Wow. Okay, sorry for not updating this sooner, but Norway was pretty fantastic and I 1) didn’t have time and 2) had too much to say (imagine that). I traveled to Oslo specifically to meet up with Alexander Hoogerhuis.

Alex has been part of OpenNMS since 2003 (or at least that was the date of his first wishlist purchase). He runs a consulting business out of Bergen, Norway, and uses OpenNMS to help his customers manage their networks. I met him in person back in October of 2006, but before that we missed each other from a number of locations around the world – almost always Alex’s fault – so we actually assumed that since we only knew him through e-mail and IRC he must be a ‘bot and not a real person (grin). His nick, _snd, thus was an obvious choice for the #opennms channel robot, _sndbot.

I asked Alex what he did for a living and he replied that he was one part plumber, one part psychiatrist. When I ask for more detail, he explained further: he goes into large accounts and helps them streamline their networking equipment and servers, sometimes purchasing new servers but often decommissioning old ones. The psychology bit involves getting people to accept change in order to create a more manageable and a higher performing network, often using open source software.

He pointed out that he does a lot with mail services like postfix, spamassassin and amavisd, and while all of the information he uses is available on line, it is his experience with these tools that is of benefit to his clients. It is no wonder that he likes OpenNMS, since its power lends itself well to people who are used to customizing other tools like the ones he uses for mail.

Anyway, I flew into Oslo since the flights from Milan to Bergen were inconvenient and expensive, and arrived a little after 9pm. Alex puts in a lot of miles on SAS so he just hopped on a plane from Bergen, rented a nice Volvo S60, and picked me up at the airport for a scenic drive across the country.

But first we had to stop by his hosting provider to pick up a box he was shipping to Singapore. It is in the same building that serves as one of the two peer points for Internet traffic into Norway.

We then headed north to Eidfjord. It didn’t get to what I would call “dark” until after midnight, and I’m not sure it ever got really dark, but as we were crossing the highlands it did start to sleet and snow (the Norwegians have 20+ words for snow) and the clouds definitely blocked out was little light there was.

Eidfjord was reached about 3am, and Alex had picked out a couple of rooms especially for my visit. He told me to look out of the window as soon as I got up, and with that we said goodnight.

I looked out before I went to bed and could make out some cliffs and water, but I was totally unprepared for what I saw the next morning. He called my room at 9am and told me to be sure to put on some clothes before I opened the blinds. This is what I saw:

The cruise ship Aida from Germany had put in overnight. Alex actually wasn’t expecting this, and had forgotten to cover up before going to the window. So basically the people on the ship got a “scenic” introduction to Norway.

After breakfast we hopped back in the car for the rest of the journey to Bergen.

It’s been a busy yet fun week in OpenNMS-land. We got 1.5.91 out the door, one of our old clients is doing really well with their on-line business, and we signed up a record number of new ones.

So now David and I are off to Europe for two weeks. Ah, the jet-setting life of an open source maintainer: first class all the way.

Not. (grin)

There are two ways to increase the money you make in a business: sell more or spend less. We’ve always taken the “spend less” bit to heart, so when we decided to attend the TM Forum’s conference in Nice, France, we decided to maximize the value of the plane ticket to Europe by adding on a week of seminars. Travel within Europe is pretty inexpensive, even in US dollars, so it was just an incremental cost to do this.

It will be a lot of coach-class air travel and sharing hotel rooms (apparently in Europe if two men share a hotel room it means they are gay – we’re not gay [not that there’s anything wrong with that], just cheap).

The “first class” part will be seeing many old friends and making new ones. It was only through the OpenNMS community that we were able to get this thing together in first place, and it is due to their kind nature that we’ll be able to have a really fun trip.

The first stop will be Lyndhurst, Hampshire, England. My friend Martin is picking us up at Heathrow and driving us down (train service from LHR sucks – I wish American still flew into Gatwick). The weather looks grand, and we’re getting a bunch of people together at my favorite pub in the whole country.

My plan is to keep the blog updated as much as possible, but time and Internet availability may limit that to some degree. If you’re coming to one of our seminars, hope to see you then.

Since we at OpenNMS don’t put any “phone home” code in our software, it is sometimes hard to tell who uses it and even if they like it. So when I travel I like to meet up with any users in the area (OpenNMS users are always incredibly intelligent, stunningly attractive and possessing a rapier-like wit). With both archon~ and derrick from the IRC channel in the Austin area, as well as Coté, I decided to try and set up a brunch in Austin before I had to head for San Antonio.

The first goal was to determine a place. It was up in the air as late as yesterday afternoon, when a chance meeting provided both a suggestion and an interesting conversation.

When I was on the barcampESM monitoring panel, I noticed that a woman had arrived and was busily snapping pictures. This was odd enough, since, to begin with, there were more cameras there than at a Britney Spears court appearance, and the fact that she was, well, a she, made her stand out. She left before I could find out who she was (and I was curious as to where those pictures were going to end up) but later when I was drinking the new Shiner Black Lager (yum), she returned and I was able to introduce myself.

Her name is Michelle Greer, and she’s involved in Geek Austin which is how she knows whurley and why she was there taking pictures. Geek Austin seems to be similar to Triangle InterNetWorkers in my area. She seems to know Austin pretty well, and she recommended Z Tejas as a nice place for lunch. It was a couple of blocks west of where the barcamp was held, so based on her recommendation and the fact that I could find it I decided to hold the OpenNMS Austin Brunch there.

Frank Sheiness (~archon from the #opennms IRC channel) and Chris Bowman were in, and I invited Coté as well, but I had the feeling that he had probably reached his limit of “Tarus Time” for the weekend. Derrick from IRC was going to show up, but he had some delayed and cancelled flights coming back from Florida and didn’t make it home until well after midnight.

Me, Chris and Frank at Z Tejas

I got to learn a lot more about Frank and Chris’s company, Korcett. They provide broadband services to apartment complexes, and they chose OpenNMS as their management tool.

I asked them how many devices they were monitoring, and the answer was less than 50. This surprised me, since the learning curve for OpenNMS is rather steep, and usually people with smaller networks don’t have or take the time to learn it. So I had to ask “Why OpenNMS?”.

There was the usual reason of scalability. The network is small now but they hope it will be growing rapidly, and it is easier to get things right at this stage than to try and fit it in later. But they also said that of all the solutions they looked at (and they looked at all of them), OpenNMS was the most “open”. It wasn’t in the sense that OpenNMS is truly free and open source, but that OpenNMS doesn’t force you into a particular way of management. It enabled them to configure the system to manage their network the way they wanted to, and not the way some vendor thought they should.

It warmed my heart.

I travel too much. I missed the snow back home, I miss my wife, and I’m now in yet another hotel room. But it’s meetings like today that make it all worthwhile.