op5 Blogs

Even though there hasn't been any posts here lately the work is very much in progress.

There has been quite a lot of people testing Ninja/Merlin all during the last couple of months and we really appreciate all feedback that we get and try to respond as quickly as we possibly can. Keep it up!

There has been changes in some areas of Ninja during this time but the previous posts still holds.

When it comes to widgets, they now have some additional functionality which makes them even more useful.

Edit
All included widgets now supports editing if enabled (by setting class 'editable') in the wrapping div. By using JavaScript it is now possible to get background (Ajax) refresh with just a few lines of code.

Example:
In the network healt widget (netw_health) a javascript resource is added in the php file
$this->js = array('/js/netw_health');

This file only contains the following code:

$(document).ready(function() {
var netw_health = new widget('netw_health', 'widget-content');
});

As you can see, it's only one line of code wrapped in the document ready event listner. It creates a new instance of the widget JavaScript class with 2 arguments:

• the widget identifier (widget name) and
  
• what CSS class in the widget that should be updated by the Ajax call.

By adding this code, a JQuery UI slider will be created to be used when editing update frequency. The element with the CSS class 'widget-content' in the example above will be updated with the interval set by the slider (default 60 sec).

It's just that simple. ;-)

More features
There are also other nifty features that has been added lately:

• Possibility to pause page refresh.
  Sometimes you don't want the page to keep refreshing. By checking the "Pause refresh" checkbox under settings you may now pause the page refresh.
• Hide Page Header.
  By checking this checkbox under settings, the page header (with the status totals widget and links) will be hidden. This is a feature that the old CGI:s had and Ninja should of course have it too.
• Paging.
  Host- and service status listings might get rather long and to make the pages load faster we now use paging. The default number of items shown is set to 100 by default but an arbitrary number of items can be used on each page. The dafault value has to be changed in config/pagination.php (the 'items_per_page' key) today but the plan is to move this to the GUI in the future.
• Improved search functionality.
  This was demonstrated at Nordic Meet On Nagios 2009 but I haven't made any posts on this yet and a more in-depth post will cover this later. The functionality of the the search result will also be enhanced even further.
• Floating table headers.
  Sometimes when viewing large data sets in tables, you loose sight of the table haders and to make it easier to see what the values in the table stand for. To amend this, we added floating table headers to make the column labels to float with the page as you scroll down.
  

There has been suggestions that we should set up a wiki to handle documentation for Ninja/Merlin and this will be launched shortly. Keep an eye on www.op5.org for updates!

Once again, thanks to everybody for contributions, suggestions, patches etc - we need your input!
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Last week I made a presentation of Ninja at the Nordic Meet On Nagios 2009 hosted by op5 in Stockholm, Sweden. The presentation received quite some attention and regarding from the number of questions afterwards, people were very interested and eager to hear about future plans and features.

The agenda for my presentation was:

• Background
• Dependencies
• Short on MVC
• The Ninja API
• Possible modifications
• Add-on integration
• Differences to todays CGI's
• Live DEMO
• Thoughts on the future (Low Hanging Fruit and such)

The presentation lasted approximately 1 hr including questions etc and was broadcasted through Bambuser. It is still available from http://nordicmeetonnagios.op5.org/ and will soon be available from youtube as well.

If you don't have the time to watch the entire presentation my slides are also available as a PDF: The Ninja project - an alternative open source Nagios GUI goes live

After the presentation, Ethan Galstad, the Founder of Nagios who was was invited as a key speaker, raised the question if we (op5) would be interested in making Ninja the default Nagios GUI. Since one of our main goals was to create the leading Open Source web frontend for Nagios, the answer was rather given.

Ethan and the community has created a fantastic and impressive piece of software that deserves a modern web GUI. It deserves attention and ideas from the large group of skilled web developers and designers out there and we strongly believe that Ninja could be the way to achieve this. Both me personally and everybody at op5 will be happy to make this contribution to the Nagios project.
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Thought I'd just share a few words on how things a moving forward with the Ninja project.

The plan is to release an alpha during the Nordic Meet On Nagios 2009 conference in Stockholm, Sweden June 3-4. We are working quite hectic these days to make the plan hold and we are confident that we will succeed albeit we're on a very tight schedule.

Currently we are working with converting some of the last big CGI's and at the same time, our interface designer is polishing the default theme. If you are interested to see some screenshots, I suggest you take a look at http://www.op5.org/community/projects/ninja where we keep some screenshots of our prototypes.

As always, we would greatly appreciate all comments and feedback.

What would You like to see in the Ninja GUI?
Give me a hint - or download the code and do it yourself :)
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As default, the Nagios CGI's relies on basic authentication. Even though this is usually sufficient from a security perspective, it has some drawbacks. One is that it isn't possible to logout unless you use some third party (Firefox) plugins/addons or simply close all browser instances. Maintaining users in htpasswd files isn't that posh either - keeping user authentication data (login, password etc) in a database, on the other hand, is. Switching to LDAP or the like isn't a walk in the park either. Other means of authentication is what we need.

Currently we use the Kohana Auth Module which is a driver based authentication module using sessions. This will provide a reasonably good authentication with salted hash passwords stored in the database. As it is driver based, we plan to extend it with LDAP support in the future. If we are lucky enough the friendly guys over at Kohana will already have done this for us when we get this far on our journey ;-)

The auth Module has support for authorization (roles) but since Nagios has it's own way of configuring who will see and do what, we will probably stick with that to make things transparent to users that are already familiar with the Nagios concept.

The current authentication implementation is possibe to configure in the config/auth.php file. It is today possible to change the default session lifetime, hash_method (defaults to sha1), salt pattern, driver, minimum username characters and maximum failed login attempts (default is false). Even though the latter directive doesn't lock down an IP or whatever at the moment, it seemed like a good idea to include support for it from start :)

As mentioned before, this is work in progress and any input is highly appreciated.
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As stated in previous posts it is possible to extend the default Ninja functionality by creating widgets. In fact, we have included some widgets as default. They are primarily used in the Tactical Overview but the plan is to make it possible to add widgets to almost any page. By using a functionality similar to iGoogle it will be possible to move the widgets around, edit settings etc. All this is currently pretty much at design stage but it looks really promising. Today we are using the widgets as hard-coded, self-contained components on a page but this should change in a not so far future.

So how do you build a widget?
First of all - consider this a draft. We are still finding our way and input is always appreciated.

A widget is instantiated using the widget helper:

widget::add('netw_health', array('index', $this->model), $this);

The helper takes care of a lot of the backend stuff like handling paths and assigning master controller variables. More on this later.

Why do we use a helper and not a controller?
Since kohana fires off some system events (like system.post_controller) every time a controller is finished, we didn't want this overhead. Also, we didn't want the widget output to be returned to browser immediately but wanted the master (calling) template to decide where to render the output. Our solution was instead to use a helper class and buffer the output using ob_start() and ob_get_contents().

The widgets has to follow some simple rules to work:
It has to be placed in a folder with the exact name as the widget.
The folder should be in widgets or - if you are developing your own - in custom_widgets
The widget class should be named like the widget name + _Widget and should extend widget_Core. If we look at the netw_health widget as an example:

class Netw_health_Widget extends widget_Core
{
    //
}

Everything is case sensitive here.

Our widget also needs a constructor:

public function __construct()
{
    parent::__construct();

    # needed to figure out path to widget
    $this->set_widget_name(__CLASS__, basename(__FILE__));
}

The constructor sets the name and path needed for the master controller to be able to render the widget correctly.

To look at our example again:
widget::add('netw_health', array('index', $this->model), $this);

The second argument to widget::add() is an array and the first element should always be the method to call. Some widgets will need access to some data to be useful and in this case we are passing a reference to the model used in the master controller.
The last argument here is the reference to the master controller so that we are able to pass the generated widget content. The master controller takes care of putting these at the appropriate place in the rendered HTML head.

Our index method:

public function index($arguments=false, $master=false)
{
    $this->master_obj = $master;
}

This first assignment is important since it is how we refer back to the master controller - without it, the widget won't be visible anywhere.

The widgets view file could be called anything (as long as it has a php extension) and to use it you call $view_path = $this->view_path('view'); with the name of the view template as an argument.

The view (template) file:
The entire widget output should be contained in a div

<div class="widget movable collapsable removable closeconfirm" id="widget-network_health">
  // widget content goes here
</div>

You should give the div an ID following the format: 'widget_'<widget_name> to make it possible to access it in a generic way using JavaScript.

To add extra css resources you assign $this->css with an array like this:
$this->css = array('/css/netw_health');. The same thing is done with needed JavaScript files using $this->js.

After writing the code that actually does something (left out here as I feel that it is somewhat out of scope for this post) there is only 2 more things to do:

require_once($view_path);
OK, so I stated earlier that you didn't have to write requires. Well even though I feel that it could be optimized, I don't feel that it's such a big deal. We could probably let the widget helper class do this but hey, we aren't finished with Ninja yet ;-)

Last thing needed is return $this->fetch(); which will do the ob_get_contents() thing and pass everything back to the calling controller.

The actual location of the widget on the rendered page, is then all up to the master controller and template - the widget should only return a view.

The netw_health widget code.
The view (template) code.

Pretty awesome, huh? :-)
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Merlin development has really kicked off. Single-server database support is in production at all our customers (all 350 or so of them), and people in the community have started using it for production use in a distributed environment.

Three people in particular have contributed awesomely to making Merlin better for distributed environments. The first to pick it up for this purpose is a guy named Russel Jennings. He's written several concise bug-reports and done tireless testing with various versions to find where some bug was introduced and which versions of the Merlin daemon work well together. A great big thanks for that, Russel!

The other person is a guy named Sean Millichamp. He's gone the extra mile and has started sending in patches for bugs he's found. So far, he's contributed with 10 patches, making him the second most prominent developer for the merlin module-daemon pair. So far, his patches hold very high standard indeed and I have great hopes that we'll see more of his excellent contributions making it into future releases.

Jean-Marc Le Fevre has also contributed some minor patches that he deserves recognition for.

Numerous other people have reported issues with Merlin and contributed to the Wiki and HOWTO's. Thank you all

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I'm clearly a workaholic when I'm fiddling with stuff I really like, and all the community interest in Merlin and Ninja lately has just made me a pure-bred hacker fanatic.

So I've implemented the state retention stuff in Merlin. Turns out that all that was really required was to make sure the status and object import works ok and is up-to-date (so I implemented an automagic way of making that happen). Then I can just read the current status from the database. I use an array sorted by object name ("host_name" for hosts and "host_name;service_description" for services) so I can use a binary search. 3000000 lookups of some randomly chosen nodes in a config with 15k hosts complete in just under 2.2 seconds. Quite impressive. Especially so when about 0.8 seconds is spent loading all the states and sorting the array in the first place.

I've also had a chance to look over the cross-host event transport stuff, which was subtly broken due to a brainfart of mine in a tertiary operation. I've tested it and it works just fine now agan.

With the changes mentioned above, I Merlin is rapidly approaching production quality in terms of its planned feature-set, so I've just released v0.5 with the hopes of attracting some more testers.

Let it rip, people, and make sure to let me know how it's going. Merlin can be downloaded from our git repositories using the following command:

  git clone git://git.op5.org/nagios/merlin.git

Cheerios for now.

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With the recent changes to the Nagios core development team, patches have been flooding in to the nagios-devel list. There's been such a flurry of improvements that I've actually had to stop working on Ninja and Merlin entirely over the past two weeks and just work on testing, adding and commenting on patches sent to the list. In view of that, I must say I'm convinced Ethan did the right thing when he extended the core dev team a bit.

However, this post is mostly about one particular patch from a guy named Jean Gabès. The patch speeds up Nagios' circular-parent-child dependency checks a *lot*. In a network 300 levels deep (root-host -> lvl1-child -> lvl2-child -> ... -> lvl300-child) where each level in itself has 500 hosts, vanilla Nagios had to be Ctrl-C'd out of after 53 minutes, while Nagios with Jean's patch completed in less than seven seconds (a speedup of more than 51000%!).

For a more modest network of 15000 nodes, (30 levels deep, 500 hosts in each level), vanilla Nagios completed a configuration check in 3 minutes and 33 seconds, while patched Nagios did the exact same job in less than one second.

Awesome, Jean. Thanks a lot indeed :-)

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Just a short post to announce myself as co-maintainer of libgit2. I don't know how long this will last, but Shawn O. Pearce (one of the truly heavy names in git development) will be very busy with the Google Summer of Code project, where core git has two student slots.

Shawn has been busy quite a long time (understandable, as he still makes significant contributions both to git.git and jgit.git), and only me and Ramsay Jones have made any significant contributions to libgit2 since it was announced back in November 2008.

Hopefully, this will mean whatever patches there are will get applied faster and that development will move forward at a quicker pace.

Personally, I've got a lot of un-committed work lying around that pertains to index reading and writing. I'll be working on finishing that up and sending it out to git@vger for review. The sooner we can get *some* part of the library working properly the better, imo, as git.git can't start using it until it does.

Oh, and libgit2 is currently looking for additional contributors. It doesn't really matter what you want to work on. Just clone the repo from git://repo.or.cz/libgit2.git and start hacking. Patches could go either to me (ae@op5.com) or to the git mailing list (git@vger.kernel.org).

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Some of you might know that a fork of Nagios has appeared recently. If you don't, go read about it in the nagios-devel mailing list archives. They're available on sourceforge somewhere, but I can't be bothered to look for them right now.

Working for a company that makes a living out of supporting and writing addons for Nagios, I must say I'm a bit sad. Being an enthusiastic and optimistic guy, I must say I'm thrilled.

A couple of facts before we set off:

• The fork was instigated largely by german members of the community. It appears to have been spearheaded by a german company (though I don't know this for sure) that makes its living selling customized Nagios solutions and/or support. I don't know this for sure, but it sure looks as if that's what's happened.
• The german company have unlawfully used the Nagios trademark after being asked not to do so. It has also registered Nagios as a trademark in Germany, to which is a huge slap in the face of an opensource project. They are naturally not on the best of terms with Nagios' founding father, Ethan, at the moment.
• Ethan has been absent working with the aforementioned lawsuit (or whatever it is a trademark violation results in when friendly talk is no longer enough), and also trying to put together a new webbased user interface for Nagios.
• Patches from all levels of the community have been erratically ignored during Ethan's absence. Some were picked up, but as many or more slipped between the cracks.
• Ethan has always been the single person with commit access to the Nagios CVS (yuk) repository.
• The fork uses git to track their patches.

The community developers have voiced a complaint that they cite as the primary reason for the fork:

Nagios is not being developed fast and openly enough.

I agree with this, and I'm currently discussing with Ethan about expanding the developer-base. Unfortunately, the scarce resource "trust" is even scarcer for those developers who joined the fork, which leaves the available candidates rather few. Happily, I count myself among them, and apparently so does Ethan. He emailed me away from public channels asking if I'd be willing to become a core developer, and op5 has graciously given a tentative promise to devote one to two days per week to Nagios development / patch management. Nothing's settled yet, but development has to continue even if the core maintainer takes a leave of absence, so one way or another, we'll make sure this happens.


In a perfect world (ie, one where I get to decide everything ), here's what will happen:

• Nagios incorporates the good changes that the fork produces.
• The benevolent but previously frustrated developers from the fork hop back to working on Nagios when they see it's once again moving forward. They could actually do that by keeping on working on their fork, although that would set them apart from the Nagios community a bit rather than make them members of it.
• Nagios development picks up its pace and a new GUI is added to it which fulfills everyones wildest dreams.
• Nagios development moves to using git instead of CVS. Since git actually invites people to fork the code but makes it incredibly simple to merge those changes back to the pre-fork project again, there could be any number of forks and Nagios would be the grand total of the best of all of them. Who would win on that? Well, the Nagios users for a start, and Nagios itself, and Ethan, and every company making a living off of Nagios one way or another. So that'd be a win-win-win-win-win situation? I like it.

For those who wonder where I'm standing in all this, I'll be working with Ethan to make the community developers happy while at the same time trying to prevent the community users from living through the confusion that a long-lived fork means. In the end, I hope Nagios becomes a better product with a stronger and better community backing it, which seems rather inevitable now that more people than ever are working frantically at making it so. Hopefully it results in a happy community where The Right People(tm) are part of a Nagios steering committee or some such.


Time will tell. It always does ;-)

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Back from a really nice summer and with so many great things in the pipe. We are on verge of releasing op5 Monitor 5.0. This is the most ambitious release since we started the company. As you might know our product Monitor is based on the well known open source project Nagios.  Nagios is the [...]
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Mycket idag handlar om att outsourca eller flytta tidigare interna tjänster till “molnet”. Samtigt rapporteras katastrofstatistik gällande hur nöjda kunderna är med sina outsourcing-affärer (se http://cio.idg.se/2.1782/1.113485) . Varför är det på detta sättet och skulle “molnet” vara annorlunda än klassisk outsourcing? Givetvis inte – vad är det man köper när man lägger en [...]
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Vi söker personal till vårt kontor i Göteborg, kika mer på http://www.op5.com/op5/about-op5/career
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Quality, Focus and customer value is are the key words when we all met this weekend:) Klas at it.. Some more pics from the crew:)
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Läste en “debatt artikel” i CS (skärpning CS, är det reklam eller är det seriös debatt?). Peter Kopelman VD för MS Sverige fick iallafall lägga ut texten om hur MS kan hjälpa företag i dåliga tider. Detta är ju helt absurt och visar direkt hur långs från sina kunder MS egentligen är. För att enkelt summera [...]
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Skulle du bygga om ditt hus utan att ha originalritningar? Troligtvis inte – och de som försökt kan nog alla instämma i att det blev både dyrare och tog längre tid än planerat. Inom IT verkar det ibland som om detta sätt vore standard och rapporterna över havererade IT-projekt verkar snarare öka. Varför är det så [...]
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I have owned a PSP for several years. It is a fabulous machine with real impressive hardware and possibilities. The big problem is that Sony tries to look in the owners so the potential of the hardware is not there. There has been way around that by installing cracked firmware. The main obstacle has been [...]
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After the problems I have had with Bredband2, I want to test Phonzo.se as a new VoIP provider. I registered on their homepage and after a couple of days I got a snail mail with my credentials. I configured my FreePBX and calling in worked directly, but not outgoing. After 2 hours of troubleshooting I started to google "phonzo asterisk" and found several [...]
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I have used Digisip as SIP VoIP provider for several years. It has been working very well until Skycom bought Bredband2 and Digisip. After that it has been very problematic: Without any information my Asterisk could not register anymore. After discussion with Bredband2 support they activated my account again after a week. According to Bredband2 this [...]
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    I have finished reading the great book "FreePBX 2.5 Powerful Telephony Solutions", by Alex Robar and it is 277 pages.   The intended target audience for this book are system administrators who want to get started with Asterisk and FreePBX.  It is perfect for administrators who want to reduce costs by replacing a proprietary PBX with a [...]
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Background I was reading the Swedish computer magazine, Tech World. There was an article about an appliance solution that could give a report about unused switch ports. The box PortIQ from Infoblox costs approximatly 10.000 Euro. op5 has developed this feature at a customer site and is included with op5 Monitor, op5 has published the code as opensource. This [...]
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My laptop and cellular phone has both Bluetooth and it has annoyed me for a while that I have not managed to get a working Internet connection using Bluetooth. I have only managed to get it working with a USB cable between my phone and laptop.   After some Google search and reading of man pages I finally [...]
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After fiddeling with my Bluetooth GPS reciever I wanted my friends and my wife to keep track of me. I wanted to use OpenStreetMap because I really like the idea of free and open maps instead of the unintelligible Google Maps licenses. The result can be seen here where I show the op5 office location outside Stockholm, Sweden.     Pre [...]
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Every computer geek ends up with a bunch of disks with unknown status in the drawer. It can be rather cumbersome to put them in a machine and check the status especially if some are SATA and others are PATA, it gets even more complicated if they are mixed 3.5" and 2.5". In situations like this [...]
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op5 announces the immediate release of op5 LogServer 3.5.0 - a minor release with some new features and a number of bugfixes.
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op5 and Redpill Linpro join forces to bring easy to use open source network monitoring tools to the Nordic Market. The companies recently signed a partnership agreement where Redpill will sell, support and provide consulting for op5 products.
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op5 announces the immediate release of op5 Monitor 4.2.6 a bug fix release solving many minor bugs mainly related to the new beta user interface Ninja.
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We have set up a community Wiki on our community site to make it possible for the community to add and change the documentation of op5s open source projects Ninja, an new PHP frontend for Nagios, Merlin, an event handler and Nacoma an nagios coniguration manager.
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op5 today announces the release of op5 Monitor 4.2, a kind of half way release to op5 Monitor 5.0. op5 Monitor 4.2 includes a "feel and try" mode of the new PHP user interface (GUI) based on the Ninja project. The GUI replaces the old and unflexible Nagios GUI and opens up for many new cool features, this includes the use of widgets.
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