GroundWork Open Source is proud to host the Cacti Development Team as its "Project in Residence" during LinuxWorld week. If you'd like to be an observer to their meetings, contact Peter Mui, pmui@groundworkopensource.com, 415 992 4573, www.groundworkopensource.com

There will also be an evening reception/ banquet with the Cacti Team on Wednesday August 6, 7PM: see the separate listing for that.

Hope to see you this week! -Peter

May's meeting will host Alan DuBoff of Sun Microsystems speaking on the new release of OpenSolaris, formerly known as Project Indiana. Alan will also be showing some of the open source software currently being developed between Sun and the communities. Such software would include Virtual Box, OpenOffice, MySQL, Xen/Xvm. Alan is currently involved in a project to port flask/type_enforcement to OpenSolaris with a project called Flexible Mandatory Access Control (FMAC). Alan also currently works in the Solaris x86 IHV/OEM group where he works with both hardware and software vendors, as well as working with the OpenSolaris community with part of his time.

Monitoring SIG XV: Nagios 3.0

A very special SIG: Ethan Galstad, project lead for Nagios, will be in from Minnesota to talk about the features of the newly-released Nagios 3.0. He'll also be available to field your questions about Nagios in general and where it's headed.

What: BayLISA Monitoring SIG XV: Nagios 3.0
Who: Anyone interested in IT monitoring issues and tools (newbies particularly welcome!)
When: Wednesday, April 9 2008, 7PM
Where: GroundWork Open Source, 139 Townsend St., San Francisco
How: 139 Townsend St. is very near AT&T Ballpark. It is one and a half blocks from the CalTrain Depot. Take the MUNI T or N trolley to 2nd and King (ballpark stop) or take the 30 or 45 bus (among others) crosstown. Allow extra travel time as the Giants are playing a home game that evening (vs. the Padres, 7:15PM start) so all the streets, sidewalks, and public transit around our office will be packed. DO NOT DRIVE unless you're willing to sit in gridlock and pay exorbitant amounts for parking.

This is the inaugural in-person meeting of the Ganglia Development Team, scheduled for Thursday-Friday Feb 28-29 2008. The primary focus will be a push towards release of Ganglia 3.1, the next major release, with a secondary focus of creating a roadmap and sustainable process for future Ganglia releases.

This Ganglia "Project in Residence" event is hosted by GroundWork Open Source in downtown San Francisco in their training center, which has a projector, wireless access, white boards, a conference table, etc. and an adjacent kitchen stocked with refreshments, so we can meet and work comfortably.

Thomas Stocking will present an overview of Ganglia and showcase the Ganglia Integration Module that adds innovative thresholding functions to the Ganglia monitoring system. Then Peter Loh will show some enhancements he's developed to extend ganglia with alarms and filtered console views. This SIG will be a kick-off to the Ganglia "Project in Residence" event Feb 28-29: more details at the meeting.

What: BayLISA Monitoring SIG XIV: Ganglia Monitoring and Integration
Who: Anyone interested in IT monitoring issues and tools (newbies particularly welcome!)
When: Wednesday, Feb 13 2008, 7PM

Monitoring SIG: Nagios Integration in Hyperic HQ

Hyperic will lead a session on Nagios integration and using Hyperic HQ's new Nagios plugin, which provides Nagios-like functionality out of HQ, including the use of Nagios plugins and configuration files, Come ready to share your own Nagios and Hyperic experiences, and be prepared to ask probing questions. Or bring the requirements for your proposed monitoring deployment and we'll compare and contrast it to this solution.

What: BayLISA Monitoring SIG XIII: Nagios Integration in Hyperic HQ
Who: Anyone interested in IT monitoring issues and tools (newbies particularly welcome!)

SIG member Lois G. reports: I did get Nagios installed and Apache serving up the interface. The configuration is all wrong, so it is not monitoring. My idea for presenting is: a beginner's "how to" with audience participation to go through my files and show what I did wrong. In other words, the theme would be "How NOT to Install Nagios."

So come ready to help Lois get her monitoring working, share your own Nagios experiences, good and bad, and be prepared to ask probing questions. Or bring the requirements for your proposed monitoring deployment and we'll peruse it for obvious and not-so-obvious gotchas.

We'll discuss monitoring tools and strategies you've tried, and maybe still use, and what their limitations are. Come ready to share your grandest monitoring experiments and failures, or be prepared to ask probing questions about why someone else's well-laid plans went awry. Or bring the requirements for your proposed monitoring deployment and we'll peruse it for obvious and not-so-obvious gotchas.

What: BayLISA Monitoring SIG XI: What Doesn't Work
Who: Anyone interested in IT monitoring issues and tools (newbies particularly welcome!)
When: Wednesday, Oct 10 2007, 7PM
Where: GroundWork Open Source, 139 Townsend St., San Francisco

Traditionally, acquiring the tools needed to create customized solutions that featured data persistence, data stream cross-referencing, cross-platform deployment, distributed architecture, and data aggregation from across multiple network domains required extensive use of proprietary software. (Consider the example of trying to merge Nagios, Ganlgia, SNMP, etc. data so that you can display it simultaneously.) Roger Ruttimann, project lead for Foundation (http://gwfoundation.sourceforge.net/) will talk about how Open Source components have matured to the point where building enterprise-class data aggregation and mining tools is relatively simple.