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1. About this Document

1.1 Revision History

0.1 - 2002-11-01 - Ian B. MacDonald - Initial Staging and Debian Operations Manual based on RPMs aliened to .debs

1.0 - 2003-01-28 - iMac - Initial Publication, ONMS v1.02-2

1.1 - 2003-04-03 - iMac- Updates, including DB purge, ONMS v1.11-1

1.2 - 2003-06-24 - iMac - Conversion to LinuxDOC SGML, FAQ and email, updates from Debian ONMS Downgrade HOWTO, ONMS v1.11-5woody

1.3 - 2003-06-25 - iMac - First public release on opennms.netstatz.com with minor layout changes and some additions

1.4 - 2003-07-14 - iMac - Used It on a box from cold iron. Some refinements, typo-repair and purging of quotes. Increased Woody distinction.

1.5 - 2003-10-15 - iMac - Second pubic release, new sources, new packages, new links to devices, troubleshooting mailing-list archives. Added vim, hdparm, snmp, GetOPT packages

2.0a 2004-01-28 - iMac - Full 1.1.2 support, New mailing list includes, all new links (to match opennms.org changes), upgrade from 1.1.1-5 process, new supplemental utilities

2.0b 2004-03-11 - iMac - More 1.1.2 test implementations + Debian Woody R2, Finally a readable document that is useful and tested (grin)

2.1- 2004-03-22 - iMac - Purged lots of unecessary stuff due to the many updates to OpenNMS.org Purged all sections referring to broken mailing-list links.

2.2 - Unreleased - iMac - Updates, updates, but no time.

2.3 - 2006-04-12 - iMac - Things have not changed much surprisingly except for the OpenNMS.org website again. Focused on Debian Sarge and ONMS 1.2.X. Had to remove more busted links to online info. Much of the troubleshooting section no longer required with Online FAQ / Knowledgebase.

2.4 - 2006-04-30 - iMac - Clean-Up, Addition of Xen, Finally ready for public consumption.

1.2 Acknowledgements and Thanks

I would like to acknowledge the following individuals and groups for their valuable contributions that resulted in the creation of this document:

  1. Tarus Balog for his commitment to OpenNMS from the ground up and positive guidance to anyone interested in using this great tool.
  2. The OpenNMS group. In 2003, this included Andreas Kerl, Ben Reed, Bill Ayres, Brian Weaver, David Miller, Derek Gillden, Eric Evans, Jacinta Remedios, Jason Johns, Jim Doble, Jose Vicente, Nunez Zuleta, Larin Hennessy, Larry Karnowski, Marshall Christy, Michael Huot, Mike Davidson, Mike Johnson, Nick Wesselman, Oli M., Robert Berkowitz, Seth Leger, Shane O'Donnell, Sowmya Nataraj, Volker Seebode, Wrolf Courtney. That was 2003; Today there are many new faces. Thanks to all.
  3. The many contributions to the OpenNMS mailing list from all across the globe.
  4. Tony Simone and Eric Evans for originally Debianizing this great tool to the FHS standard, and to current package maintainers.
  5. Phoenix Telnet Inc. and their NOC staff for their resources and requirement for developing a stable Debian+ONMS solution for their North-America-wide VOIP network. Motekers, Diamac and others for driving recent updates.
  6. All other current and future Netstatz clients who aim to harness the power of OpenNMS, Xen Virtualization and other great GPL's technologies. (As of the writing of v2.0, Sun T1 processor hardware also fall into this GPL pile).
  7. Dan Peachey for great feedback and notes on Debian, and others that have provided both critical and positive feedback.

The acknowledgement section is both difficult and important. The past three years have seen a lot of changes and positive public acknowledgement of the OpenNMS group's accomplishments. The new landscape of talented network engineers providing support and development are certainly not all reflected here. After a few years without active participation in OpenNMS user forums, Netstatz is getting fired back up with the new product possibilities leveraged by Xen technology. We are augmenting our previous solutions with virtualized paralell monitoring environments. You should too, or drop us a line and have us build one for you.

1.3 Copyright Information

This document is Copyright 2003, 2006 by Ian B. MacDonald. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.

Copyright of documentation seems to be a standard. The goal of this section is to promote dissemination of this knowledge through as many channels as possible and also to be notified of any plans to redistribute the HOWTO so that we can keep people aprised of new versions.

OpenNMS is a trademark of Sortova Consulting Group, Inc. OpenNMS is referred to as ONMS throughout this document.

1.4 How this document was created

This document was created using Lyx 1.3.6 and the LinuxDOC article (SGML) template. Every once in a while I clicked View->HTML and View->PDF and the rest was history. My desktop system at the time was a Sun Blade 100* running the Debian Sid GNU/Linux (Sparc) distribution. Anyone who would like to create documents easily, and uses Debian, should have a look at the following packages. (Or just apt-get install everything like I did.)

bash~#apt-get install docbook docbook-doc docbook-defguide docbook-dsssl docbook-dsssl-doc docbook-utils docbook-xml docbook-xsl docbook-ebnf docbook-defguide jade jadetex openjade ldp-docbook-dsssl ldp-docbook-xsl linuxdoc-tools linuxdoc-tools-text linuxdoc-tools-info linuxdoc-tools-latex sgml-data sgml-base sgmltools-lite sgmlspl sgmls-doc latex2html latex2rtf gv html2text gnuhtml2latex imagemagick

bash~#apt-get install lyx

The only trick is reconfigure lyx once you install all the supporting tools. The simpliest method is to select Reconfigure from from the bottom of theEdit menu.

*v1.4 was written on Debian Sid running on a VIA/AMD box. It looked and worked exactly the same on big-endian and little-endian architecture. Props to the package maintainers that make Debian Sid fun and powerful on almost any arcitechture.

*v2.0 was updated on Debian Sid running on a PowerPC laptop. Yes, it is still all the same. Basically the LinuxDoc SGML template has always worked fine and meets ours needs.

*v2.3+ were authored on our Xen documentation virutual machine which travels everywhere as a DVD image and can be spawned on any Netstatz server for quick customizations. Someyear soon, we will figure out the default Lyx DocBook TOC template and drop in some fancy CSS. For now the LinuxDoc templete is still meeting our needs.

1.5 Feedback and comments

Please send any feedback to Ian B. MacDonald ian [-AT-] opennms.org. A number of positive comments from the first versions were appreciated, and we seem to receive a lot of traffic via Google. I'm surprised someone didn't rant about the silly typos in some commands and URLs in early versions of this doc. Negative feedback is often the best feedback, so send it on over. The goal is to enhance the readability and mood/tone of this document and work towards a style that is consistent with the types of documents people enjoy and benefit from.

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