The fourth Management Developers Conference (mandevcon) took place November 17 - 20 2008, in Santa Clara, California.

This is the annual get together of people involved and interested in systems management technologies and standards as defined by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

The DMTF is an industry organization defining systems management standards such as the Common Information Model (CIM) or Web Services for Management (WS-Management).

For my employer, these standards play an important role as they're part of the Novell/Microsoft technical collaboration agreement about interoperable systems management.

Compared to last year, attendance to the conference was very low. I guess only about a third of last years attendance numbers were reached. This decline was mostly attributed to slashed travel budgets due to the tough economy. However, hallway conversations also hinted towards lack of scope of the conference, trying to be everything for everyone. A split into research, development and deployment topics is probably needed.

Presentations during the three days of the conference are divided into three parallel tracks. These were

• the DMTF industry initiatives (http://www.dmtf.org/initiatives)
  like
  • SMI (storage management)
  • CDM (diagnostic)
  • CMDB (configuration database)
  • Virtualization
  • SMASH (server hardware)
  • DASH (desktop hardware)
• CIM core technology
• Web Services for Management
• Developers

The full conference schedule can be obtained from here.
Sadly, the presentation slides (mostly PDF) are only available to attendees (authorization needed).

Being busy with my own slides, I wasn't able to attend as many presentations as I wanted. But I still made it to the following presentations of the first day:

Python CIM providers

Writing CIM instrumentation has a long history of being complicated and needing C or C++. Bart Whiteley of Novell presented pywbem, showing how to write CIM providers in a modern scripting language. Pywbem also comes with a provider generator, spitting out a Python skeleton provider from the definition of its CIM classes.

Multi-Tenant CIMOM, Fact or Fiction

There are a couple of CIM object managers (CIMOMs) available, mostly as open-source. However, CIM providers are mostly CIMOM-specific and can't be easily ported. With the Common Manageablity Programming Interface (CMPI), a standard ABI for CIM providers is established. Still configuration information required to install a provider is different from CIMOM to CIMOM.

This presentation showed typical obstacles in writing portable providers and gave rules and recommendations to make a provider cimom-agnostic.

cmpi-bindings - Compiler Free Provider Development

This was the first of my own presentations. Cmpi-bindings serves a similar purpose like pywbem, freeing CIM provider developers from the need for C or C++.

cmpi-bindings uses SWIG to generate bindings between the Common Manageablity Programming Interface (CMPI, the ABI between a CIMOM and a CIM provider) and a scripting language. Currently supported are Python, Ruby and Perl. Any other SWIG supported language can be added fairly easily. cmpi-bindings use SWIG in an innovative way, allowing to call into the scripting language from the CIMOM. This effectively reverses the typical flow of control for SWIG, which is calling a C or C++ library from a scripting language.

Testing with PyWBEM

Automated testing of CIM providers is often neglegted and developers use plain CIM browsers to explore their code.

Tim Potter showed various ways for testing providers with the help of Python and pywbem. Most interesting was learning about Twisted, a Python networking framework for asynchronous programming. This stuff makes your brain hurt and the O'Reilly book title illustration is worth a thousand words ;-)

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On day 2, I had the opportunity to attend Microsofts 'Strategic Architect Forum' in San Francisco. So I skipped the mandevcon presentations for that day. I'll blog later about the Microsoft conference.

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The last day had a complete track on WS-Management.
It started with a generic introduction by Josh Cohen from Microsoft. Josh is leading the WS-Management work group within the DMTF and the driving force behind Microsofts adaption of an open standard for systems management. Too bad his presentation isn't available online.

Openwsman swig bindings

Anas Nashif, of AutoYaST fame, showed the Openwsman swig bindings Openwsman is an open source implementation of the WS-Management protocol, used e.g. by Microsoft Windows for remote systems management.

These bindings allow for easy ws-management client programming using one's favorite programming language. Fully supported currently are Python, Ruby and Java (yuck!).

Scripting openwsman server plugins

WS-Managment is a generic protocol for resource management. Each resource is identified by a universal resource identifier (URI), which onsists of a namespace and a resource part. The openwsman server maps namespaces to plugins and lets the plugin handle the specific resource implementation.

Openwsman includes default plugins for the generic Identify operation and for CIM operations (WS-CIM). Writing plugins in C is easy, using a scripting language makes it even easier.

My presentation shows how the problem was approached and describes the implementation. It is in an alpha state currently and needs some more work to become fully functional. This will also require some changes in the openwsman plugin API to fully support plugins.
The code is part of the openwsman svn repository and available here.

ActiveWSMAN

One thing that bothers me when coding against the openwsman client API is the amount of protocol knowledge needed. Doing a simple enumeration call requires one to know about the enumerate, pull and release protocol functions. Not to mention keeping track of the context.

Having enjoyed the ActiveRecord pattern as implemented in Ruby On Rails, I collected some thoughts around using this for WS-Management client programming.

The presentation shows a concept on how to make a developers life much easier. It focuses on resources and their semantics, completely hiding the internals of the ws-management protocol.

A proof-of-concept implementation based on ActiveRecord exists and I itend to complete it in the next couple of weeks.

Torrents are now available:

• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1)
• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live USB: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1) (instructions)

Thanks to...

• ... Benjamin Weber, Masim Sugianto, Andre Duffeck and Magnus Boman for have mirrored openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CDs and USBs.
• ... Marcus Rueckert for have created torrents, and Andreas Jaeger (you know why ;-) )
• ... Stephan Kulow for the useful tips given on how to create the ISOs.
• ... Stephan Binner for patches, suggestions, and feedback.
• ... Joe Brockmeier for the release announcement.
• ... you (!) for the time spent reading this crap of blog :-P
  

Finalizing, even though I strongly encourage users to upgrade to KDE 4 not only for how awesome it is (KDE 4.1.3 on openSUSE 11.1 is solid as rock!), but also because KDE 3 will be officially unsupported and thus not included on openSUSE 11.2 and later versions, I would like to hear what's in users mind about a possibility of having KDE 3 and openSUSE 11.1+ KDE3 Live CDs maintained and released by the community - any volunteers?

(Yes, I use KDE 4 and hell not stepping back to KDE 3! heh)

After quite some time I went on a trip to Ireland again. The first two days I stayed in Longford and went on a sight-seeing tour, i.e., a friend drove me around. Finally I could see the river Shannon and Mount St. Patrick. From the statue which is some meters up the hill we had a lovely view over the little islands below. There was Achill as well where I once ambitiously wanted to take part in a half-marathon. Needless to say I had some excuses not to go there. I think we also went to Westport. Nice tourist town with colourful houses. On our way back and before going to Lord of the Dance in Roscommon we drove through uninhabited valleys and came to the only fjord in Ireland. Somehow the whole journey reminded me a bit of the volcanoe tour on Lanzarote. It's a bizarre and lovely landscape. After Lord of the Dance there was dense fog and we could only crawl back to Longford. There were no houses on miles on end, no cars either. Only thick fog. But then it approached. The Gritter (not the Critter as I first thought). I could see huge yellow lights subdued by the fog on the other lane. My friend said: I think that's The Gritter. He seemed somehow agitated and excited. He repeated several times: I think this is The Gritter. I didn't dare asking. My friend slowed down even more and I thought he's going to stop for an encounter with The Gritter. I still didn't dare asking. Little stones were making noises when hitting the car. And then it was gone. The Gritter. The Gritter is the creature that grits salt on the street. Somehow I was relieved when it was gone. I felt like in this film 'The Fog' and the gritter being a lost soul coming out from the fog to have its revenge.
I was really lucky in Dublin then on my walk to the lighthouse. There was sun and almost no wind at all.

The River Shannon


The Fjord





Dublin Bay





Bay with Lighthouse



The Lighthouse



Lighthouse Walk



A Seagull on the Salty Beach

It is cold outside ... but for the ones longing for spring or summer, well there is time for every season and sunny cold winter is better than rainy fall.

Just the cold feet suck.

Relaxed a lot between the holidays, spent new years eve at colleagues with yummy food and relaxed chatting, watched various of 25c3 talks, but did not visit Berlin.

At work since 5th of January again, with the 6th being a public holiday here.

On the 6th we ventured to Pottenstein, where they hold a catholic procession through town ... and burn hundreds of fires around the valley... The latter is the reason for the large number of visitors :) Took and uploaded some pictures (go right in the photostream).
Pretty cold there, nice fires, but well .. i like easter fires more :)

Wine 1.1.12 packages published, lots of security updates released as usual.

Relaxation mostly gone after 4 days of work. :/

Update: Situation is again under control. Benji Weber, Masim Sugianto and Andre Duffeck have setup mirrors (THANKS!) - see MIRRORS file. Temporarily the Live CDs (not the USBs) will be automatically redirected to Benji's.

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Since the release announcement of the Unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CD for openSUSE 11.1 the server where the ISOs are hosted at has been running out of bandwidth due to the huge amount of requests for downloading those files, and since the server also host other important client accounts, the sysadmin offered me two choices:

1. disable the account
2. get mirrors around
   

In the meantime I was forced to move the files away and wait for some mirrors to fight back all the download requests. So, whoever can provide mirroring of these files please contact me (comment, email or IRC)! Torrents are also allowed and recommended!

My apologies for any inconvenience caused...

P.S.: I didn't expected all this traffic around the ISOs... the openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 Live CDs didn't get that many attention. Well, it's a good sign though ;-)

Quoting "Unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CD for openSUSE 11.1" story from openSUSE News:

Want classic KDE on openSUSE, without the full DVD download? Carlos Goncalves has you covered. openSUSE 11.1 Live CDs and USB images featuring KDE 3.5 are now available for download.

Created by openSUSE community member Carlos Goncalves, the KDE 3.5 Live CD and USB images contain openSUSE 11.1 plus several key updates.

In addition to KDE 3.5, the Live CD offers OpenOffice.org 3.0, Smolt, Amarok 1.4.10, KDEPIM3, Firefox 3.0.4, K3b, and many other useful applications. You can see the entire package list here: package-lists-openSUSE

And, of course, openSUSE has the current KDE releases covered as well. You can download the official openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Live CDs based on KDE 4.1.3, or if you want to follow KDE development, Stephan Binner has created a KDE Four Live CD featuring KDE 4.2 Beta 2.

Note that the KDE 3.5 live CD is an "unofficial" release. Even though it's not a formal release, we're excited by the work Carlos has put into supporting KDE 3.5 and showing what can be done with the build service. Want to create your own Live CD featuring openSUSE? See Carlos Build Service Live CD project on creating a Live CD here: home:cgoncalves:LiveCD, and Masim's "How to Make openSUSE 11.1 KDE 3.5 LiveCD or LiveDVD" article.

Download

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD and USB are available for i686 and x86_64 architectures:

• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1)
• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live USB: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1) (instructions)

If you want to report any bug found use Novell's Bugzilla for better tracking. Feedback can be sent via email, IRC and comment in here.

A huge thanks to Stephan 'Beineri' Binner, Stephan 'coolo' Kulow, and Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier for their assistance and effort!

We hope that the openSUSE community will find it useful and have a lot of fun with KDE 3.5!

Mirrors administrators around the world, I think I will need your help! Please mirror these files and let me know the URL so I can point people out to your mirrors instead ;-)

This is just a short reminder that in openSUSE 11.1, it is possible to search online for packages in YaST as described in this blog (thanks to Lukas and Bubli for making this reality!).

In short, just type on command line:

/sbin/yast2 webpin_package_search

and you will get this UI for an online search and install of packages:

Enjoy!