By RangerRick, on September 16th, 2007
First of all, I want to point out that OpenNMS 1.3.7 is out, and it's full of awesomeness. Big speed improvements, my SmokePing clone, and lots of other cool stuff. I finally finished up the last of the packaging updates today; 1.3.7 is now in Fink, has Debian packages, and RPMs. I also spent a lot of time updating the installation instructions (Yum, Debian) so please, try it out, and if you run into any issues, let me know, and I'll make sure the docs get fixed.
In other news, I've actually started spending some time getting Fink stuff up-to-date again. PostgreSQL has bugfix releases coming up for all supported releases, and I have some KDE updates coming as well.
In addition, I need to catch up on the KDE/Mac stuff, I'm going to start working on a new build this week.
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By RangerRick, on September 1st, 2007
So I know I've been quiet, but I've been busy as a bee, mostly with OpenNMS.
First of all, I've been spending time prepping for the 1.3.7 release, closing bugs, documenting, and writing code. 1.3.7 is ramping up to being an awesome
release.
First of all, brozow found a pretty major performance issue in the way we're scheduling and writing RRD data. It is now an order of magnitude faster to collect the data and get it queued for writing, so once again we're I/O bound. 😉
Second, we spent some time completely reworking the ICMP (ping) code, it is crazy efficient now, and the code is considerably easier to understand. No more 2-pages-of-code-to-do-a-simple-ping. Discovery is way faster, and overall ICMP handling is much improved.
That paved way to the new MultiICMP monitor, a clone of Tobi Oetiker's wonderful SmokePing tool. I wrapped that up this week, and it's happily chugging away in the new codebase.
Also, we've embedded Jetty into OpenNMS, so we no longer require Tomcat for our Web UI (although we still offer the option if you need to split things out, or already have a servlet container.) This will simplify installation immensely, to the point where you'll be able to yum/apt-get/rug install opennms, edit the discovery conf, and have a working system out of the box.
Trunk is pretty solid at this point, the only work to do really is documentation and fix a few older bugs that need to be cleaned up. Woot!
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By RangerRick, on August 6th, 2007
So DevJam officially ended Friday, and now it's time for LinuxWorld.
If you're here in San Francisco, please, stop by the .org pavilion and say "hi!" We will be showing off OpenNMS 1.3.6 and hanging out with the other über-geeks. 😉
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By RangerRick, on August 1st, 2007
So I've been having a lot of fun at my first OpenNMS DevJam. We've had a lot of fun geeking out and I've had a chance to work on some neat bits of code.
First of all, we released OpenNMS 1.3.6, which as I mentioned before, removed all of the JNI code from the build, simplifying packaging and distribution immensely.
In addition, we're now working on embedding Jetty so it won't be necessary to install a separate servlet container like Tomcat to be able to use the web interface.
While I was at it, I implemented a pet project, Bonjour service advertising -- so your OpenNMS web instance will be easily located from any Bonjour-capable web browser, like Safari or Camino.
There's also a lot of cool work going on with a Google Web Toolkit UI that's looking very promising.
I've been very impressed by the facilities provided by the University of Minnesota. The dorm rooms are much nicer than what I had back in the day, and our conference area is great -- blazing fast internet (I grabbed Solaris 10 x86 at about 2 MB/s), comfy lounge furniture, plenty of tables, a huge TV (for the Wii, of course), and a kitchen. The other campus facilities (food, etc.) have been really nice as well. I'm not sure if other schools have done similar things, but I would have killed to have this kind of stuff when I was in school. 🙂
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By RangerRick, on July 27th, 2007
As of yesterday, Brozow and I (and with the help of others) have completely exorcised the C code from the OpenNMS codebase. That is not to say that it isn't required, we still rely on C code for performing ICMP pings (java has no raw socket support), but at least it is split out into it's own package, which makes packaging much easier.
Now, instead of building umpteen different RPMs for different platforms every time we make an OpenNMS release, we can make a single .noarch RPM for all platforms -- only updating the platform-specific code when necessary, which is rarely. That code has barely changed over the years, so chances are, we won't have to do it again for a while.
Thanks to this, it is now easy to create a yum repository with this stuff, so I have gone ahead and done so:
It only contains stuff for RHEL4/CentOS4 and RHEL5/CentOS5 right now (i386 and x86_64 versions), but the intention is to expand it to all supported RPM-based platforms.
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By RangerRick, on July 25th, 2007
A few weeks ago I finally released KDE 3.5.7 to Fink unstable, as well as KOffice 1.6.3. Both seem to be pretty solid and I've not really had any reports of issues, so it's looking pretty good.
In addition, I finally updated Fink stable to include the KDE 3.5.6 release that has been in unstable for months, as it's had no major reports against it.
I'll give 3.5.7 a few more weeks to make sure there are no major issues with it, and then move it over as well.
There is also another KDE4 release pending, API freeze is coming up Any Day Now, so I will try to refresh my binaries as well with the new code if I get the chance.
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By RangerRick, on July 12th, 2007
OpenNMS 1.3.5 is now in Fink 10.4 unstable.
It's mostly a bugfix release, with a few changes to notifications and thresholding. For a general idea of what's changed, see the New and Noteworthy page at the OpenNMS wiki. For more details, see the full release notes.
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By RangerRick, on July 10th, 2007
I started seeding a new KDE/Mac snapshot last night after fighting my way through some build issues. It looks to be a pretty solid release, lots of bugfixes and fresh code. 🙂
It's been great to see the interest since going to aKademy, there are a number of folks very interested in seeing the Qt/Mac port get cleaned up and ready for the Real World™ so expect to see more in the future.
It's slow going seeding from my home network, as I need to throttle it during the day (since my wife and I both work from home) but it should pick up as things make it to other seeders, and my seeding machines out on the 'net.
As always, let me know how things go!
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By RangerRick, on July 3rd, 2007
My aKademy presentation is now available online!
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| Ogg Theora Video |
PDF Slides |
(There is also a torrent of the entire collection of talks.)
It went reasonably well once I got started, but I actually had, um, some technical difficulties.... 😉
I had forgotten to pack my DVI->VGA adaptor so that I can hook up to the projector. Someone was kind enough to lend me one, but it turns out you can't use any old adapter, you need an Apple one. Otherwise, your shiny new perfect Macbook Pro hard-locks and takes 5 minutes to fsck and start up. (GRR.)
Anyways, Stefan Teleman was nice enough to switch with me, and do his talk first. Once he was finished, I tried one more time with the DVI connector, and it crashed again, so we gave up on the VGA plug and set about trying to figure out a way to get my presentation (and demos) viewable.
Then someone in the crowd had the ingenious idea of setting my laptop on the spot for the projector camera used for oldskool transparencies, instead of hooking into the VGA cable. It was a little fuzzy, but it worked! If you watch the video you'll see near the end that the laptop is sitting with the screen laying flat on the table. (tee-hee)
Anyways, thanks to everyone who came to see my talk, I've had a good time at aKademy!
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By RangerRick, on June 29th, 2007
It's been a crazy month, and it's gonna keep getting crazier. June 11th I went to WWDC. Then, last weekend, I was in New York for the Origami USA convention. Now I'm headed out to Glasgow to speak at aKademy.
Then, in July it's off to the OpenNMS Dev-Jam, and immediately after that, LinuxWorld Expo, where we'll be in the .org pavilion.
Phew!
So anyways, if you'll be at any of those events (heh), drop me a line!
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