayed like the original event
[NMS-4350] – spring/beanfactory issue Java 1.7.0 – pointcut issues
[NMS-4668] – Create a poller monitor to “proxy” pings via the CISCO-PING-MIB
[NMS-4725] – LDAP authorization fails – group to role mapping does not work
[NMS-4745] – java.net.SocketException: Too many open files
[NMS-4817] – Null (\0) characters in logmsg field of events causes org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8″: 0×00
[NMS-4862] – Add command option to NRPE in provisiond
[NMS-4873] – Upgrade bug when Linkd tables contain data
[NMS-4875] – Older builds ov OpenNMS are not available for download
[NMS-4877] – Typo in datacollection-config.xml

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

énergie efficace.

2011-08-21T20:08:48+00:00

Barrage de Roselend

2011-08-21T20:07:20+00:00

The Barrage de Roselend turned 50 this year and this week-end they had the doors open and organized a party. The public transport sucked, all prejudices about the capability to organize things came true..well, might be they were overwhelmed by the number of people which passed by. But! The site is beautiful, the party great and we had a good day

The barrage is used to power electricity generators in the valley (1200m below), but there’s a small generator on the barrage itself.

The inside looks as if it inspired some computer game makers: