I stopped caring about Observium when someone said it wouldn’t monitor something by IP address, it required both forward and reverse DNS. Even though Mike tried to defend that. It’s “Soup Nazi” logic. Everything else in the world accepts an IP address in place of a hostname, I suspect you have to write extra code to NOT do that.
From: Jon Auer Sent: Saturday, April 04, 2015 5:52 PM To: Animal Farm Subject: Re: [AFMUG] What Adam Armstrong of Observium thinks of WISPS Until I see evidence to the contrary (just did a svn up and no wisp gear has been removed...) I'm treating that entire exchange as the internet equivalent of some drunk (Smeg) walking up to you(Adam) in the bar and grabbing your arm and saying have your wife dance with me. You're like, that's her choice and she says no. Repeating as the night goes on. Eventually maybe you snap, say some unkind things because you want the drunk to get lost and he just isn't taking the hint. That wasn't the first IRC exchange between them and others. Adam's volatility is well known but in this case I believe he was sorely provoked. We've all experienced the client from hell. Thing is, maybe some of us are the client from hell. What happened in IRC after may help understand where he is coming from... [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:18:33] While I completely understand that you're the author and shit, and what you say goes. period... wasn't that a bit of an overreaction? [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:18:56] BenA: you have no fucking idea [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:19:05] I don't, it's true. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:06] these people will not take no for an answer [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:07] they go on [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:08] and on [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:09] and on [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:10] and on [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:19:20] Couldn't you just, like, look away from the screen? [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:23] BUT MUH SUPPORT, MILLIONS OF USERS, PLZ [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:32] couldn't you? [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:19:38] Ask him if he wants to pay. if he doesn't, ignore? [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:19:46] oh, they all say they want to pay [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:19:49] Ah. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:20:10] but when they realise it costs more than $5... [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:20:15] Right. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:20:31] the wireless industry seems to be rammed full of overly entitled douches [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:20:48] whot hink it's totally justified that we support evey bit of shitty kit they have [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:20:51] fucking wireless vendors [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:21:00] every new MODEL they release has to come with an entirely new set of mibs [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:21:04] it's ridiculous [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:21:11] You're a victim of your own success. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:21:23] and none of these people will ever listen when you tell them [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:21:32] adn they just keep coming back and coming back [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:21:35] he's asked here a few times [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:21:40] and we've had these conversations on the mailing list [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:21:44] and god knows what else [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:22:02] and you'd think [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:22:03] when someone says [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:22:07] "fuck off, it's not going to happen" [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:22:13] you'd realise that was, well, that [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:22:53] I guess he really sees the advantages of Observium, and is keen for you to have further market penetration... over your express wishes (-: [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:23:06] no, he's keen to have his own pet hardware supported [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:23:12] That too. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:23:21] we already support 4 different families of cambium kit [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:23:28] but apparently that doesn't include the devices he has [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:23:44] and i'm sure if i checked, we'd only have like 2-3 users using cambium kit [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:24:52] You could spend a few dozen man months of eye-straining, back-breaking labour adding in some kind of horribly complex and fucked up extensible API for 3rd party MIBs, and then telling people they can add whatever the fuck support/devices they like, but there's no support for it. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:25:06] or not [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:25:14] Party-pooper. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <BenA> [09:25:39] And people said you were a nice guy. [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:25:46] rarely [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:25:55] and even more rarely in here \o/ [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:26:49] we have 3 cambium ptp400 devices and 5 cambium ptp800 devices [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:27:00] in our entire userbase [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:27:24] 1086 cambium canopy devices [2015-04-04T01:39:59-0500] <@adama> [09:27:31] but, ofc, he said they weren't important and not to bother with them On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 7:46 AM, Mike Hammett <[email protected]> wrote: I had got the impression that he didn't even want user contributions. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: "Jon Auer" <[email protected]> To: "Animal Farm" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, April 4, 2015 2:59:53 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] What Adam Armstrong of Observium thinks of WISPS It's more than just OIDs, adding device support involves a fair amount of fiddly little things. Finding/cropping icon, regex to match the OS/device type to handle it correctly, logic to handle the device-specific things, logic to work around whatever they broke in the MIB (remember when Cambium returned strings instead of ints for some counters?). Then more testing. That's what makes Observium more useful out of the box than something like Cacti where you're adding OIDs onesey twosey to device templates. I think a big part of his reaction is, if you watch IRC, for the past few months to years there have been people asking for WISP features and pretty much nobody in a place to write code to do it. My guess is he is time constrained and would rather work on other things (hence non-responsiveness to offers of money) combined with not wanting to deal with what could be perceived as self-entitled communication from some users. The hostile reaction to WISP gear: CMMMicro is a switch that doesn't even use the switch MIB -> Work done to support WISP devices doesn't pay off in helping support other Enterprise/Wireline devices. Cambium is extra special because they version the PMP MIB against OS rev instead of starting out with a well-designed MIB as spec and fixing OS to match. The easy way out is to ignore that and use the latest but what happens when Cambium updates something? Bug reports from users on new OS complaining that something doesn't work. You update and now there's bug reports from the users that want to stay on old OS for a while. The hard way? Handle every OS rev differently/code gardening responsibility? You just can't win. <I digress> So, WISP gear, he doesn't need it and doesn't care. I need it and care so I write what I need. I may not appreciate the politics of Observium but I'm being pragmatic. I contributed what little Cambium PMP device support there is in Observium currently and I have more devices I'd like to see supported. If the time comes that my contributions are turned away I'll look for another monitoring solution, not out of spite but because I need to monitor all the things. There may come a time when I move to LibreNMS. They seem to have openness & saying yes down but I want to see how they handle saying no to extraneous things/feature creep beyond monitoring metrics (e.g. if it were me, allow/keep rancid integration but just say no to generalized IPAM). You can't please everyone and who/how they choose to please will be insightful. </I digress> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Mike Hammett <[email protected]> wrote: Do we know why Adam blows up whenever people specify OIDs they want to track? I've never bothered to figure it out myself. He made it seem like hte OID was such a small part of everything that needed to be done. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Neil Lathwood" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 1:08:23 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] What Adam Armstrong of Observium thinks of WISPS On 31 March 2015 at 19:04, WaveDirect <[email protected]> wrote: Yeah you should accept at least equipment donations :) Some of us may have spares we can part with and after you are done sell them to help buy other products you want to support. The donation of equipment is a huge ++++. It wouldn't be necessary to send the kit anywhere just provide snmp access, that way we can see what data is available and work on adding support. Thanks, Neil
