Month: February 2021

OpenNMS Resources

Posted on by Tarus

Getting started with OpenNMS can be a little daunting, so I thought I’d group together some of the best places to start.

When OpenNMS began 20+ years ago, the main communication channel was a group of mailing lists. For real time interaction we added an “#opennms” IRC channel on Freenode as well. As new technology came along we eagerly adopted it: hosting forums, creating a FAQ with FAQ-o-matic, building a wiki, writing blogs, etc.

The problem became that we had too many resources. Many weren’t updated and thus might host obsolete information, and it was hard for new users to find what they wanted. So a couple of years ago we decided to focus on just two main places for community information.

We adopted Discourse to serve as our “asynchronous” communication platform. Hosted at opennms.discourse.group the goal is to migrate all of our information that used to reside on sites like FAQs and wikis to be in one place. In as much as our community has a group memory, this is it, and we try to keep the information on this site as up to date as possible. While there is still some information left in places like our wiki, the goal is to move it all to Discourse and thus it is a great place to start.

I also want to call your attention to “OpenNMS on the Horizon (OOH)”. This is a weekly update of everything OpenNMS, and it is a good way to keep up with all the work going on with the platform since a lot of the changes being made aren’t immediately obvious.

While we’ve been happy with Discourse, sometimes you just want to interact with someone in real time. For that we created chat.opennms.com. This is an instance of Mattermost that we host to provide a Slack-like experience for our community. It basically replaces the IRC channel, but there is also a bridge between IRC and MM so that posts are shared between the two. I am “sortova” on Mattermost.

When you create an account on our Mattermost instance you will be added to a channel called “Town Square”. Every Mattermost instance has to have a default channel, and this is ours. Note that we use Town Square as a social channel. People will post things that may be of interest to anyone with an interest in OpenNMS, usually something humorous. As I write this there are over 1300 people who have signed up on Town Square.

For OpenNMS questions you will want to join the channel “OpenNMS Discussion”. This is the main place to interact with our community, and as long as you ask smart questions you are likely to get help with any OpenNMS issues you are facing. The second most popular channel is “OpenNMS Development” for those interested in working with the code directly. The Minion and Compass applications also have their own channels.

Another channel is “Write the Docs”. Many years ago we decided to make documentation a key part of OpenNMS development. While I have never read any software documentation that couldn’t be improved, I am pretty proud of the work the documentation team has put into ours. Which brings me to yet another source of OpenNMS information: the official documentation.

Hosted at docs.opennms.org, our documentation is managed just like our application code. It is written in AsciiDoc and published using Antora. The documentation is versioned just like our Horizon releases, but usually whenever I need to look something up I go directly to the development branch. The admin guide tends to have the most useful information, but there are guides for other aspects of OpenNMS as well.

The one downside of our docs is that they tend to be more reference guides than “how-to” articles. I am hoping to correct that in the future but in the meantime I did create a series of “OpenNMS 101” videos on YouTube.

They mirror some of our in-person training classes, and while they are getting out of date I plan to update them real soon (we are in the process of getting ready for a new release with lots of changes so I don’t want to do them and have to re-do them soon after). Unfortunately YouTube doesn’t allow you to version videos so I’m going to have to figure out how to name them.

Speaking of changes, we document almost everything that changes in OpenNMS in our Jira instance at issues.opennms.org. Every code change that gets submitted should have a corresponding Jira issue, and it is also a place where our users can open bug reports and feature requests. As you might expect, if you need to open a bug report please be as detailed as possible. The first thing we will try to do is recreate it, so having information such as the version of OpenNMS you are running, what operating system you are using and other steps to cause the problem are welcome.

If you would like us to add a feature, you can add a Feature Request, and if you want us to improve an existing feature you can add an Enhancement Request. Note that I think you have to have an account to access some of the public issues on the system. We are working to remove that requirement as we wish to be as transparent as possible, but I don’t think we’ve been able to get it to work just yet. I just attempted to visit a random issue and it did load but it was missing a lot of information that shows up when I go to that link while authenticated, such as the left menu and the Git Integration. You will need an account to open or comment on issues. There is no charge to open an account, of course.

Speaking of git, there is one last resource I need to bring up: the code. We host our code on Github, and we’ve separated out many of our projects to make it easier to manage. The main OpenNMS application is under “opennms” (naturally) but other projects such as our machine learning feature, ALEC, have their own branch.

While it was not my intent to delve into all things git on this post, I did want to point out than in the top level directory of the “opennms” project we have two scripts, makerpm.sh and makedeb.sh that you can use to easily build your own OpenNMS packages. I have a video queued up to go over this in detail, but to build RPMs all you’ll need is a base CentOS/RHEL install, and the packages “git” (of course), “expect”, “rpm-build” and “rsync”. You’ll also need a Java 8 JDK. While we run on Java 11, at the moment we don’t build using it (if you check out the latest OOH you’ll see we are working on it). Then you can run makerpm.sh and watch the magic happen. Note the first build takes a long time because you have to download all of the maven dependencies, but subsequent builds should be faster.

To summarize:

For normal community interaction, start with Discourse and use Mattermost for real time interaction.

For reference, check out our documentation and our YouTube channel.

For code issues, look toward our Jira instance and our Github repository.

OpenNMS is a powerful monitoring platform with a steep learning curve, but we are here to help. Our community is pretty welcoming and hope to see you there soon.

Open Source Contributor Agreements

Posted on by Tarus

I noticed a recent uptick in activity on Twitter about open source Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), mostly negative.

Twitter Post About CLAs

The above comment is from a friend of mine who has been involved in open source longer than I have, and whose opinions I respect. On this issue, however, I have to disagree.

This is definitely not the first time CLAs have been in the news. The first time I remember even hearing about them concerned MySQL. The MySQL CLA required a contributor to sign over ownership of any contribution to the project, which many thought was fine when they were independent, but started to raise some concerns when they were acquired by Sun and then Oracle. I think this latest resurgence is the result of Elastic deciding to change their license from an open source one to something more “open source adjacent”. This has caused a number of people take exception to this (note: link contains strong language).

As someone who doesn’t write much code, I think deciding to sign a CLA is up to the individual and may change from project to project. What I wanted to share is a story of why we at OpenNMS have a CLA and how we decided on one to adopt, in the hopes of explaining why a CLA can be a positive thing. I don’t think it will help with the frustrations some feel when a project changes the license out from under them, but I’m hoping it will shed some light on our reasons and thought processes.

OpenNMS was started in 1999 and I didn’t get involved until 2001 when I started work at Oculan, the commercial company behind the project. Oculan built a monitoring appliance based on OpenNMS, so while OpenNMS was offered under the GPLv2, the rest of their product had a proprietary license. They were able to do this because they owned 100% of the copyright to OpenNMS. In 2002 Oculan decided to no longer work on the project, and I was able to become the maintainer. Note that this didn’t mean that I “owned” the OpenNMS copyright. Oculan still owned the copyright but due to the terms of the license I (as well as anyone else) was free to make derivative works as long as those works adhered to the license. While the project owned the copyright to all the changes made since I took it over, there was no one copyright holder for the project as a whole.

This is fine, right? It’s open source and so everything is awesome.

Fast forward several years and we became aware of a company, funded by VCs out of Silicon Valley, that was using OpenNMS in violation of the license as a base on which to build a proprietary software application.

I can’t really express how powerless we felt about this. At the time there were, I think, five people working full time on OpenNMS. The other company had millions in VC money while we were adhering to our business model of “spend less than you earn”. We had almost no money for lawyers, and without the involvement of lawyers this wasn’t going to get resolved. One thing you learn is that while those of us in the open source world care a lot about licenses, the world at large does not. And since OpenNMS was backed by a for-profit company, there was no one to help us but ourselves (there are some limited options for license enforcement available to non-profit organizations).

We did decide to retain the services of a law firm, who immediately warned us how much “discovery” could cost. Discovery is the process of obtaining evidence in a possible lawsuit. This is one way a larger firm can fend off the legal challenges of a smaller firm – simply outspend them. It made use pretty anxious.

Once our law firm contacted the other company, the reply was that if they were using OpenNMS code, they were only using the Oculan code and thus we had no standing to bring a copyright lawsuit against them.

Now we knew this wasn’t true, because the main reason we knew this company was using OpenNMS was that a disgruntled previous employee told us about it. They alleged that this company had told their engineers to follow OpenNMS commits and integrate our changes into their product. But since much of the code was still part of the original Oculan code base, it made our job much more difficult.

One option we had was to get with Oculan and jointly pursue a remedy against this company. The problem was that Oculan went out of business in 2004, and it took us awhile to find out that the intellectual property had ended up Raritan. We were able to work with Raritan once we found this out, but by this time the other company also went out of business, pretty much ending the matter.

As part of our deal with Raritan, OpenNMS was able to purchase the copyright to the OpenNMS code once owned by Oculan, granting Raritan an unlimited license to continue to use the parts of the code they had in their products. It wasn’t cheap and involved both myself and my business partner using the equity in our homes to guarantee a loan to cover the purchase, but for the first time in years most of the OpenNMS copyright was held by one organization.

This process made us think long and hard about managing copyright moving forward. While we didn’t have thousands of contributors like some projects, the number of contributors we did have was non-trivial, and we had no CLA in place. The main question was: if we were going to adopt a CLA, what should it look like? I didn’t like the idea of asking for complete ownership of contributions, as OpenNMS is a platform and while someone might want to contribute, say, a monitor to OpenNMS, they shouldn’t be prevented from contributing a similar monitor to Icinga or Zabbix.

So we asked our our community, and a person named DJ Gregor suggested we adopt the Sun (now Oracle) Contributor Agreement. This agreement introduced the idea of “dual copyright”. Basically, the contributor keeps ownership of their work but grants copyright to the project as well. This was a pretty new idea at the time but seems to be common now. If you look at CLAs for, say, Microsoft and even Elastic, you’ll see similar language, although it is more likely worded as a “copyright grant” or something other than “dual copyright”.

This idea was favorable to our community, so we adopted it as the “OpenNMS Contributor Agreement” (OCA). Now the hard work began. While most of our active contributors were able to sign the OCA, what about the inactive ones? With a project as old as OpenNMS there are a number of people who had been involved in the project but due to either other interests or changing priorities they were no longer active. I remember going through all the contributions in our code base and systematically hunting down every contributor, no matter how small, and asking them to sign the OCA. They all did, which was nice, but it wasn’t an easy task. I can remember the e-mail of one contributor bounced and I finally hunted them down in Ireland via LinkedIn.

Now a lot of the focus of CLAs is around code ownership, but there is a second, often more important part. Most CLAs ask the contributor to affirm that they actually own the changes they are contributing. This may seem trivial, but I think it is important. Sure, a contributor can lie and if it turns out they contributed something they really didn’t own the project is still responsible for dealing with that code, but there are a number of studies that have shown that simply reminding someone about a moral obligation goes a long way to reinforce ethical behavior. When someone decides to sign a CLA with such a clause it will at least make them think about it and reaffirm that their work is their own. If a project doesn’t want to ask for a copyright assignment or grant, they should at least ask for something like this.

While the initial process was pretty manual, currently managing the OCAs is pretty automated. When someone makes a pull request on our Github project, it will check to see if they have signed the OCA and if not, send them to the agreement.

The fact that the copyright was under one organization came in handy when we changed the license. One of my favorite business models for open source software is paid hosting, and I often refer to WordPress as an example. WordPress is dead simple to install, but it does require that you have your own server, understand setting up a database, etc. If you don’t want to do that, you can pay WordPress a fee and they’ll host the product for you. It’s a way to stay pure open source yet generate revenue.

But what happens if you work on an open source project and a much bigger, much better funded company just takes your project and hosts it? I believe one of the issues facing Elastic was that Amazon was monetizing their work and they didn’t like it. Open source software is governed mainly by copyright law and if you don’t distribute a “copy” then copyright doesn’t apply. Many lawyers would claim that if I give you access to open source software via a website or an API then I’m not giving you a copy.

We dealt with this at OpenNMS, and as usual we asked our community for advice. Once again I think it was DJ who suggested we change our license to the Affero GPL (AGPLv3) which specifically extends the requirement to offer access to the code even if you only offer it as a hosted service. We were able to make this change easily because the copyright was held by one entity. Can you imagine if we had to track down every contributor over 15+ years? What if a contributor dies? Does a project have to deal with their estate or do they have to remove the contribution? It’s not easy. If there is no copyright assignment, a CLA should at least include detailed contact information in case the contributor needs to be reached in the future.

Finally, remember that open source is open source. Don’t like the AGPLv3? Well you are free to fork the last OpenNMS GPLv2 release and improve it from there. Don’t like what Elastic did with their license? Feel free to fork it.

You might have detected a theme here. We relied heavily on our community in making these decisions. The OpenNMS Group, as stewards of the OpenNMS Project, takes seriously the responsibilities to preserve the open source nature of OpenNMS, and I like to think that has earned us some trust. Having a CLA in place addresses some real business needs, and while I can understand people feeling betrayed at the actions of some companies, ultimately the choice is yours as to whether or not the benefits of being involved in a particular project outweigh the requirement to sign a contributor agreement.

The Server Room Show Podcast

Posted on by Tarus

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to chat with Viktor Madarasz on “The Server Room Show” podcast.

The Server Room Podcast Graphic

Viktor is an IT professional with a strong interest in open source, and we had a fun and meandering conversation covering a number of topics. As usual, I talked to much so he ended up splitting our conversation across two episodes.

You can visit his website for links to the podcast from a large variety of podcast sources, or you can listen on Youtube to part one and part two.

It was fun, and I hope to be able to chat again sometime in the future.

Note: Viktor is originally from Hungary, as was my grandfather. I tried to make getting some Túró Rudi part of my appearing on the show, but unfortunately we haven’t figured out how to get it outside of Hungary, and we all know that I’d talk about open source for free pretty much any time and any place.

Thoughts on Security and Open Source Software

Posted on by Tarus

Due to the recent supply-chain attack on Solarwinds products, I wanted to put down a few thoughts on the role of open source software and security. It is kind of a rambling post and I’ll probably lose all three of my readers by the end, but I found it interesting to think about how we got here in the first place.

I got my first computer, a TRS-80, as a Christmas present in 1978 from my parents.

Tarus and his TRS-80

As far as I know, these are the only known pictures of it, lifted from my high school yearbook.

Now, I know what you are thinking: Dude, looking that good how did you find the time off your social calendar to play with computers? Listen, if you love something, you make the time.

(grin)

Unlike today, I pretty much knew about all of the software that ran on that system. This was before “open source” (and before a lot of things) but since the most common programming language was BASIC, the main way to get software was to type in the program listing from a magazine or book. Thus it was “source available” at least, and that’s how I learned to type as well as being introduced to the “syntax error”. That cassette deck in the picture was the original way to store and retrieve programs, but if you were willing to spend about the same amount as the computer cost you could buy an external floppy drive. The very first program I bought on a floppy was from this little company called Microsoft, and it was their version of the Colossal Cave Adventure. Being Microsoft it came on a specially formatted floppy that tried to prevent access to the code or the ability to copy it.

And that was pretty much the way of the future, with huge fortunes being built on proprietary software. But still, for the most part you were aware of what was running on your particular system. You could trust the software that ran on your system as much as your could trust the company providing it.

Then along comes the Internet, the World Wide Web and browsers. At first, browsers didn’t do much dynamically. They would reach out and return static content, but then people started to want more from their browsing experience and along came Java applets, Flash and JavaScript. Now when you visit a website it can be hard to tell if you are getting tonight’s television listings or unknowingly mining Bitcoin. You are no longer in charge of the software that you run on your computer, and that can make it hard to make judgements about security.

I run a number of browsers on my computer but my default is Firefox. Firefox has a cool plugin called NoScript (and there are probably similar solutions for other browsers). NoScript is an extension that lets the user choose what JavaScript code is executed by the browser when visiting a page. A word of warning: the moment you install NoScript, you will break the Internet until you allow at least some JavaScript to run. It is rare to visit a site without JavaScript, and with NoScript I can audit what gets executed. I especially like this for visiting sensitive sites like banks or my health insurance provider.

Speaking of which, I just filed a grievance with Anthem. We recently switched health insurance companies and I noticed that when I go to the login page they are sending information to companies like Google, Microsoft (bing.com) and Facebook. Why?

Blocked JavaScript on the Anthem Website

I pretty much know the reason. Anthem didn’t build their own website, they probably hired a marketing company to do it, or at least part of it, and that’s just the way things are done, now. You send information to those sites in order to get analytics on who is visiting your site, and while I’m fine with it when I’m thinking about buying a car, I am not okay with it coming from my insurance company or my bank. There are certain laws governing such privacy, with more coming every day, and there are consequences for violating it. They are supposed to get back to me in 30 days to let me know what they are sending, and if it is personal information, even if it is just an IP Address, it could be a violation.

I bring this up in part to complain but mainly to illustrate how hard it is to be “secure” with modern software. You would think you could trust a well known insurance company to know better, but it looks like you can’t.

Which brings us back to Solarwinds.

Full disclosure: I am heavily involved in the open source network monitoring platform OpenNMS. While we don’t compete head to head with Solarwinds products (our platform is designed for people with at least a moderate amount of skill with using enterprise software while Solarwinds is more “pointy-clicky”) we have had a number of former Solarwinds users switch to our solution so we can be considered competitors in that fashion. I don’t believe we have ever lost a deal to Solarwinds, at least one in which our sales team was involved.

Now, I wouldn’t wish what happened to Solarwinds on my worst enemy, especially since the exploit impacted a large number of US Government sites and that does affect me personally. But I have to point out the irony of a company known for criticizing open source software, specifically on security, to let this happen to their product. Take this post from on of their forums. While I wasn’t able to find out if the author worked at Solarwinds or not, they compare open source to “eating from a dirty fork”.

Seriously.

But is open source really more secure? Yes, but in order to explain that I have to talk about types of security issues.

Security issues can be divided into “unintentional”, i.e. bugs, and “intentional”, someone actively trying to manipulate the software. While all software but the most simple suffers from bugs, what happened to the Solarwinds supply chain was definitely intentional.

When it comes to unintentional security issues, the main argument against open source is that since the code is available to anyone, a bad actor could exploit a security weakness and no one would know. They don’t have to tell anyone about it. There is some validity to the argument but in my experience security issues in open source code tend to be found by conscientious people who duly report them. Even with OpenNMS we have had our share of issues, and I’d like to talk about two of them.

The first comes from back in 2015, and it involved a Java serialization bug in the Apache commons library. The affected library was in use by a large number of applications, but it turns out OpenNMS was used as a reference to demonstrate the exploit. While there was nothing funny about a remote code execution vulnerability, I did find it amusing that they discovered it with OpenNMS running on Windows. Yes, you can get OpenNMS to run on Windows, but it is definitely not easy so I have to admire them for getting it to work.

I really didn’t admire them for releasing the issue without contacting us first. Sending an email to “security” at “opennms.org” gets seen by a lot of people and we take security extremely seriously. We immediately issued a work around (which was to make sure the firewall blocked the port that allowed the exploit) and implemented the upgraded library when it became available. One reason we didn’t see it previously is that most OpenNMS users tend to run it on Linux and it is just a good security practice to block all but needed ports via the firewall.

The second one is more recent. A researcher found a JEXL vulnerability in Newts, which is a time series database project we maintain. They reached out to us first, and not only did we realize that the issue was present in Newts, it was also present in OpenNMS. The development team rapidly released a fix and we did a full disclosure, giving due credit to the reporter.

In my experience that is the more common case within open source. Someone finds the issue, either through experimentation or by examining the code, they communicate it to the maintainers and it gets fixed. The issue is then communicated to the community at large. I believe that is the main reason open source is more secure than closed source.

With respect to proprietary software, it doesn’t appear that having the code hidden really helps. I was unable to find a comprehensive list of zero-day Windows exploits but there seem to be a lot of them. I don’t mean to imply that Windows is exceptionally buggy but it is a common and huge application and that complexity lends itself to bugs. Also, I’m not sure if the code is truly hidden. I’m certain that someone, somewhere, outside of Microsoft has a copy of at least some of the code. Since that code isn’t freely available, they probably have it for less than noble reasons, and one can not expect any security issues they find to be reported in order to be fixed.

There seems to be this misunderstanding that proprietary code must somehow be “better” than open source code. Trust me, in my day I’ve seen some seriously crappy code sold at high prices under the banner of proprietary enterprise software. I knew of one company that wrote up a bunch of fancy bash scripts (not that there is anything wrong with fancy bash scripts) and then distributed them encrypted. The product shipped with a compiled program that would spawn a shell, decrypt the script, execute it and then kill the shell.

Also, at OpenNMS we rely heavily on unit tests. When a feature is developed the person writing the code also creates code to “test” the feature to make sure it works. When we compile OpenNMS the tests are run to make sure the changes being made didn’t break anything that used to work. Currently we have over 8000 of these tests. I was talking to a person about this who worked for a proprietary software company and he said, “oh, we tried that, but it was too hard.”

Finally, I want to get back to that other type of security issue, the “intentional” one. To my understanding, someone was able to get access to the servers that built and distributed Solarwinds products, and they added in malware that let them compromise target networks when they upgraded their applications. Any way you look at it, it was just sloppy security, but I think the reason it went on for so long undetected is that the whole proprietary process for distributing the software was limited to so few people it was easy to miss. These kind of attacks happen in open source projects, too, they just get caught much faster.

That is the beauty of being able to see the code. You have the choice to build your own packages if you want, and you can examine code changes to your hearts content.

We host OpenNMS at Github. If you check out the code you could run something like:

git tag --list

to see a list of release tags. As I write this the latest released version of Horizon is 26.0.1. To see what changed from 26.0.0 I can run

git log --no-merges opennms-26.0.0-1 opennms-26.0.1-1

If you want, there is even a script to run a “release report” which will give you all of the Jira issues referenced between the two versions:

git-release-report opennms-26.0.0-1 opennms-26.0.1-1

While that doesn’t guarantee the lack of malicious code, it does put the control back into your hands and the hands of many others. If something did manage to slip in, I’m sure we’d catch it long before it got released to our users.

Security is not easy, and as with many hard things the burden is eased the more people who help out. In general open source software is just naturally better at this than proprietary software.

There are only a few people on this planet who have the knowledge to review every line of code on a modern computer and understand it, and that is with the most basic software installed. You have to trust someone and for my peace of mind nothing beats the open source community and the software they create.