[KLUG Members] Open NMS and glowing recommendations.

[Adam Williams]

I diddles with OpenNMS back in the 0.9 days,  and while it was very 
complete it was a bloated buggy pain.

So I continued to use clumsy hacks like MRTG, etc...  But on my attend to 
rebuild some of those things I thought "This is WAY too hard".

So I went back to OpenNMS, not at release 1.0.

Installed several RPMS, diddled with a single line of one config file 
(clearly documented in the install guide, BTW).

And I did
/etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat4 start
/etc/rc.d/init.d/opennms start

Alot of scary stuff blew by on the screen,  then I connected to the box 
with a web browser.  And Oh My.....

There is my entire network, with event notification, performance graphs, 
availability calculations, assett management, etc....

Actually it took about 30 minutes to discover everything (during with the 
network slowed to a crawl, luckily it was after hours),  but didn't take 
more than 10 minutes to install (which is exactly how it should be).

Anyone who wants to admin a network *NEEDS* this package yesterday.

P.S. You'll need a box with Sun's Java, 256Mb of RAM (min), and a 300+ MHz 
processor, this thing is a beast.  But worth every kilobyte.

P.P.S. http://www.opennms.org

P.P.P.S.  You if already have pgsql 7.1.x installed and running you don't 
need there specific version.

P.P.P.P.S.  When you list the RPMS to install, list the tomcat ones first 
or you won't be able to login.