Author: tarus

Expansion

Posted on by tarus

Things are really rolling at OpenNMS, and we’re only a few weeks into the year.

I am happy to announce that we have officially opened a regional office in Marietta, Georgia.

The hope is to leverage the talent in the area for some of the positions we have available and to provide an alternative for people who don’t want to relocate to North Carolina.

Also, we are renting out space in that office for co-working, so if you are in the area and would like a cool environment in which to work, drop me a note.

Sweden

Posted on by tarus

On February 2nd I found myself with great seats to a world championship sporting event. No, it wasn’t the Super Bowl, but for the details, read on.

When I was last in Europe, not only did I spend some time in London, I also got to spend some time in Sweden. We are doing a lot of work there (more details soon) and I expect to be visiting a lot, but this was my first trip. It was pretty cool.

We are seeing a lot of interest in OpenNMS from Nordic countries. Things are booming there while the rest of Europe struggles – so much so that The Economist ran a special report on it. I’ve been to Norway a couple of times and Denmark once, and I’ll be in Finland later in the year so it was nice to get the set with this vist to Sweden.

I had to rent a car to get where I was going, so I walked up to the Avis counter and asked for a Swedish car, seeing as how I’m in Sweden ‘n all. I had checked the Volvo S60 box when I ordered, so I was ready to tackle this country in all its Scandinavian glory (I stopped short of putting ABBA in my music collection).

They rented me a Peugeot. A Peugeot 508.

Not only was it a French car, it was a diesel hybrid French car. When I first got into biodiesel I thought a diesel hybrid would be a great idea. When diesel cars idle they don’t use much fuel, so a hybrid wouldn’t need to always turn off the engine in order to save fuel when the electric motor was running. But it was pointed out to me that diesel’s peak power is at low RPMs, just like with an electric motor, and it was questionable whether they would benefit each other. Considering the extra weight, cost and the production of rare earth metals that goes into an electric hybrid, it probably won’t be a great idea either for the car or for the environment.

The 508 was nicely equipped and comfortable, but it had the worst transmission of any car, bar none, that I have driven. I should have known something was up when the lady at the Avis counter asked “can you drive an automatic?”

Well, I thought I could. I have driven a Prius so I wasn’t thrown by the little shifter thingie that only had two directions, forward and back. When I finally got moving I thought something must be wrong, since every shift felt like the car momentarily stopped, throwing me toward the windshield and then slamming me back as it shot forward.

It had six speeds.

In all fairness, it did have a manual mode and paddle shifters, so maybe it was supposed to be driven like a manual car. Who knows.

Sweden was not at all what I expected. I have been to Norway a couple of times and I expected more of the same, sort of like one might expect Arizona and New Mexico to be two sides of the same coin. However, this part of Sweden was very flat. So flat that there were huge windmills (the make energy kind and not the Don Quixote kind) everywhere. It was kinda cool.

I arrived on a Saturday so the client had arranged for a group of us to attend a game of “Bandy” while I was in Sweden. When she sent me the URL, the website was in Swedish and I just assumed that it was hockey. Turns out I was wrong.

She managed to score tickets, on the ice, not only to Bandy but to the Bandy 2013 World Championship game between Russia and Sweden.

When we arrived, we entered the area and went to a “members only” type restaurant on the second floor that looked out over the ice. The place had a bar and a buffet, and we had a table right over one of the goals. It was packed, but we got four seats next to the window.

The first thing that made me think “this ain’t hockey” was the rink – it was huge. We’re talking soccer field huge, which is appropriate since I figured out later that Bandy seems to be more “soccer on ice” than hockey. While we ate, the teams came out to warm up and that’s when I noticed another major difference. Instead of a flat puck Bandy is played with a pink plastic ball. The ball is smaller than a baseball but bigger than a golf ball, and part of the game is to get it in the air.

The sticks are also different. They are much more curved, and the goals are much larger than in hockey. They are taller and wider, with a height about that of a man. The goalie, by the way, has two large, round padded gloves but no stick.

We finished eating before the game started. The place had filled up as we made our way to our seats in the front row near center ice. When the game started I tried to understand how it was played. This is where the soccer analogy came into play. There was no icing, no body checks, and no plastic wall protecting the fans from the ball (although that really didn’t matter). It was a physical game nonetheless, and fast. Like soccer, it consisted of two 45 minute halves and the clock never stopped – they simply added time as needed for penalties and other issues.

They did have penalties and a penalty box like hockey, although the times were pretty severe. Of the four penalties I remember, one was for 5 minutes but the others were for 10 minutes each. When a team was playing light (a “power play” in hockey”), the penalty did not end when the other teamed scored.

Speaking of scoring, Russia pretty much dominated. Their first two points came after the Bandy equivalent of a corner kick: The Swedes would all line up in front of the goal while one Russian player passed in the ball from a corner. Then three or four Swedes would shoot out and try to break up the play before they could score.

They didn’t do so well on the first two.

At halftime it was 2-1 Russia, and in the second half Russia scored its first “real” (non-corner kick) goal to make it 3-1, but the Swedes managed to score again late in the game to make it 3-2. Unfortunately, Russia scored another corner kick thingie with only 10 or so minutes left, and even though Sweden scored again they couldn’t pull off the tie in time.

I say “10 minutes or so” since you couldn’t really tell when the game was going to end. Just before the 45 minute mark in the second half, a referee took a huge fall and wasn’t getting up. I didn’t see him get hit (that did happen a couple of times throughout the game) but he must of hit the ice hard because as they helped him off the ice you could tell that his legs weren’t quite working (not that they were broken but that it was having trouble keeping them under him). We ended up waiting about ten minutes for them to find a replacement and get him suited up, which I thought was a little weird for such an important game. Most soccer games have a alternate referee dressed and ready to go, and since this game is much faster than soccer I would assume refs get hurt more frequently in Bandy.

I really enjoyed myself. While the Russians would cheer “Ruuus-See-Ah Ruuus-See-Ah” the Swedes would shout something like “Ya Ya Men-sah, Fah Tosh Bor-ah” and I struggled to learn it. I was sad to see the Swedes lose.

Anyway, I’ve chalked this one up under my “weird international sports” along with Australian Rules Football and perhaps I can see another game some other time, as I look forward to going back.

Airplanes

Posted on by tarus

I travel a lot by air, and while I can tell you almost immediately what type of plane I am in from the inside, I have trouble identifying most planes from the outside. There are some notable exceptions like the Concorde or the Boeing 747 (my favorite plane) and quite often my confusion is due to a poor sense of scale: unless I see a Boeing 737 parked next to a Boeing 767 I can have trouble telling them apart.

I brought this up with Alex Hoogerhuis when we met up in London, and he graciously spent about an hour explaining key points to look for when trying to identify a plane. The following is what I remember of that conversation. Anything I get right is due to Alex and anything wrong is totally my fault. If I use words like “tail” to mean both the rear of the plane and the bit that sticks up in back, don’t take it personally.

Also, I am not ready to explore the various versions of each aircraft. For example, the 737 comes in a number of models, often identified by numbers such as “-200” or “-300”. So while I plan to tell you what I know about identifying a 737, I won’t get into the differences between a 737-300 or the rare 737-600. Alex could hold forth on such things.

Finally, I stole all of the pictures. If you click on one it will take you to the site where I found it. My thanks to the creators (and just let me know if you’d rather I didn’t use it if you own it).

The Boeing 737



Probably the most common narrow-body commercial jetliner in use today, if you have flown at all (at least in the US) you have likely flown in a 737. For example, the entire Southwest fleet is made up of 737 aircraft. It is called a “narrow body” jet because it seats a maximum of six people in a row, but I like to differentiate narrow body from wide body by the number of aisles: narrow body planes just have the one (note that all my notes about aisles and seats refer to the main cabin).

Being so common, I am often thrown by the many differences between the models. When I used to fly Southwest, I liked the model where the first exit row was missing a seat. I would aim for the window seat in the second exit row so I could stretch out my legs where the missing seat would be, but most models have a full set of six seats in each exit row. So how can I tell a 737 without peaking inside?

Alex told me to look at the tail. Almost all commercial jets have a tail that rises at an angle off of the top of the fuselage. The 737 is different: there is a small triangle in front of the main tail, so there is almost a little “fin” in front of the tail proper. Apparently no other aircraft (or at least common, commercial aircraft) do this, and it does make it easy to spot one in the wild, no matter the model (Note: when I wrote this I didn’t have Internet access and it looks like some very early models didn’t have the little fin bit, but all modern ones do seem to have it)

The MD-80



I am putting this plane next because I fly American Airlines and, unless I am going to Miami, I will be in a McDonnell-Douglas 80 (or Super 80 [S80] as American calls them) if I am staying within the US. I have spent several months of my life inside these things, so I am a bit nostalgic about them. That, and the fact that this was the first jet that Wilbur and Orville Wright flew just adds to the historic nature of the flight.

Okay, yes, these bad boys are old, so old that I swear one I flew in was powered by coal, but they have safely gotten me out and back many times. They are narrower than a 737 and the main cabin setup is two seats on the left and three on the right (still with the single aisle).

These are easy to pick out because they are roughly the size of a 737 but the engines are mounted in the rear of the plane near the tail. This is something to think about when picking seats as the rear of the plane can get quite loud.

The Boeing 767



If I am not in any of the above two planes, I am flying from Raleigh/Durham (RDU) to Heathrow, London (LHR), on a Boeing 767 (or Dalles/Ft. Worth [DFW] to Frankfurt [FRA] on a 767). This is a wide body jet with a seat arrangement of 2-3-2: two seats near the windows and two aisles with three seats between them. It has the same general proportions as a 737 so I often have trouble telling them apart at a distance. However, the 767 lacks the little lead in fin of the 737 tail and the fuselage comes to a point at the end that is a perfect cone. Thus, if you are looking at a big plane and the tail ends in a cone, you’re probably looking at a 767.

The Boeing 757



Every so often I end up in a 757. This is a plane about the length of a 767 but it is a narrow body aircraft with a similar seating arrangement to a 737 (3-3 with single aisle in the main cabin). I asked Alex how to tell the difference between it and a 767 since they are roughly the same length, and he pointed out that the cockpit windows on a 757 are lower than the windows in the main cabin. Also, he said to imagine a person standing on top of the line of windows along the side (he didn’t say this was a possible place to stand, just to imagine it). If a person could fit between the top of the plane and the top of those windows, you were looking at a wide body jet. If not, narrow body (since windows are pretty much the same size on any commercial jet except for the 787 Dreamliner which are larger).

The Boeing 747



This is my favorite plane of all time. I think it is beautiful and I love flying in it. Well, I love flying in it as long as I am not in the main cabin, which is has a whopping 3-5-3 seat configuration that makes each row hold almost twice as many people as in a 737. If I have to sit in the back I aim to be way back. When the fuselage starts to taper in the back, they can’t fit as many seats in, so the “window” seats after extra space between them and the actual window. After takeoff you can move all of your crap over there for easy access while having okay legroom.

But my favorite place to sit is in the upper deck in business class with lay-flat seats. It’s like having your own private little room, complete with separate galley and lavatory. With it’s truncated upper deck, huge size and four engines (all planes discussed up until now are two engine craft) it is easy to spot. It is still the best thing to fly over the ocean in my opinion, with the possible exception of first class in …

The Boeing 777



The “triple seven” was aimed to be a replacement for the aging 747. American used to fly one on the RDU to LHR route and I loved the modern seats and in-seat entertainment, even in coach. But I got to fly in First Class in one once from Chicago to Narita and it was awesome. You get your own little pod-thingie that can turn into a completely flat bed and even sports a guest chair if you want to sit and talk with someone across a table. I used points to get my wife and I on this flight, and even though we were next to each other in the middle section (the seating in first is 1-2-1, versus 2-5-2 in the main cabin) the “pods” were so wide we’d have to stretch to touch hands.

But how do you tell this big plane from other big planes? Look at the tail end of the aircraft. While the 757 and the 767 have cones, the 777 has a long, flat vertical paddle – almost as if it were a fish that lost its tail fin. Plus, its two engines are freakin’ huge.

The Boeing 787



I have yet to fly on this plane, and with the current de-bugging going on it may be a while before I do. This is a great example where the higher number does not mean a bigger plane (the 737 is bigger than the older 727, but while the 757 is smaller than the 767, both are smaller than the 747). It was built to be extremely fuel efficient, very quiet and with a long range. With exceptions for things like luggage, it costs about as much to fly a plane half full as it does full, so airlines want full flights (and they are succeeding, if my recent travel is any indication) hence smaller planes, and more fuel efficiency translates directly to the bottom line.

I have seen it, however, in FRA. It looks small but it is slightly larger than the 767 but smaller than the 777, and it has larger than normal windows. I won’t worry about looking for other clues until they get more prevalent.

Okay, that about covers the Boeing line up (there is a 717 that I flew intra-island in Hawaii) but there is that *other* plane manufacturer over in Yurrip known as Airbus.

The A319, A320 and A321



Since air flight distances intra-Europe tend to be shorter than in the US, Airbus has three planes that are used to serve most of that traffic, the A319, A320 and A321. Alex showed me this neat little picture where you can see that the main difference is length.

If I am looking at a narrow body jet that doesn’t have the 737’s distinctive tail but still has two wing mounted engines, I assume it is an Airbus. If it has one exit row window over the wing, it’s an A319. If it has two exit row windows over the wings, it’s an A320, and two exit row windows positioned in front and behind the wings it’s an A321. Alex told me that each pair of exits accommodates 50 passengers, so you can count the exit windows and doors and know the approximate capacity of the plane.

The A340



This is a cool plane. It is a wide body jet with four engines, but they look tiny, almost cute. If I see a plane with four wing mounted engines that isn’t a 747, I just assume it is an A340. I have flown on these a couple of times, but it is rare. Once was on a British Airways flight in business class, and the business class seats are arranged head to tail (i.e. the seats near the window face backward so that your shoulders are near the feet of the guy next to you, although a partition keeps that from being awkward). Besides being the safest way to sit in case of a crash, it is almost like having a little room if you are next to the window and the partition is up, and it is my favorite way to fly outside of first class on a 747 or a 777.

The A330



This is where my memory fails. This plane is smaller than the A340 but bigger than the first three I mentioned. Perhaps Alex will chime in and update this for me.

The A380



This bad boy is hard to miss. Two rows that run the complete length of the plane, this is a monster, capable of holding 853 people in one flight. As a long haul plane with lots of capacity, I first saw them in Emirates livery at LHR, although there is one that flies into San Francisco for Lufthansa every day. I have yet to fly on one but with a new Australia to DFW route that skips LAX, I’ll be sure to try it the next time I have to head down under.

There are other planes out there. I’m old enough to remember the DC-10, with its three engines including the dodgy one in the upright stabilizer. I see one at RDU flying for FedEx, but I’m told that’s a DC-11. There’s the L1011 (another plane I’m old enough to have flown in) which has an engine mounted on the top of the fuselage in the rear but it exhausts out the tail of the plane. And I did my time on 727s as well as a slew of smaller aircraft.

By using Alex’s cheat notes, the last time I was taxied around LHR I was able to feel confident about my identification of the planes (including the pair of A380s side by side at the Qantas terminal – yowsa). I saw a slew of 747s and 777, plus a large number of A340s and other craft, including what I assume is a retired Concorde parked off to one side. I did see a strange one though – a passenger jet with four small engines but the wing was mounted high – I want to say it was above the cabin windows.

But then again, maybe not. Alex would know.

Super Bowl

Posted on by tarus

I was happy to be traveling during the Super Bowl this year. I’m a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Not only was I born in Pittsburgh (don’t bother trying it for my “security” question – I always lie on those), Terry Bradshaw led the Steelers to their first win in Super Bowl 9, which was also my 9th birthday, so I’ve always felt a certain connection with the game.

As everyone, at least in the US, is aware, the Steelers are the greatest dynasty to ever play the game. No one else has ever won six championships and only Dallas has been in the big game as many times (eight).

However, as I am Steelers fan, I harbor a certain distaste for the Baltimore Ravens. Thus I found myself in a weird situation this year. While I like the San Francisco 49ers and even rooted for them when I lived in the area, San Francisco has won five Super Bowls. If they won this year, then they would tie my team.

This could not be allowed to happen.

So found myself pulling for the Ravens to win, and for once they didn’t disappoint. No, what I was focused on during Sunday was not the game or the commercials, but found myself wondering how well the Papa Johns Pizza network was holding up.

The Super Bowl is to Papa Johns what Mother’s Day is to florists. Even though it is a Sunday, almost every employee in the company works and they move a lot of pie. In the past there have been some network hiccups on Super Bowl Sunday, but now so much of their business is booked online that the smallest outage could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Last week I got a nice note from Chris Rodman, the OpenNMS head honcho at Papa Johns:

I’m sitting in a meeting with our call center right now. There is this massive spreadsheet/chart printed up a piece of paper that was printed in 10pt font from a plotter! It outlines EVERY imaginable scenario that could go bad on Super Bowl Sunday from a meteor hitting our data center to a Map Quest outage. And there is a column on this sheet that says how will we know there is an issue. And on almost every single row in that column it says the word “OpenNMS”.

Thus, before I even looked up who won the game, I sent a note to Chris asking how well their day went. His reply:

Purred like a kitten…. #1 day in sales!!!!

OpenNMS did not miss a beat…..as usual! Nothing, nada. No additional load or headaches on the system. It was a champ all day!

The only reason I posted this is that, even today, I am often asked if “real” companies use open source. Here is a concrete example of a company that uses open source in general (and OpenNMS in particular) to secure a multi-billion dollar business. And it “just works”. If you are spending tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in software licenses you really should ask yourself if it is worth it, and explore the available open source options. You’ll be glad you did.

♫ When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie … ♫

London Training

Posted on by tarus

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching an OpenNMS course in London.

We’ve been doing some work with BT (British Telecom) and part of that involved training. The hardest part in doing training outside of our main office is finding a place that also has computers we can use. It dawned on me that Red Hat has a London office, so I sent a few e-mails and they were gracious enough to loan us both a conference room and a mobile classroom equipped with nice laptops.

I think I need to make it a tradition to visit as many Red Hat offices as I can (grin).

This one was in a building that used to house Special Operations:

The office is on Baker Street (yes, that Baker Street) which is in Mayfair, a very posh section of London. It’s home to Selfridges on Oxford Street, a Harrods-like huge department store, as well as a slew of expensive cars: Bentleys, Rolls, Aston Martins as well as Ferrari’s and Mercedes.

Not that I had too much time to spend looking at the sights. I was there to teach a class and I am in the middle of totally redesigning it, so my first couple of nights were spent working on slides. On Thursday, however, my friend Jonathan Sartin (OGP) had invited me to see a presentation on “The Universe Within” at the Royal Institute by professor Neil Shubin.

We got there a bit early, so I grabbed a local ale and we waited for Craig Gallen (OGP) to show up from the Royal Society (a different “Royal”). The auditorium was pretty full and steeply pitched, which reminded me of some of the many colleges I attended.

Shubin is best known for finding a transitional fossil named Tiktaalik in the arctic region of Canada. A good portion of the hour long presentation was on finding it, starting with looking for fossils along the highways of Pennsylvania. As my family is originally from there, I can remember driving by these hills that were steeply cut so the road would run straight and you could see the different strata plainly. He was looking for fossils in the Devonian era (about 375 million years ago) specifically for an animal that closely resembled a lobed fish but with the flat head and neck of the later land dwelling amphibians. After several years he found it in Tiktaalik.

The talk was good, but at one point he mentioned that the Earth was actually speeding up and the days were getting shorter. This didn’t sound right to me, as I remember once in high school actually calculating the effect the Moon has on the Earth’s rotation and that it was slowing down (through its influence on tides). Furthermore, it would slow down until the rotation of the Earth (a “day”) matched the rotation of the Moon, which is a little more than 27 current days. When that happens, the Moon will spiral into the Earth, causing a few traffic jams and flight delays.

Actually, the calculations showed this was to happen in about 7 billion years, and by that time the Sun will be a Red Giant with a diameter out to about the orbit of Mars, so no worries.

Anyway, when question and answer session happened, I decided to call him on it. He pretty much corrected himself, “It *is* slowing down, the days are getting shorter … I mean longer. Did I say shorter? I meant longer” and left it at that, but Jonathan gave me points for asking a question at the Royal Institute on my first visit, and one meant to correct the speaker at that.

On the way out, I noticed that there were chargers out front for electric cars. Cool.

When I mentioned I was in London, Alex Hoogerhuis, an OpenNMS guru and current resident of Norway, decided to fly in for the day and visit with me. It was fun. We walked down the road to a pub called “The Pheasant” and had a nice meal, and afterward went to the lounge and talked about planes. He taught me the easiest ways to identify the most common commercial jets and I plan to write that up at some point.

The next morning we took a cab to Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Since he no longer has elite status I was able to get him into the BA lounge, and he was able to show me a really cool, almost hidden section of the lounge where we waited for our gates to be announced. It was a fun visit and I hope to be able to see him again soon, which will probably be at the OpenNMS Users Conference in March – the OpenNMS event of the year.

Be there. (grin)

Salesforce – A Cautionary Tale

Posted on by tarus

When OpenNMS was small, we maintained our customer lists and sales prospects in a spreadsheet. As we grew, this didn’t work out so well, so we needed some sort of CRM solution.

As open source fans, we turned to SugarCRM, but the “community” version was a little hard to maintain. Unlike OpenNMS, they didn’t bother packaging things, so upgrades were a pain, and we found the application a little wanting in other aspects. The person in charge of sales suggested Salesforce, so against my objections we tried them out.

What were my objections? Well, first, I distrust putting company sensitive information into “the cloud”. I think the regulatory structure necessary to protect consumer data is horribly lacking and I didn’t want our clients, potential clients, revenues, etc. to be in someone else’s system. But that would be an issue with almost any hosted solution, so another of my objections was the price. Salesforce is designed for companies with teams of sales people – people who log in at the start of the day and log out at the end. We found out that our sales tend to be quite technical, so our sales guys are also engineers and product managers. The guy who is primarily concerned with sales probably doesn’t log into Salesforce every day, and I log into my account seven or eight times a month – tops.

But I am also a pragmatist. As someone running a company that survives by being profitable, I have to be. So when Salesforce seemed to be the best option, we went ahead and signed up. Other than the price and some small security concerns (I think Salesforce makes an honest effort to protect client data) I was satisfied. It’s just like when one of my guys wants a MacBook – I am moving away from Apple gear but I am not going to impact their productivity because of my personal bias.

A short while ago, I got an e-mail from the account manager at Salesforce:

I noticed you had signed the previous Salesforce contract. David had contacted Salesforce about adding licences, do you know if this was still the case? I ask because the discount I was going to apply for the net new discounts expire shortly.

This pissed me off for a couple of reasons. First of all, if David, the president and COO of the company, is the contact, deal with him, not me. It’s kind of like a small child running to Mom when Dad says “No”. Second, I hate (detest, despise, abhor) hard sell tactics like the “discounts expire shortly”. What? Salesforce has some extra accounts that are going to go bad, like a brown banana, if you don’t order before midnight tonight? It’s not like there are only a certain number of accounts available, and once they are gone, they are gone. I figured that ol’ Arunan was obvisouly B-team sales material.

In any case I asked David what was going on. We are growing a lot in 2013. We are formally opening the Georgia office and we plan to open three more offices by the end of the year. We’re hiring due to increased demand and that has led to the need for more account management. He was looking to add a couple of Salesforce accounts so that we could put more people into a part time sales role.

The key word being “part time”. Even the discount prices that Arunan was offering were too much for what we were getting. We figured we’d either make do with our current accounts or switch to something like SugarCRM (their hosted service is half the cost of Salesforce and it looks like their “community” version has gotten a lot better, including the upgrade process).

I wrote back to Arunan and said that we would not be getting any more licenses, and that we would probably be switching to something else before our contract expired in July. He replied:

Thanks Tarus for the note. Please make sure to call 415-901-8457 to log your cancellation notice so they can turn off the auto-renew on your contract.

Dave, it was a pleasure speaking with you the other day, and until the summer I will continue to be the Account Manager, so please do not hesitate to call or email when you need me.

Nothing offensive there. I would have probably asked why we were switching, if just to have a data point that some sort of smaller cost plan was desired by some Salesforce customers. I didn’t think much about it. Until the next day when I got:

You don’t have to worry about calling Billing. I’ve put in the cancellation for you – the case # is xxxxxxx for your records. Your account will not renew and your licenses will delete this summer. Make sure to call back in if you want to keep them.

What? Is this some sort of sales guy lesson I missed? When a customer expresses dissatisfaction and is thinking about leaving, you shove them out the door?

The thing that most frightened me about this was that we have a lot of data in Salesforce – data I hope to migrate to the new system. While nothing in his correspondence stated it, words like “delete” jumped out, and it dawned on me that Salesforce could decide to nuke that data at any time and we would have little real recourse. Instead of helping the issue, Arunan not only insured that I would not be a customer of Salesforce come July, he instilled fear in me about a whole industry. If Salesforce decided, on a whim, to cut us off, we may have some legal recourse but in the meantime we would be screwed. Salesforce is a lot bigger than us and could probably keep us tied up for years. All just because a mediocre Account Manager wanted us off his list.

And think about it – before this exchange I would actually recommend Salesforce. Sure it was a little reserved, along the lines of “I am not super happy about them but they are the best alternative I’ve found” but it was a recommendation nonetheless.

I think it is possible to provide cloud based services in a secure fashion, but I am not sure Salesforce is one to do it. We are installing SugarCRM now, so I’ll post later with an update on how the migration went, and a more up to date understanding of Salesforce vs. Sugar.

One Hot Tomato (#noapple)

Posted on by tarus

I had started to notice that my home wi-fi performance seemed to be degrading. I use an Apple Airport Extreme and I’m not sure if it is just the new proliferation of Android and Linux devices in my house or if something else is going on, but I was seeing a lot of network drops and slow connections when wireless.

I figured I could continue on my #noapple quest and get rid of yet another Apple product if I decided to replace the router. I knew that whatever I purchased I wanted the option of loading FOSS firmware, so I did a little research and came across the DD-WRT and the Tomato projects (I’m sure there are others, these just seemed to be the most popular).

There was a pretty high profile case a few years back when it was realized that the base operating system of Linksys routers was Linux, and due to the diligence of the Software Freedom Law Center and others, device vendors using Linux had to be more transparent about it. The name of the DD-WRT project came, in part, from the Linksys WRT54G router that was the main focus of these early alternative firmware versions.

My requirements for a new router were that it had to support both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, it had to support SNMP (‘natch) and I wanted to be able to host a guest network. I live out on a farm and often I have people visit who want to access the Internet. Rather than give them the password to my network, the Extreme allowed you to create a “guest” network that had no local access but could connect to the Internet over wi-fi.

I settled on the Linksys E4200 and ordered it from Amazon. When it arrived I started playing with the stock firmware and found another feature that I quite liked: a built in UPnP server. This allows you to connect a hard drive to the router and then serve media content such as music and videos to devices that can access UPnP media servers (such as my TV and the PS3).

I didn’t like the way Linksys implemented the guest network, however. Unlike the Extreme, where it was just a separate SSID that you could leave open, this required a password, and you had to connect to a web page and authenticate first. I believe this was a feature brought in from legacy Cisco gear, but I didn’t care for it. Still, I figured that as little as that feature got used I could live with it.

No, the show stopper for me was the lack of SNMP support. For some reason modern consumer-grade routers just don’t support it. But, not to worry, I could load in an alternative firmware.

Or so I thought.

I had decided to use Shibby’s Tomato firmware since I really liked the idea of a UPnP server and I read that the one that ships with DD-WRT wasn’t very good (I’m not stating that as fact, mind you, but the limited amount of research I was able to do seemed to indicate it). I downloaded the version for the E4200 and hit a roadblock: the firmware wouldn’t install.

Turns out that I had the E4200 version 2, which uses the Maxwell chipset instead of the Broadcom chipset. None of the firmware versions I could find support that chipset, so I was stuck. I packed the router up and shipped it back to Amazon.

(sigh)

To replace it, I ordered the Asus RT-N66U. It seemed to be decent hardware and had solid alternative firmware support. I knew from my research that the default software did not support SNMP, so I immediately installed Tomato. The process was incredibly simple:

  • Download the proper firmware version from Shibby’s site
  • Put the router in “rescue mode”: first, turn it off
  • Remove the power cord
  • Press and hold the reset button (the small recessed button between the LAN port and the USB ports)
  • Replace the power cord
  • Turn on the router
  • Release the reset button once the power light slowly flashes (on 4-5 seconds, off 4-5 seconds)

At this point in time you can navigate to 192.168.1.1 and access the firmware reload screen. I set up 192.168.1.2 as a static address on my system since I read that this process can have issues if you are using a DHCP address, and then I simply uploaded the new firmware through the browser and installed it.

That was it – once the router rebooted I was able to access the Tomato webUI and it “just worked”.

The number of features are just staggering. Want to create a guest network? Just create a new SSID and associated it with a new VLAN. Need SNMP? Configures out of the box. The UPnP server was pretty easy to set up, but I had formatted the external drive as ext4 and it wouldn’t mount. I was able to ssh in to the router and look at dmesg to see that it was complaining about “extra features” so I reformatted as ext3 and it mounted just fine.

While I haven’t played with everything (such as QoS), I was really impressed with the IPv6 support. Since my ISP doesn’t support IPv6, I needed to set up an IPv4 to IPv6 tunnel. I signed up for a free account at Hurricane Electric and I was able to get IPv6 working rather quickly. However, since my public address is assigned via DHCP, any changes would cause the tunnel to break. However, Tomato comes with a built in Dynamic DNS client that talks to the Hurricane Electric site and updates the tunnel with any changes. Now that I have IPv6 working, I can configure the Juniper router in the office to allow traffic between the two networks with no need for a VPN.

Cool.

Once again I am impressed that not only is a complex open source application available for free, but that it trumps its commercial counterpart by far.

OpenNMS Hardware Specs Case Study

Posted on by tarus

Back in December I visited a client site where they had been running OpenNMS for a couple of years. The main reason was to migrate to new hardware as the old system was pretty overloaded and slow, with a load average between 6 and 10.

We replaced it with this:

Dell R420 Server

  • 2x Intel Xeon E5-2430 2.20GHz, 15M cache, 6-core processors
  • 24 GB RAM (6x 4GB 1333MHz DIMM)
  • 2x 500GB 7.2K RPM SAS 6Gbps 2.5” HDD – in RAID 1
  • 2x 100GB SATA Enterprise Value Solid State Drives 2.5” – in RAID 1
  • PERC H710 RAID controller, 512MB NV Cache
  • Intel Quad-port 1Gb Ethernet Adapter (add-on)
  • 2x onboard 1Gb Ethernet adapters

Here are the stats from today:

 09:23:56 up 30 days, 19:20,  2 users,  load average: 0.11, 0.06, 0.06

This system is monitoring 950 nodes, 4841 interfaces and 10171 services and 84738 RRD files. We put the O/S and application on the regular hard drives and /var/opennms on the SSDs. The database lives on a separate server on the same switch.

Note that we also switched from JRobin to RRDtool. While your mileage may vary, I have seen a number of installations that have benefited greatly, performance-wise, from that switch. On new installs I always set RRDtool as the default (it’s not in the main distribution because of the extra step of getting and installing the RRDtool package). The downside is there is no way to easily convert your old data.

I thought I’d share in case anyone else was looking to monitor a similar network.

If you learned something from this, or would like to learn more about OpenNMS and performance, don’t miss the 2013 OpenNMS Users Conference being held at the University of Fulda in March. We have people from six countries already registered, and I’m surprised my friends from Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK have yet to “represent”. Early bird registration ends on the 15th.

Odds and Ends

Posted on by tarus

Just a few notes that I wanted to share today.

First, OpenNMS was mentioned on Somos Libres, a website promoting free and open source software in Peru, in its “Best Free Software in 2012 According to Users” article in the “Essential for Communication Networks” category. I thought that was pretty cool.

Next, we have training scheduled later this month in London at the Red Hat offices. This is probably a one-time deal for us to be able to hold training in such a convenient location and we only have a few seats left, so if you are interested please be sure to register (if you have contacted me to reserve a seat rest assured that I have done so, but please register as well). The next training in the US will be held in April.

Finally, the OpenNMS Users Conference, sponsored by the OpenNMS Foundation, will be held in March at the University of Fulda. Early bird registration for that event ends on the 15th, so if you want to save a few euros be sure to sign up soon. This will be the place in 2013 to learn about the latest changes to OpenNMS as well as to meet many of the people behind the project.