Hipster vs. Microsoft

This week was great, Microsoft bought GitHub! All the Hipsters went crazy and a lot of open-source people move now their repos to GitLab. There is even a Hashtag #movingtogitlab floating around.

The GitLab importer showed significant peaks when the news broke out. What the hell happened?

GitHub is the new SourceForge

GitHub was cool, it made Git to shine. GitHub was the platform to collaborate on software development in public and helped to make Git the de-facto standard as a free and decentralized version control system. It helped to make development workflows transparent for everyone. The interface was quick, simple, well accepted and it was not plastered with popups and advertisements. It was started in 2007 by the company GitHub, Inc. in San Francisco. In a very short amount of time it was so well accepted, it killed SourceForge and Google Code. It was the prototype of “disrupting” the way how people collaborate in software development, especially in open-source projects.

Monitoring DevOps and the Status Quo

As most of us noticed a few companies changed our perspective how to develop software and deploy them as a service. There are quite a few changes between selling every year a box with 10 CD’s and develop and deliver your software as a service. This article is a collection of thoughts and ideas I had and wanted to be written.

Who cares about a version number?

User give a shit about version numbers anymore, all what matters needs to be focused on the user. Great user experience, functionality and a good “Effort-to-Outcome” ratio to solve your problems will make your software successful.

Zyxel vs. Vodafone Easybox with VDSL 50

I ran in some trouble with my Vodafone Easybox 904 xDSL. Even with 2Ghz and 5Ghz WLAN I had regularly drops. Had to turn on / off the WLAN on the device or had to reboot it to reconnect. Otherwise the VDSL line reguarly got disconnected, also replacing the Easybox from Vodafone didn’t helped, so I bought a Zyxel VMG1312-B30A.

Pimp my Mail Notifications

Notifications are important if you do monitoring. I never liked mail notifications from monitoring systems where all the information is hidden in non-sense text. Otherwise notifications never look the same, so I’m always forced to read all that useless crap again and again. This is an approach to improve the usability of monitoring notifications using more a table pattern which helps me to recognize useful information much quicker.

Probably a lot of E-Mail guys will hate me for the reason I’m using HTML in mails. The notifications work so much better for me so I don’t care. I’ve used just inline CSS and there is no JavaScript involved. All the things are in the mail and there are no external resources loaded. Here is how I work with OpenNMS mail notifications.

Material Workshop OpenNMS im Büro 2.0

Am 30.03.2015 haben wir im Büro 2.0 in Berlin einen Workshop mit OpenNMS durchgeführt. Die Zielgruppe waren NeueinsteigerInnen und alle die Interesse an Monitoring mit freier Software haben. Es wurden Installationszenarien, das Provisioning und beispielhaft diverse Monitore für Anwendungen und Dienste eingerichtet.

Die Slides sind unter einer freien CC-BY 3.0 lizenziert und stehen auf GitHub zur Verfügung.

Kickstart Workshop OpenNMS im Büro 2.0

Für diejenigen, die kurzentschlossen sind – hier eine letzte Erinnerung für einen kostenfreien Kickstart workshop zu OpenNMS. Die Registrierung und Anfahrt findet ihr unter:

• Büro 2.0 Veranstaltung
• Registrierung bei Meetup
• Anfahrt

Conferences OUCE 2015 and 31c3

I spent some time with preparing the OUCE 2015 and we use the free an open-source software frab as conference management system. I do most of my server automation with Chef and my playground is running with Vagrant. For this reason I decided to spend some time an built a Vagrant / Chef environment and contributed it back to the frab project. This guys do a really good job and IMHO it is the best free conference management system you can get. If you want to play with it feel free and give it a try and contribute.

Open-source Experience

I spend a lot of time in the OpenNMS project and I love to work in free software and the workflows around it. We moved with our project from SourceForge to GitHub a few years ago and I think it was the right decision. There are now some established workflows in this ecosystem and they tear down borders between different open-source projects and here is an example of it.

I develop with IntelliJ IDEA and spend currently some time working in documentation of OpenNMS. We have migrated from Docbook XML format to AsciiDoc and started with the help of a few brave community volunteers a new documentation environment. I’ve found a plugin for IDEA which renders AsciiDoc and gave it a try to have a better workflow working on documentation and navigating through source code in just one program.

OpenNMS and Documentation

To help the OpenNMS project I spent a year together with Alexander Finger and Klaus Thielking-Riechert writing an OpenNMS book. We started with a development version of for 1.8 and tried to find a mixture between consistent slow changing and new concepts in 1.8. It was kind a complicated thing and from my point of view not perfectly done. Nevertheless I’ve thought about something like: “It’s about time writing a second edition covering the topics in coming 1.14?” The problem I’ve with books, it doesn’t allow contribution and hasn’t a really long life cycle. So I’ve decided instead of spending a year again writing a book, I want something which is more helpful to the project itself.

DevOps Guy

I started in 1998 in IT-Services and I did all the funny stuff – was involved building new networks for companies, migrated software from commercial vendors from version A to B to C to D and I have wasted too much lifetime on broken RAID 5s, backups and restores.

If you want to learn how to operate a computer network – this is a good place. You will always be called for the complicated problems nobody can solve with a simple Google search. You get also a good feeling, which solution is maintainable over a longer period of time. Fortunately people developing software experienced enough pain and started thinking about how to make code maintainable. Good developers realized years ago, people spend more time maintaining software than writing it. In my point of view an underestimated acceptance criteria in an “Agile” process ;) Since I spend more and more time in the OpenNMS project, I get much better an idea what the meaning about testing, documenting, Continuous Integration and Test Driven programming is. What people realize is a nameless magical connectivity between the guys who develop Things™ and the ones who bring them to production and the poor souls which have to keep it productive. In the late 90s there wasn’t a name for it. To make a good job Ops-Guys and the Dev-Guys have to work together – which wasn’t/isn’t a default behavior by nature.