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... it's better to have good questions

SSL and Java

2018-11-26 3 min read Tutorial Technology Ronny Trommer

Running applications with a current Java is not a big deal thanks Let’s Encrypt. This article describes what happens if you want to authenticate your OpenNMS against LDAP using SSL with a self-certified certificate.

First of all I assume you have confiured verything so you can authenticate against LDAP in plaintext and you got a role mapping as you wanted it. If not you can have a look here.

So the naive approach would be, just changing the line in your activeDirectory.xml from

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Send notifications with Signal

2018-11-01 3 min read OpenNMS Tutorial Ronny Trommer

In some cases it is nice to have notifications from OpenNMS in a separate channel on a smartphone and you don’t want to pay for SMS. Here is a tutorial where I use Signal using the signal-cli.

This Howto will describe how to download the latest signal-cli tool, link it to your existing Signal account and how to configure OpenNMS to use it as a notification target. You should have already an OpenNMS Horizon or Meridian running and you need a Signal account with the Signal app installed and configured on your smartphone.

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Everyone can change it and why you shouldn't

2018-09-27 3 min read Open-Source Technology Ronny Trommer

Open-source software is great. If there is something you don’t like, you can at least - try to change it. A lot of open-source software out there is not primarily used by private people. There are many companies who provide professional services around open-source software. Some of them try to enhance the appearance with custom User Interfaces, their company logo to fit their own Corporate Identity. There are several motivations, mostly they want to be distinguished on the marked or need some easy to maintain little customization which allows their sales guys easier to sell a project and not using the software from the community projects website. How hard could it be to make something pretty, right?

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Guidance to Survive Monitoring

2018-08-08 5 min read Technology Open-Source Ronny Trommer

While working in the monitoring field for a long time, here are some rules I try to follow when requirements go awry.

Rule #1: Only create an alert when human interaction is required

When you setup a monitoring, it tends to get noisy very quickly. The problem is, people want to know everything and want to monitor everything. You tend to build a system which sends you a lot of alarms and you will get alarm fatique. To get most out of your monitoring solution, you have to always keep in mind Rule #1. When you alert for something, ask yourself is it really necessary to wake some one up in the middle of the night. There is nothing more horrible than waking someone up and it is a false alert.

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He's dead, Jim

2018-07-30 5 min read Technology Ronny Trommer

If you operate networks there is a big chance you had to deal with SNMP - the Simple Network Management Protocol. If you ever wondered where it came from, it started with a big bang.

On October 27, 1980, there was an unusual occurrence on the ARPANET. For a period of several hours, the network appeared to be unusable, due to what was later diagnosed as a high priority software process running out of control. Network-wide disturbances are extremely unusual in the ARPANET (none has occurred in several years), and as a result, many people have expressed interest in learning more about the etiology of this particular incident.

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Monitoring Websites with OpenNMS

2018-07-27 4 min read Tutorial OpenNMS Ronny Trommer

Monitoring websites is a common requirement. Using OpenNMS to monitor websites can be done by using the built in HTTP/HTTPS based monitors.

While a “Node” can be pretty much everything in a network, the internal model to monitor something is pretty old-fashioned and static. Monitoring a service requires to assign a service to an IP address.

OpenNMS Node Model

This article describes a pattern how you can monitor web sites with low maintenance and without the need to maintain for each website a monitor which is cumbersome in maintenance.

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Authenticate OpenNMS Horizon with FreeRADIUS

2018-07-22 2 min read Tutorial OpenNMS Ronny Trommer

Centralized authentication is a core service as soon you have a network with more than 3 computers. This article is about how to authenticate a OpenNMS Horizon 22.0.2 using RADIUS provided by a FreeRADIUS service.

In this example the FreeRADIUS server is configured to provide 3 users. A dictionary is configured which returns 2 roles, ROLE_USER and ROLE_ADMIN which can be used to decide which security role is assigned in the OpenNMS Horizon Web UI.

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Authenticate OpenNMS Horizon with Active Directory on Windows Server 2016

2018-07-16 3 min read Tutorial OpenNMS Ronny Trommer

Centralized authentication is a core service as soon you have a network with more than 3 computers. This article is about how to authenticate a OpenNMS Horizon 22.0.1 against an Active Directory provided on a Microsoft Windows Server 2016. I’ll focus here on the Active Directory and Spring configuration parts, securing the connection with LDAPS and using self-signed certificates in Java is another topic and not covered here.

In this example the domain is called labmonkeys.local and the Microsoft Windows Server has the IP address 192.168.178.220. The user name for the bind user is OpenNMS Bind User with the password MyPass123!.

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Build OpenNMS with Docker

2018-07-14 4 min read Tutorial OpenNMS Ronny Trommer

Being able to compiling an open-source project is important. You can change the code, so you should also able to build it.

Why is there a dedicated Docker image for the build environment? The dependencies running a pre-build OpenNMS Horizon distribution and compiling from source are different. To build OpenNMS Horizon you need Apache Maven and to compile JICMP, JRRD you need a C compiler environment. This is nothing you want to carry when you just want to run OpenNMS Horizon.

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Hipster vs. Microsoft

2018-06-07 3 min read Technology Open-Source Ronny Trommer

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.

GitLab importer statistics

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.

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