[talk] network discovery application

[Sevan Janiyan]

On 08/12/2016 18:01, Pete Wright wrote:
> I can unequivocally say that no-one should touch OpenNMS unless they are
> secretly building infrastructure to take down a company from the inside
> - it combines the magic of Java with the insanity of SNMP slathered with
> a nice layer of XML for configuration.
> 
> 
> those battle wounds are still a bit fresh :)


<3

I'll say that the auto discovery thing in OpenNMS is pretty cool. Point
it at network ranges & it goes and probes the ranges and starts adding
detected devices to the system.

I gave up with having anything to do with it back in 2014 but someone
else picked up the ball and suffered for a couple of years going back
and forth after. Turns out there was issues both in OpenJDK 8 & OpenNMS
which never showed up on Linux because it was a bit more permissive
about mistakes than FreeBSD. I guess running it on FreeBSD is a possible
thing again now (I never ran v8. sunjdk5, openjdk 6 & 7 where the
versions I tried it on).

Not sure if it'll ever make it into ports (data, settings & binaries are
intertwined in the same directory (just like on Solaris where each
application installs under a separate prefix)). The other thing is that
it uses maven for the build system & has a hefty dependency list.

It seemed the open source offering was very much the testing ground for
the commercial offering (through the amount of bug reports filed &
having to run bleeding edge to obtain fixes which is a lost effort
because you want to use a stable version to build on/package, not get
side tracked into navigating through a minefield).

For all the things java is supposed to do in terms of portability, it
was pretty fragile as soon as you moved away from redhat flavoured?
linux distro. Certainly the Solaris packages were broken for some time
through the mix use of /bin/sh & /bin/bash in scripts. Was broken on
OminOS if I recall too for other reasons.

There's a bunch of really clumsy & painful stuff which did eventually
get resolved before all that so it wasn't just all about maiming.


Sevan