Juni 2008 - Nav-dev - lister.unit.no

Status meeting minutes June 24 2008
by Vidar Faltinsen 24 Jun '08

24 Jun '08

Hi folks, Minutes from todays meeting, June 24; Jørgen * Good progress with the report tool * Found that the matrix module makes the tool unneccessary slow * workaround: "violated" the pep8 by instead loaded the module in the matrix subsystem. This improves performance radically :) * Reimplemented the java code for advanced search * Will now look at local reports. Thomas * New alert engine is running on navdev * logging with log levels now ok * testing done, not all cornercases, but all queue types tested and some advanced filter cases. * fine tuning of the code on todo, will look more into means of detecting and coping with exceptions / error conditions as early as possible. * will look into a better means of structuring the code, making it easier to later add new alert channels, i.e. jabber. * started doc, will do more, https://metanav.uninett.no/devel:alertengine * Will look into support for "ignore closed alerts" (aka MB8 "delayed smses"). * Translated the alert profile database * must look more into coping with primary key sequence migration issues. Magnus * Good progress with the new alert profiles tool * The NAV look is there :) * The GUI will be made a lot simpler and to the point * i.e. tabs as used elsewhere in NAV * A lot of work put into understanding and getting under the hood of the inner magic of django. * Implemented the tab for setting up filter expressions. Turned out to possibly be the most complex subtask. The road a head looks bright. * The work of Thomas and Magnus are merged to the same branch Kristian was on vacation this week. Magnus will be on vacation next week. Morten is back next week. - Vidar

1 0

Status meeting minutes June 18
by Vidar Faltinsen 18 Jun '08

18 Jun '08

Hi all, First: Next meeting will be on Tuesday June 24 13-14. Minutes: Thomas * The rewrite of alert engine is feature complete(!!!) Extensive use of sql implemented. All logical operators now supported (the old code only supported a subset) * testing on todo * logging needs to be tuned in terms of adequate log levels * The django model is fully implemented in accordance with the alert profiles database meeting last week. * A rewrite of the actual database, including translation from Norwegian to English, is on todo. The task will include the making of an upgrade script. Magnus * Alert Profiles now works fine with php5. Back compatibility to php4 is in place, but not fully tested. Will be done. * Trimmed the UI, improved look and feel. CSS fixes, not html. * Fixed support for wap (even though noone(?) uses it) * Started studying the NAV django model. It could be better documented... * Will continue working on the new alert profiles, partly in cooperation with Thomas (on the design level at least). Jørgen * Just started. Added textual description of the reports. Will now look into local reports and the sum function. * The code should ideally be partly rewritten. To much of the code is placed in cheetah. Will not improve this at this stage, instead move on to the device management task (SMJ8 in tasklist). Kristian: * Not at the meeting, but rumors has it that the new network exlorer is almost there! John Magne: * Not there but has made an importand bug fix to 3.4; https://metanav.uninett.no/hg/default/rev/c6a1c9cae549 Vidar * We discussed the task: MB7: Admin can change his user_id https://metanav.uninett.no/devel:tasklist#mb7admin_can_change_his_her_effec… Morten: is it sufficient to solve this functionality within alert profiles? * Regarding MB8: support delayed smses * Thomas can/will solve this within the alert engine code - Vidar

1 0

Status meeting minutes June 12
by Vidar Faltinsen 13 Jun '08

13 Jun '08

Hi folks, Status from our meting on Thursday June 12; Morten * 3.4.0 debian package received from Werner. Now out on the tool boxes around the country. Discovered a bug in ip dev info, unfortunately. * Automatic database schema upgrade failed for the Arnold database. Some constraints have been automatically named by PostgreSQL 7.4, but the naming scheme has changed for PostgreSQL 8. We should explicitly name constraints, indexes etc. in the future to avoid naming confusions on upgrades. * Deleting a box from NAV takes a _very_ long time. The database delete operation blocks the web interface, causing the result page to load "forever", resulting in a bad user experience. The delete takes a long time because of all the cascading deletes necessary in PostgreSQL. Possible workarounds are being looked into; * do the delete as a background process. Inform the user that the delete will take effect in an hour (or so). Other improvement: * The key bottleneck (when deleting a switch) is most likely the cam table. It can become very large, thus updating hundreds of thousands of rows due to cascading from netbox deletes will be slow. A tested schema change (details will be reported by Morten) reduced the delete time from 43 minutes to 10 minutes for a box with 750.000 cam rows in a 12M row cam table. * We need a means of overriding the django settings file. I.e. django sends email using an awkward from address and django has timezone set to chicago time, which is a pain in many use cases... * possible solution: /etc/django.conf where sensible parameters are set and in turn imported into the django settings file(s). John Magne * macwatch background process implemented. It runs just after the camlogger in time and looks for "wanted" mac addresses listed in a config file. If a "wanted" mac is detected an alarm is generated. * macwatch is checked into a separate repository. Needs further testing before being merged to the default branch. * A nav cricket contrib is made for temperature monitoring. The contrib adds a database table for storing temperature sensors. A script fills this table with data based on collected temperature sensors seen on the netboxes. Another script expands the cricket config tree to include the temperature monitoring. The latter script is also embedded in makecricketconfig, it needs adjustment to the .nav file in the cricket config tree - a rather unocumented feature as of now. * This contrib is not on the default branch yet, either. Magnus: * Started working with alert profiles. Focus on bug fixing. Currently working with resolving error messages seen with php5. Fixes need to support php4 as well. * Is considering a rewrite of alert profiles to python. Many advantages; 1) wanted fixes in the user interface can then be resolved (not worth while fixing the current php code to be more NAV look a like). 2) the same django model as the new alert engine uses can be adopted. 3) There are cases today where alert engine and alert profiles have a different view of the world, unfortunately (read: bug[ish]). Jørgen: * Not much to report - studying for his exams. Will start next Tuesday. Tomas * A reported bug from UiT in alert engine is not possible to reproduce, not by UiT either. Bug case closed. * Has studied the alert engine code in debth. Tried for hours to resolve a bug, but changed to a more positive mode and started rewriting the code. * Has the framework for a new alert engine ready with lots of django models implemented. A complete pyhthon alert engine may be finished by the end of next week!!! Kristian * Good progress with the new network explorer. A lot af javascript. Basic skeleton in place, currently implementing search functions, sysname search in place. * Responded to several bug reports regarding the new network map. Possible new task to someone [tm] * Find a bug tracker replacement since sourceforge is horribly slow. Alternatives could be launchpad.net or roundup (on a UNINETT install). - Vidar

1 0

Gaining momentum (i.e. minutes from the biweekly status meetings)
by Stein Magnus Jodal 06 Jun '08

06 Jun '08

Hi NAV developers and followers, The nav-dev mailing list should be the primary location for discussions and (intra-release) news related to the development of NAV. Sadly, the mailing list is rather inactive and have only seen about 64 posts in the last two years, and only eight this year. This is a paradox given that NAV got several geographically separated contributors, in addition to seven(!) people (counting students/summer interns) working with NAV at UNINETT. That's a lot of people. ...and it's starting to become a lot of changes. During the fall I'm supposed to work actively on NAV while living in Oslo. I haven't left yet, but I'm already feeling a bit out of the information loop by not attending all of the biweekly status meetings. (Which was initiated earlier this spring, being a useful event both for synchronization of work and getting motivation. Motivation I will still need to get some way or another during the fall.) The fact that NAV development is finally gaining momentum through new heads, a new distributed VCS (Mercurial), new development frameworks (Django and Twisted) and code cleanup is fabulous. (And who knows what's next? Unit tests, continuous integration and nightly builds?) With increased momentum it follows naturally that our information flow also needs a bit more current. Let's direct that current to this public mailing list, thus at the same time motivating old, new and future users of NAV to contribute development time and patches. Finally arriving at my point. I would like to suggest, as a start, that the minutes from the biweekly NAV status meetings are posted to this list. A "these two weeks in NAV development" newsletter. What has changed? What are the status of upcoming changes? Who is working at what? In that way I, and the 33 other people at this list, would be given a heads up at most two weeks after changes. Changes like the unification of the four NAV databases into four schemes in one database, which apparently happened recently. (I'm starting to believe writing a Master's thesis won't be too hard, once I get started. ;-) ) -- Stein Magnus Jodal UNINETT

3 2

Minutes June 04 2008
by Vidar Faltinsen 04 Jun '08

04 Jun '08

Hi all, Status meeting minutes, June 4th 2008 Morten Brekkevold: * NAV 3.4 released May 16th. Debian package not there yet, hopefully tomorrow... * dbnamespace branch: tested a merge of all four NAV databases to one. Looks good. Will be merged to main branch and will be introduced in 3.5. * README on doc/svn2hg for how to look up old Subversion revisions. * Kai Bjørnenak @ Uit is using mercurial and is developing the radius log subsystem there. Have not had time to study the results. * ipdevpoll under startup. Will replace gDD down the road! Implemented in python. Uses asynchronous network polling based on the twisted framework. Simple skeleton implemented so far with a plugin framework, three test plugins imlemented: one collects sysobjectid, another collects ifdescr, a third does dns reverse lookup. pep8 complient (python style guide), ref NAVs HACKING. * notify & listen in postgres may be useful for NAV as a replacement for eventq/alertq table polling. However: JDBC driver does not support asynchronous notification. * teknobyen-vk will be upgraded, the old machine will be used as development database machine. * TODO: move HACKING file to wiki Jørgen Abrahamsen: * Working on improvements in the report tool * made automated report page * new attribute introduced: description * restructured code for improved readability * Will start with the local config file option * Later: event engine bug fixing Tomas Adamcik: * Working on alert engine * have read the perl code. At a minimum variable names should be given more self explanatory names. * better: rewrite to python. reuse python daemon module implemented for the sms daemon. use sql more extensively for filter matching, via django models. Preliminary estimated rewrite time: 2-4 weeks. * First priority: fix two bugs reported from UiT and NTNU for 3.4.1 * Later: Translate NAV profiles db relations from Norwegian to English Kristian Klette: * Working on new network explorer * setup django application for new network explorer * design: require javascript, fetch data on demand * router view and router interface view in place * uses jQuery, license checked ok (GPL) * Later: merge of gwport and swport tables, Cisco WLAN controller plugin for ipdevpoll Vidar Faltinsen: * Involved in the network explorer req spec * Will participate at the weekly summer meetings * has disjunct vacation with Morten except week 32. Magnus Eide: * Not at the meeting - starts next week * Will start his work on alert profiles. * fix bugs, improve stuff, translate db to English (coop with Thomas) For the summer, status meetings will move to Mondays, with higher frequency (every week). regards - Vidar & Morten

1 0

Rewrite of network explorer
by Vidar Faltinsen 03 Jun '08

03 Jun '08

Hi, Kristian is given the task of rewriting Network explorer so that we in the long term can get rid of tomcat. At a meeting today the current functionality was discussed in detail. Generally speaking the functionality of today will be kept, but we will make some improvement in the way information is presented. Not everything is entirely intuitive... If others have comments - fell free; https://metanav.uninett.no/task:rewrite_network_explorer Kristian: I have added / structured info after the meeting. Check for updates. - Vidar

1 0