This Week in OpenNMS: Season 1.6, Episode 9

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

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

Project Updates
---------------

- Stable: Current Release is 1.6.2

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

- Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.0

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

- Trunk: Build System Updates

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

  - core: OpenNMS core.  This will include event handling, basic daemon
    support, and other support code needed by all of OpenNMS.
    - api: Interfaces and basic APIs
    - lib: "Library" code (the majority of the core code)
    - runtime: Runtime code, ie, things only needed in a running
      OpenNMS instance
    - web: Web application code common to all of OpenNMS
    - doc: Documentation
  - features: Any feature of OpenNMS that can be modularized, and isn't
    part of the Core.  This will include most of the daemons (Notifd,
    Provisiond, etc.)  Each feature gets it's own directory, and will
    have a similar structure to the core module.
  - extensions: Any feature of OpenNMS that does not need to be built by
    default for a basic running OpenNMS installation (ticketing
    integrations, etc.)  Each extension gets it's own directory, and
    will have a similar structure to the core module.
  - lib: Support "library" code used by any part of OpenNMS, which can
    be a standalone package.  The lib directory is not built by
    default, but instead deployed to the maven repository as they are
    updated as if they were individual projects.  Examples include the
    service-registration framework (DNS-SD advertising), our version
    of JoeSNMP, and the SNMP strategies.
  - assemblies: Assemblies in maven describe how all of these various
    components get packaged up together.  The plan is to make multiple
    assemblies for a minimal system, full install, and so on so you
    can choose how much OpenNMS you want when building from source.
    Having multiple assemblies will also make it easier to run just
    a portion of OpenNMS for development and testing.

- Trunk: Provisiond

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

- Trunk: RANCID

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

- Trunk: DNS Provisioning Adapter

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

- Trunk: UI Enhancements

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

- Trunk: Event Parameter Name Extraction

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

  http://bugzilla.opennms.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3061

About the Inventory Scanner
---------------------------

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

  Inventory Scanning is a protocol agnostic daemon tasked with
  collecting inventory and asset information from hosts through
  whichever means available to it through the coded scanners.  At
  the present point in time only a WMI scanner exists but I plan
  on trying to get someone "onboard" to write a SNMP scanner and I
  plan on writing a telnet/ssh-based scanner that works similar to
  Expect.

  Inventory Scanning saves inventory information in three layers:
  category, asset, property.

  - Categories are high level classifications of assets.  For example
    there may be a "Network Adapters" category. Categories are defined
    in the configuration and are not driven from host-based data.
  - Assets are items of interest from hosts.  Examples of assets would
    be "Broadcom 100MB Network Adapter."
  - Properties are the individual components of information for a
    given asset.  To continue our previous example you would have a
    manufacturer, serial number and assorted configuration information.

  Categories are largerly going to be used for grouping and organization
  in the web representation of inventory information.  All assets and
  properties will be idenfitied with a source, whether they're active
  and an effective date.  During the process of scanning the scanner
  will collect all configured information from the host and pass that
  information to a persister which will go through the process of
  comparing the scanned asset information to the most effective version
  of the hosts configuration.  It will add new properties and assets as
  they appear and remove (by setting the property or asset as deleted)
  any assets in the effective configuration set that are not in the
  scanned collection and were defined by that scanner source.

  This last part is important: whatever is scanned and saved will have
  a history.  When that history changes a UEI will be emitted for
  interested parties, potentially for notification.  But the tracking
  of the source is important since now you can have multiple protocols
  maintaining asset information on a single host in addition to
  providing the user with limitless ability to manually add custom
  asset information.

  Despite the fact that it can keep a history of inventory information
  in the database and the UI will have the ability to browse history
  and the user will have the ability to be notified on configuration
  change events this is not intended to be an enterprise grade
  replacement for other CMDB tools or inventory tools.  It will not
  have the ability to send configuration changes to hosts, and at
  least in my incarnation no ability to differential comparisons
  between hosts or versions.  Although this could be added on by
  some enterprising member of [The OpenNMS Group] or the community
  if someone decided this was a feature they desired.

Very cool stuff, Matt!

Upcoming Events
---------------

(Note: April training has been pushed back to May.)

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

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

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

For more information on training, go to:
  http://www.opennms.com/training.html

For more information on the conference, see:
  http://www.opennms.org/index.php/OpenNMSUCE2009

For more information on Dev-Jam, see:
  http://www.opennms.org/index.php/Dev-Jam_2009

That's It!
----------

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


-- 
Benjamin Reed
The OpenNMS Group
http://www.opennms.org/

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