Community

We Have the Champions

Posted on by tarus

Almost every customer we have starts out with one person with the vision to switch from expensive proprietary software such as OpenView or Tivoli to OpenNMS. We refer to them as “internal champions” and without them OpenNMS wouldn’t exist. They are the ones who find OpenNMS, explore its power and then convince their organizations to use it.

One of those people is Eddie van Zanten.

Eddie works for the Ministry of Defense for the Netherlands. They have been using OpenNMS for many years now, and they sent a bunch of people to the US for training. When you come to training you get an OpenNMS polo shirt, but Eddie wasn’t one of them. However, the operation of OpenNMS fell to him. His coworker Dennis Waanders wrote to me:

One guy is doing the implementation of OpenNMS in our department. And he is been busy with it for over two years now. Without him OpenNMS would have died a slow death within our department. He alone is keeping OpenNMS alive within our department. At this moment some OpenNMS features are implemented and ready for monitoring and now people in our organisation do see the benefits of OpenNMS. All because of the persistence of one guy. One guy who had faith in the use of OpenNMS.

That is pretty much the definition of an internal champion.

So I sent Eddie a one of a kind OpenNMS pullover, which he is proudly wearing in the picture above. We are here because of people like him.

A Quick Post on Being Nice

Posted on by tarus

There was a nice e-mail on the opennms-install list today. The install list is our “newbie” list, as the first hurdle to jump with OpenNMS is to get it installed, and a person had posted a question about a Debian install.

The question was well worded, and while I couldn’t explain the problem the person was having with importing our GPG key to apt, I was able to quickly test a workaround on my desktop and offer it to the list.

Here is the reply we received:

I wanted to thank everyone for helping me with this issue. Obviously, I am new to this and just trying to learn. I asked a question on a different listserv (for a different monitoring software package I was testing) and all I received were snarky responses and little to no help…how discouraging! That definitely was not the case here!!!

I went with Tarus’ instructions and they worked just fine. The rest of the tutorial was spot on for me and no issues. I now have a few nodes scanned and am just loving the interface and how it feels.

I have been involved in open source for a very long time now, and I have to say that his experience with “snarky responses” is all too common. We have always made the best effort to be open and friendly to new users, since they will be the old users of the future.

But I can understand how this happens. No sooner had I read the post then someone else hijacked the thread with a “it don’t work help me plz” question.

(sigh)

I tried not to be snarky when I replied, asking the user to start a new thread by sending a new message to the list. Was it too much to point them to esr’s “How to Ask Questions” document?

I also felt the need to stress that any direct replies to me would be ignored. While this doesn’t happen with most users on the list, usually the ones that need a little more help latch on to the first person to reply and start peppering them with questions to their direct e-mail address.

I never feel right answering those, since our business model is for a large part built on providing commercial support services, so in order to ask me a direct question I want you to have a support contract. Not because I’m greedy, but because I want to be fair to the people who put food on my table.

But the list is different. Since it is shared I feel like I am answering not only the question at hand but almost all future versions of that question.

It’s really hard to balance limited time with virtually unlimited needs, but if someone politely asks a well-formed question on the list, I do my best to answer it.

Who knows, perhaps one day in the future they’ll answer a question of mine.

2013 OpenNMS Users Conference

Posted on by tarus

This was the week for the fifth annual OpenNMS Users Conference in Fulda, Germany. I had grand plans for blogging about the event, but as usual things got away from me and now I am getting started on the last day.

I spent last week teaching an OpenNMS course to ten students from a local company in North Carolina. While I love teaching people about OpenNMS, it took a lot out of me. Even for “the Mouth”, talking for 8 or 9 straight hours for days on end can be difficult.

The class ended on Friday and I had just enough time to head home, do laundry and pack before leaving for the airport on Saturday morning to head toward Fulda.

One of my tasks was to bring Ulf, the OpenNMS mascot. While I was waiting for my plane to Dallas (I hate flying through Heathrow so, yes, I went two hours in the wrong direction just so I could get a direct flight to Frankfurt) I ran into the UNC Womens Gymnastic’s team and they were kind enough to pose for a picture.

The rest of the trip to Frankfurt was pretty uneventful. At the airport I was met by Markus, who was acting as chauffeur, as well as Jeff who came in from Atlanta and Gary from Kansas City. We drove to Markus’s house where he and his wife Sandra had prepared a nice lunch. Some of the other people from the conference came by, and we had a great time chatting into the evening.

For dinner we visited a traditional German restaurant in Fulda called the Schwarzer Hahn. While we were eating I was able to ask a question about the German language. When I travel, I like to leave a tip for the housekeeping staff at my hotel. I asked them for the German word for “housekeeping” and they replied that there really wasn’t one, but I could try “zimmermädchen” or “room maid”. On Monday morning I left a note and three euros for the cleaning staff using my new found German words.

On Monday we prepared for the conference. For the last four years the conference had been organized by Nethinks, a certified OpenNMS partner with offices in Fulda, and I’ve been to Fulda on a number of other occasions (this year it was organized by the newly formed OpenNMS Foundation). When a friend of mine decided to make the four hour trip from Bayreuth just to visit me, I was able to show her around Fulda like a native.

Did I mention it was cold? I think it is kind of important to mention how cold it was – most of the time it was a few degrees below freezing – so the Fulda tour pretty much involved finding great places to eat and have coffee.

We ended up at Hochschule Fulda, the site of this year’s conference, and we got to see Christian’s Raspberry Pi controlled coffee maker. The interface is in the style of the replicator from Star Trek, and you can simply state, in German “Computer – coffee please”. It was kind of cool to see it work, but we found out that with Jeff’s accent the difference between “make a coffee” and “perform the cleaning function” are similar. (sigh)

Speaking of language issues, when I got back to my room on Monday night I found that my note and three euros were still on the desk. When I met Jeff for breakfast and told him about it, he asked to see the note, and when I showed it to him he immediately started to laugh. I had written “Zimmer Mädchen Danke” and apparently by adding the space I was not addressing the cleaning woman but instead I was asking to have a young woman (Mädchen) for my room. While I had other German speakers tell me that it would have been a stretch for someone to arrive at that conclusion, others start laughing the moment I mention adding the space. Of course, being German, some of them simply point out that three euros is not enough money and that three 50 euro notes would have been more appropriate.

(heavy sigh)

Tuesday morning I awoke to see about six inches of snow on the ground. Apparently it was bad enough in Frankfurt that they closed the airport. This did impact some of the people coming to the conference, but for those on trains it was only delays versus cancellations.

The conference officially started on Tuesday with a Basic Training Day. I tried to fit about two and half days of training into one, but even with some drastic cuts and pre-installing OpenNMS, it took ten hours to cover the OpenNMS basics. The class was cool and let me talk until 7pm, but I was really looking forward to Wednesday and my first “down day” in weeks.

Dinner was at the Havanna Bar, where we went to celebrate Jeff’s birthday. Tobi Oetiker had arrived (although a little late due to the snow) and it was nice to be able to spend some time with him. He had come up to do an RRDtool tool talk on Wednesday. After dinner I told everyone not to expect me until noon.

At 8:30 Wednesday morning my phone rings. Jeff is sick and can I come in and teach? I quickly shower, dress and head over to the school, where I proceeded to improvise eight hours of advanced OpenNMS training. I think it went well, and I only ran about 30 minutes over the allotted time, but to say I was exhausted at the end of the day would be an understatement.

I skipped the evening activities and tried to get a little rest, but soon realized that I needed a lot of rest. I felt ill, but I wasn’t sure if it was related to illness or just exhaustion. I went to sleep but woke at 5am in order to get my demo working for my “What’s New in OpenNMS” talk on Thursday morning. I literally had to build a fresh OpenNMS release since major bug fixes had been added by Ben Wednesday night, and I think the demo was well received with the exception that loading the VMWare topology database via OSGi failed (it had worked at the hotel).

I ended the talk with a Steve Jobs style “one more thing …” This is very hard to do with an open source project, since by its very nature open source software doesn’t hide anything (I was always amused by those fauxpensource companies that promised an “unveiling” of new software at various trade shows). My “one more thing” was to point out that the best new thing in OpenNMS is the OpenNMS Foundation. The creation of this independent users group means a lot to me, and I think it will insure the continued growth and success of OpenNMS.

At lunch on Thursday I heard a nice story. One of the attendees had a performance review via Skype the day before, and he was told that he had received a prestigious “innovators” award from his company. The reason was his introduction of OpenNMS to this large corporation that had been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on products from HP and BMC.

Cool.

Unfortunately, I missed the rest of Thursday. I simply could not go on. I went back to the hotel and crashed, but managed to get up in time to visit the Havanna Bar for the conference social event. We had over seventy people in the upstairs dining room, and I spent most of the night with a table of Germans and Ville, a Finn who works at Vaadin and is living in Frankfurt.

At one point the talk turned to language, and it was pointed out that there are only five words in German that end in the letters “nf”. I thought that was cool, since the German word for “five”, fünf, is one of those words. However, no one at the table could name all five, and one person found an article that stated there were only four (apparently there is a dispute).

This bothered me, since I felt it was important that there be five since fünf would be one of them, so Ville and I decided to introduce the word “pünf” to the German language, which is defined as “the feeling when one realizes they should have stopped eating 15 minutes ago”. Both of us were feeling very pünf at that moment.

Speaking of language, I think we should all adopt the German term for the mobile phone, which is “handy”. My reasoning is that the word “phone” is outdated (I rarely use the “phone” function of my handy). John Scalzi in “Old Man’s War” called them “hand terminals”. That is accurate if a little long, so we should shorten it to “handy”.

At one point in the evening I remember looking around the room at everyone laughing and talking, and thinking “I put this in motion”. Not the conference, as that was done by better people than me, but when I took over the OpenNMS project in 2002 to keep it from dying, I never thought that it would grow so much beyond what I started.

I left the event a little early, as I was still not feeling my best, and I walked back to the hotel through the light snow. I got to sleep a little after 11pm and slept in until 7:30. When I awoke I felt better than I had all week, so I am hoping it that I was just tired and that I’m not getting sick.

So far on Friday I’ve seen a couple of cool talks. Almost all of the talks in this conference are being given by OpenNMS end users. I saw one on integrating OpenNMS with Salt Stack (a Puppet/Chef-like configuration management tool) and one on the new Scale Free Topology Provider.

I hate that I missed most of the talks yesterday, but I think the organizers have done a great job with this conference and I look forward to what they come up with next year.

The only thing I would change is the weather.

OpenNMS Wins a 2012 BOSSIE Award

Posted on by tarus

I am once again humbled to see that OpenNMS has again been recognized with Infoworld’s Best of Open Source Software award.

OpenNMS is the network monitoring and management software you use if you have a lot of stuff and need something highly customizable. More flexible, more customizable, and more enterprise-ready than most of its competitors, it is also the most open source. The only downside is that it’s more difficult to install on average. However, if you need to monitor and manage everything and anything on the network, this is probably the best tool under the sun, open source or not.
— Andrew Oliver

I also think it’s cool they used Antonio’s map feature (complete with a picture of his home country of Italy) as the screenshot. I can’t wait until they get their hands on the new GUI, just in time for next year’s awards.

2012 Dev-Jam: Celebrating Community

Posted on by tarus

When I became a maintainer of the OpenNMS project over ten years ago, for several months OpenNMS consisted only of me working on a laptop in my attic. One of the things that kept me going were my connections to, at the time, a group of strangers on the OpenNMS IRC channel and on the mailing lists. They kept me going at times when I wondered if anyone really cared about this project. With their help I was able to keep the project going until it could grow, and now I am very happy that OpenNMS is so much more than just one guy.

Moving forward to 2005, the business side of OpenNMS consisted of me, David Hustace and Matt Brozowski. We thought it might be fun to get together with other members of the community in person, and thus Dev-Jam was born. I invited anyone interested to fly out to Pittsboro, NC, to spend the week hacking on OpenNMS, and five people took me up on it: Bill Ayres, Craig Gallen, DJ Gregor, Johan Edstrom and Mike Huot.

It was a great week, and we learned a lot about the best way to get a group of disparate guys together. Everyone has different sleeping schedules, so it would be nice if people could set their own hours. Also, easy access to food would be cool. Finally, lots of bandwidth doesn’t hurt.

For the next Dev-Jam, Mike suggested we hold it at the University of Minnesota. And thus we decended on Yudof Hall.

It worked out so well that we have returned there for five of the seven Dev-Jams. Outside of the first one, we did Georgia Tech one year, and while it was okay it seems that Yudof is our home.

Things have changed a lot since that first Dev-Jam (although four of the original five people came this year as well). We have more money than we had back then, so this year I rented a bus and we all went to see the Twins play baseball. We had great seats in far right field, and while I’ve always pictured us as being in far left field, they worked out well and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect.

We even got our name up on the Jumbotron.

Photo credit Mike Huot

I had a couple of spare tickets left over, so we invited along some students. Ulf made some new friends.

Photo credit Mike Huot

And that’s pretty much what it’s all about: friendship. We got a lot of code written that week, but my main goal was to increase community involvement in the project. We’ve been lucky as a business that I’ve had such a great talent pool to pull from when hiring, but I worry when I hire a lot of community members that those I’m not paying will feel left out or less inclined to contribute. I really, really want a strong independent OpenNMS Users Group, and to that end I handed out copies of Jono Bacon’s “Art of Community” in hopes it would inspire people to stay involved.

OpenNMS is a great mixing bowl for bringing people together. We had people from seven countries (Canada, France, Italy, Germany, UK, USA, Venezuela). The seven Germans sat next to the one Italian as Italy once again knocked Germany out of a major soccer tournament.

Photo credit Mike Huot

One of our oldest fans, Ronnie Counts, who has been using OpenNMS longer than I have, got to meet one of our youngest developers, Ronny Trommer, or as we call him in this context, Mini-Me.

Another German, Markus Neumann, was awarded the Order of the Green Polo for his work on the code and in building the community, especially in Germany (he’s mentoring two Google Summer of Code students).

Everyone seemed to have a great time, and I am already looking forward to next year.

Photo credit Alex Finger

2012 OpenNMS Users Conference Europe

Posted on by tarus

Schnapps is Evil.

That isn’t the only thing I learned at the fourth annual OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe (OUCE), but it was the last thing so it stuck in my mind.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After spending a great week in Montréal, I was home for around 33 hours before heading back out to the airport. Even though there is a direct flight from RDU to London, I try to avoid Heathrow whenever possible, so I flew two hours in the opposite direction to catch a flight from DFW to Frankfurt. While the flight was uneventful, I didn’t manage to sleep so you can imagine that I looked and felt my best upon arriving at 8am on Monday.

I met up with Jeff, who had flown in from Atlanta, as well as Ronny and Markus, and we headed to the OpenNMS office in Fulda.

Since it is associated with the University, we then headed to a student run place called Cafe Chaos for coffee and to catch up.

Over time a number of other OpenNMS folks joined us. Christian is working on our VMWare integration, and Dustin is one of our Google Summer of Code folks. Sven brought us a cool little plush toy representing the Planck Epoch, or the universe immediately after the Big Bang.

I’m not sure if it was to scale – those things are pretty hard to measure.

I was also introduced to Club-Mate, the official drink of European hackers. It’s an ice tea-like beverage with a high caffeine content and relatively low sugar. I needed caffeine at the time so I drank a half litre, and I can understand the origin of the drink’s tag line which is “You get used to it”.

After lunch we wandered around campus and looked at the facilities. Since Ronny teaches part time at the school, Markus’s impersonation of a young student calling out to him “Herr Trommer” in a high pitched voice became a meme for the week.

Due to a mixup in scheduling, the OUCE was scheduled the same week as a huge emergency service vehicle convention, so all of the hotels in Fulda were booked, thus we got rooms just outside of town at the Hotel Gasthof Rhönblick. It was actually quite nice for the price, and I always like to stay a place where bikers are welcome. That afternoon we checked in and then headed back to Fulda for dinner.

Monday evening we met up with Uwe from Nethinks and his bride Daniela. While the company was awesome at dinner, by this time it was getting close to 11pm and Jeff and I had been up for 34+ hours, so we called it a night.

On Tuesday the OUCE started with the first of two training days. I did a one day seminar on the basics of OpenNMS. While our formal training offerings are a little more structured and go into greater detail, this is a good introduction to the application. Roughly 90 minutes are spent on each major facet of OpenNMS: provisioning, events, service assurance and data collection. We had a little over 30 students in attendance and everyone seemed to enjoy it (I didn’t see anyone sleep or look to terribly lost).

Wednesday was the second, or advanced, training day. This was added after last year’s conference when people wanted to explore the more complex features of OpenNMS. Jeff and Ronny taught this day (to let my voice rest) and it included things like the remote poller, the trouble ticketing interface and JasperReports. We had a few more people show up to for this class since they had been there the year before, and the only complaint I heard was that it was a lot of material to cover. Even when some of the hands-on stuff is removed we are trying to squeeze a five day class into two so it can be a bit much to take in.

On Thursday the OUCE kicked off in earnest. We decided to split the two days into a standard conference agenda on Day One and then a Barcamp on Day Two.

I started the day off with a presentation on the State of OpenNMS, which included a review of the new features in OpenNMS 1.10 as well as the future direction as we build toward 2.0. I also was able to present a mockup of a new user interface based on Vaadin.

This was followed by a great presentation by Alex Finger on project management for large NMS deployments. As someone who has been creating network management solutions for 25 years I can’t stress enough the need for some formal project management structure in order to guarantee the success of such projects.

It was during this talk that I started to structure the agenda for the OpenNMS Users Conference Americas (OUCA) to be held at the end of June. While a lot of people involved with OpenNMS are technical, many tend to have more political than technical challenges to overcome, so I thought it would be cool to have a track focused on the politics of getting a solution like OpenNMS into an organization instead of just how to use it. Alex is going to give this presentation again in Minneapolis as part of that track.

The next four talks were focused on integration. Jeff and Ronny talked about integrating OpenNMS with Puppet. Markus did a very technical talk on instrumenting Java applications with JMX so that OpenNMS could be used to monitor metrics from inside the applications themselves. Michael Batz from Nethinks demonstrated how he was able to use NagViz, a tool designed to integrate with Nagios, to present data from OpenNMS in a graphical format (i.e. maps), and I closed the day with a “Stupid Data Collector Tricks” presentation that included, among other things, a detailed description of my OpenVND project where we used OpenNMS to monitor a drink machine.

After seeing how well these talks were received, I invited the presenters to repeat them for the OUCA. It kinda solidified the theme of “Integration” for the conference. Although, perhaps we’d have more people show up if we unpacked our suitcase of “happy cloud”.

At the end of my presentation we got together to plan Friday’s barcamp. Everyone got up and introduced themselves, and we took down suggestions for topics and placed them on the wall. People would then vote on the talks they most wanted to see, and the top talks would be presented.

We had a little time for a break before everyone headed to the local brewery for an evening event, and no, this is not where the Schnapps comes in. I really like the Wiesenmühle – the beer is excellent and the food is good – although I was unhappy that this wasn’t the right time of year for Dunkel.

After eating, I excused myself for a couple of hours so that I could head to the office and catch up on e-mails and phone calls. Two hours later when I went back there were some hardcore OpenNMS folks still at it, but our designator driver was able to drive everyone back to the hotel.

Friday we split the day up into two tracks. The first session found me discussing some useful Net-SNMP tricks while Ronny discussed some ideas for using OpenNMS to monitor IPMI interfaces.

The second session was combined to discuss developing the European user community. While it didn’t get a ton of votes, I felt it was important enough to warrant the slot, and considering that we went 30 minutes over the time budget, we had a lot of good discussion. I really, really want to see the development of an independent users group for conferences such as this. I have no problem with The OpenNMS Group acting as a sponsor, but this should be something for the users by the users and I am certain that our partner Nethinks, who carries the majority burden of organizing this thing every year, could use some help. This session resulted in the creation of a new opennms-europe mailing list and I’m hoping to see the discussion continue there for next year’s conference.

After lunch we had three more sessions. In the first one, Ronny talked about Christian’s VSphere integration for monitoring VMWare while Markus talked some more about JMX integration (it was a popular topic). After that I did a presentation on making OpenNMS highly available, while Jeff did a session on Drools integration. His talk went almost an hour over time (well into the afternoon break) so we shifted the last session out even more. In that one, Jeff talked about backup strategies and Michael revisited maps.

During the afternoon we said goodbye to a number of people who had trains to catch, and the overall atmosphere for the conference was very upbeat. People seem to like OpenNMS and are eager to get most out of it, which does require an investment in time and energy even if the software is free.

There was still a core group of us left after everyone else had gone, and by this time I was totally shattered. After being on the road for most of six weeks, and the last two being out of the country, I just needed to unwind.

This is where the Schnapps comes in.

We dropped our bags off at the office at went to a Cuban-themed bar for drinks. Things started off pretty simply, but I am certain I was the one who called for the first round of Schnapps. We relaxed and talked for a long while, and then the subject of dinner came up. Places were still busy, it being a Friday night as well as the other convention being in town, so we decided to head back to the Wiesenmühle for dinner.

And more beer. And more Schnapps.

I forget how much we drank that night. I remember Ronny teasing me around 10pm since that was when I wanted to be in bed, but although my memory is a bit hazy I’m certain that was a couple of hours before we actually stopped for the night. Both Ronny and Markus abstained so they could drive the rest of us back to the hotel.

I don’t really remember that ride.

I do remember getting to the hotel, saying goodbye to Ronny and then remembering, too late, that my laptop bag holding my room key was still in his car. Needing sleep, I found that the doorway to my room was comfortable enough. I then I remember sometime later being wakened by Alex who had managed to get the master key from the innkeeper to let me in my room (these locks used old school physical keys and not key cards).

The next thing I know it was 5am. I’m awake, on my bed, completely clothed, and all the lights are on in the room (I haven’t done that in decades). I set my alarm for 7am, turned off the lights and got undressed for a two hour nap before heading to the airport.

Ronny showed up Saturday morning to drive me, Alex and Ian (another attendee) to the airport. I never saw Jeff. My trip home had me going through Heathrow as I wanted to visit some friends in the UK, and I am happy to report that I managed to stay awake as Martin drove me from the airport to his home in Lyndhurst.

There, his wife Sue plied me with the restorative powers of proper English tea, and after what seemed like about two pots I was pretty much myself. On a walk around Lyndhurst I found the next company car, if I can get it with left hand drive.

Craig visited from Southampton and we had a nice dinner, and I managed my first real good night’s sleep in weeks.

On Sunday, Sue drove me back to the airport in her new Fiat 500 (what a fun little car) and I had an uneventful trip back to Raleigh (where I was happy to find two Global Entry kiosks at customs).

It was a great week, and I hope to capture some of that energy for the conference next month. We have a number of folks signed up already, and remember that the early bird special ends this week. Space is limited due to the capacity of the rooms we’ve rented from the University, so if you are thinking about coming, register soon or drop me a note so I can save you a space.

And remember, Schnapps is Evil.

Inveneo Update

Posted on by tarus

As some of you may remember, we got involved with Inveneo when they were deployed to Haiti to help that country recover from a disastrous earthquake.

I was working a support ticket from Andris Bjornson and he sent along the following update, and I ask him if I could share it.

FYI – I’m currently in Nairobi, Kenya. Last week we installed a new 1U, -48VDC server in a local telecom provider’s Kenya datacenter. The server is running ONMS to monitor a number of projects we’re deploying in Kenya, the first of which is a project we rolled out this week in Dadaab on the Somali border. Dadaab has the dubious distinction of being the largest refugee camp in the world.

Through the network we helped deploy, NGOs delivering lifesaving aid in the camps will have much improved broadband connectivity options to improve logistical communications.

Today I trained the NOC on use of OpenNMS, and several of them commented on its ease of use. I’m looking forward to see our second major OpenNMS installation grow with the network.

Thanks for your continued support…I still am really hoping to get one of my engineers out your way for OpenNMS training. We’ll have to find some time between the numerous planned deployments.

Thanks!

Andris

Conferences and the Indiana LinuxFest

Posted on by tarus

Man, I’ve been slammed lately, so let me apologize for taking two weeks to write about my trip to the Indiana LinuxFest (ILF) in Indianapolis.

I was kind of surprised when Matthew Williams, one of the main organizers of the ILF, contacted me and asked me to keynote. While I’ve been both deeply involved and committed to free and open source software for over a decade, I don’t really view myself as a spokesperson for the FOSS community as a whole. I’m just part of a small team that is using open source as a way to make a living. And while I can talk about OpenNMS for hours, it was a different experience to chat about something “keynote worthy”.

The topic I chose was an examination of how the divisions within the FOSS community actual foster innovation and improvement. I titled it “Why We All Can’t Get Along (I Why This is a Good Thing)”. I think it was well received and it was fun to think about.

The conference as a whole was a lot of fun. I have to admit that I agree with Brian Aker that the most rewarding part of most conferences is what happens outside of the presentations, and to that end I got to spend a lot of time talking with Bradley Kuhn and Brian Proffitt. That night, we were joined by Carol Smith and Daniel Klein of Google. Most people know Carol as the Summer of Code maven. Daniel works out of the Pittsburgh office and has network management as one of his responsibilities (he has written the software he uses at the moment but I’m hoping to get him interested in OpenNMS).

(Left to Right: Bradley, Brian, Carol and Daniel)

The only criticism I can level at the conference, and this applies to most new grassroots events I attend, is limit the number of tracks. I would say have one track for (at a minimum) every 100 people you expect to attend. This is confirmed people, not how many you’d like to attend or how many you hope will attend – be very honest with yourself and don’t worry about hurting the feelings of any speakers you have to exclude. Your attendees will appreciate a more streamlined conference and the speakers who are there will appreciate fuller rooms. The worst example was last year’s SELF conference that had about seven tracks, and it just got confusing.

Anyway, speaking of conferences, we have two OpenNMS User Conferences coming up this year.

The third annual OpenNMS Users Conference Europe. This will be held 26-27 May in Fulda, Germany, just outside of Frankfurt. The first day will consist of a class on OpenNMS covering the basics of installation, provisioning, event management, service assurance and data collection. The second day will be a barcamp-style day with presentations chosen by the attendees. We’ve had a large amount of interest so far and I hope it builds as we get closer to the date.

Mike Huot (OGP) suggested that we hold a conference in the US, so we’re doing something similar on 17-18 June in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This promises to be a lot of fun, since it is in advance of our annual Developer’s Conference, Dev-Jam so we should have OpenNMS contributors from all over the world for both events. If you are just starting out with OpenNMS or you have advanced questions, this will be the place to be.

Finally, let me make it clear that we welcome anyone to come to Dev-Jam for a week of OpenNMS geekery, and only the slightest bit of nudity. Held at the University of Minnesota, we take over a large “club room” in a dorm and hack on OpenNMS for the whole week. It is one of my favorite times of the year.

In other conference news, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Southeast LinuxFest, also in June, and I hope to be at OSCON this year, but they’ve been a little late announcing speakers so I’m not sure if I’ll be there or not.

Hope to see you all, in person, at some point soon.

gov.eg

Posted on by tarus

I am writing this from the Air France lounge in the Lisbon airport. In a few hours I should be back in England in preparation for our training next week. I took the time to catch up on the news.

I’ve been following the unrest in Egypt closely. While I have never visited Egypt, I have been to the Middle East a couple of times and I’ve found the people there to be some of the most friendly on the planet. And don’t get me started on the delicious food.

We have commercial customers in Egypt, including the government. I sent out the following note out to them today. I’m not sure if they will receive it, so I wanted to post it here:

Hello.

Working in open source brings together people of all nations and beliefs.

I just wanted to send to you this note that we are all wishing you safety and health during Egypt’s troubles. We sincerely hope that the issues are resolved soon and in a way that provides freedom and prosperity for all.

We are thinking of you in our prayers.