This Week in OpenNMS: Season 1.6, Episode 2

The feedback on continuing to put this out on the announce list has been
positive, so it's time for another installment.

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

- Stable: Ticketing Updates

Jonathan Sartin worked more on the OpenNMS trouble-ticketing API,
finishing up a change to allow ticketer plugins to be able to raise
exceptions when errors occur. In addition, he resurrected work on an RT
(Request Tracker) ticketer plugin. Both will be merged to the 1.6 branch
when they're ready.

- Stable: Bug Fixes

I spent a little time this week cleaning up some bugs, mostly
exceptions, simple bugfixes, and other minor changes.

- Stable: Windows Updates

Bobby Krupczak was kind enough to lend a Win64 machine with Visual
Studio so I could get 64-bit binaries built. They are available now on
SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4141&package_id=240236
(Copy the jicmp and msvcr90 DLLs to your system directory, don't forget
to rename them to remove the -win64 bit.)

In the process of working on that, a reasonably serious bug was found in
the JICMP libraries on Windows. Windows passes around HANDLEs instead of
file descriptors for the purposes of file I/O (and socket I/O). We were
treating them as if they were normal file handles (ie, integers), which
just happened to work on Win32, not because it was correct, but because
we didn't try to access the filehandle from Java directly. :) The code
has now been cleaned up to treat socket operations on HANDLEs (well,
SOCKETs) properly on Windows, and the new DLLs in the JICMP 1.0.9 binary
release contain these changes (win32 and amd64).

Additionally, it was determined that Windows XP, at least, is pickier
about reading from raw sockets than other platforms, and requires that
at least one packet is sent out the socket before reading any in (even
though we're just listening for any ICMP packets on the raw socket, so
it shouldn't really matter). This is fixed in the jicmp.jar in the 1.0.9
distribution; until 1.6.2 comes out, it is recommended you copy this jar
over the one included in $OPENNMS_HOME/lib if you are running on Windows.

- Trunk: More Work on the New Provisioner

Donald continued implementing "detectors", the equivalent of Capsd's
protocol plugins, including a new asynchronous API which will allow us
to interact with services at a much more granular level.

Matt has proposed we use more agile development practices, and towards
that goal, he started working on a document describing the current
desired featureset of the provisioner. We've broken it up into chunks
which will then be used to do code sprints so we can do a better job of
divvying up the work. We're working on going through and cleaning up the
documentation and hopefully we'll get it into the wiki soon.

- Trunk: Refactoring Maven (Services)

Right now, one of the biggest chunks of code in our source tree is
"opennms-services". It's kind of a dumping-ground of all of the
high-level code that isn't webapp code, and it's a bit unweildy. I've
started a branch to attempt to refactor at least some of it into smaller
chunks (splitting out capsd, collectd, config, eventd, mock, notifd,
poller, threshd, trapd, xmlrpcd, and so on). Work will be ongoing, but
hopefully eventually we'll have things a bit more manageable.

- (Almost) Trunk: WMI Support

Matt Raykowski has been finishing up work on his WMI (Windows Management
Instrumentation) monitor and collector and we hope to be merging it into
trunk in the near future. There are just a few more finishing touches to
put on it, and then it will be ready for inclusion in the future 1.8
release.

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

(Or, as Tarus calls it, Git Yer Learnin' On.)

January 26th-30th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The
OpenNMS Group in London, England.

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

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

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

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

If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

Development: A Brief Interlude
------------------------------

It's time for a little aside on some of the tools we use for development.

Maven is an awesome tool, but with a large project like OpenNMS,
checking repositories and other things are actually a significant drag
on the build process. To help alleviate this (and to speed up building
and sharing artifacts on our Bamboo continuous-integration server) we
set up a Nexus proxy at the office. It worked so well, I set one up at
home too. =)

If you'd like to set up your own, I've documented what we did on the
OpenNMS wiki. Feel free to update it (and/or ask questions) if you run
into any issues.

More information on Nexus is available at http://nexus.sonatype.org/ and
you can read about setting up the maven proxy at:

  http://www.opennms.org/index.php/Setting_Up_a_Maven_Proxy

And on the subject of Bamboo, I realized I haven't yet publicly thanked
Atlassian for their generosity. They've generally been very generous to
open-source projects, offering free licenses for their tools (continuous
integration, bug tracking, etc.) OpenNMS has a very large build, and it
can take a long time to work it's way through the continuous-integration
process even with a fast machine. They were kind enough to extend our
open-source license to allow for more than the usual number of agents,
and we're now burning rubber with our entire set of classroom machines
acting as build agents. No longer do we have huge queues of waiting
builds, we get very timely Jabber notices when we break the build. Hm...
maybe that's not such a good thing after all. ;)

Anyways, thanks again to Atlassian for the license upgrade, it's working
great!

Visit http://www.atlassian.com/ for more on Bamboo.

That's It for This Week
-----------------------

That's it for now. I hope you're enjoying these updates. If you have any
questions or comments, or if you've done something cool with OpenNMS
that you'd like included, please let me know.



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

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