Re: An enterprise-ish request (ie, basically SNMP)
On 13.09.2007, at 18:27, Jim Jagielski wrote: On Sep 13, 2007, at 12:11 PM, Erik Abele wrote: On 11.09.2007, at 19:26, Jim Jagielski wrote: ... I actually work for a company which is currently working out the logistics of open sourcing and donating our SNMP module. It would serve as a nice base to start from. Nice! I'd be happy to involve myself here too and provide patches, docs and also test the stuff; don't have the time (or interest) to start something from scratch though... Our pref, of course, would be to follow what we did with mod_ftp and donate it to the ASF and the httpd project. Sure, makes sense to follow that example and start in the Incubator; happy to give my +1 then and join the PPMC etc... We're in the process of cleaning up all the legal aspects and some code cleanups before we ping the PMC about it... ;) Cool :) Cheers, Erik
Re: An enterprise-ish request (ie, basically SNMP)
On Sep 13, 2007, at 12:11 PM, Erik Abele wrote: On 11.09.2007, at 19:26, Jim Jagielski wrote: On Sep 11, 2007, at 1:11 PM, Jeff McAdams wrote: For the benefit of the list...if there are other developers, in addition to Nick, that might be interested in taking a look at this project and tackling it, let me know and we can certainly talk. I actually work for a company which is currently working out the logistics of open sourcing and donating our SNMP module. It would serve as a nice base to start from. Nice! I'd be happy to involve myself here too and provide patches, docs and also test the stuff; don't have the time (or interest) to start something from scratch though... Our pref, of course, would be to follow what we did with mod_ftp and donate it to the ASF and the httpd project. We're in the process of cleaning up all the legal aspects and some code cleanups before we ping the PMC about it... ;)
Re: An enterprise-ish request (ie, basically SNMP)
On 11.09.2007, at 19:26, Jim Jagielski wrote: On Sep 11, 2007, at 1:11 PM, Jeff McAdams wrote: For the benefit of the list...if there are other developers, in addition to Nick, that might be interested in taking a look at this project and tackling it, let me know and we can certainly talk. I actually work for a company which is currently working out the logistics of open sourcing and donating our SNMP module. It would serve as a nice base to start from. Nice! I'd be happy to involve myself here too and provide patches, docs and also test the stuff; don't have the time (or interest) to start something from scratch though... Cheers, Erik
Re: An enterprise-ish request (ie, basically SNMP)
On Sep 11, 2007, at 1:11 PM, Jeff McAdams wrote: For the benefit of the list...if there are other developers, in addition to Nick, that might be interested in taking a look at this project and tackling it, let me know and we can certainly talk. I actually work for a company which is currently working out the logistics of open sourcing and donating our SNMP module. It would serve as a nice base to start from.
Re: An enterprise-ish request (ie, basically SNMP)
Nick Kew wrote: > On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:09:25 -0400 > Jeff McAdams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I look forward to being able to answering any questions about our >> desires and hope to see some discussion and progress on an SNMP >> implementation. If people think some financial support would be >> helpful in bringing this about, I'm certainly willing to talk about >> that and work out what my company would be willing to do along those >> lines. > Some apache developers, including myself[1], make a living doing > contract work for companies with development needs, such as yours. > If you have a budget, I'll be happy to talk to you. The fact you're > looking to make it available as open source will qualify you for > a reduction in my standard rate. While I don't have anything hard and fast, like I said, I have talked, informally with some management folks around here about possibly getting some professional development work done on it and didn't get much push-back on it, so it seems likely that we could make something happen. Unfortunately, that means I don't really have any real numbers to consider at this point though I could probably talk in off-the-record generalities to at least get an idea if what it'd take to get it done. Certainly having Apache developers, such as yourself, would be a great thing for us. I figure its more likely to be a successful project if we've got someone working on it that's already familiar with the httpd code base and best practices for module development, etc. For the benefit of the list...if there are other developers, in addition to Nick, that might be interested in taking a look at this project and tackling it, let me know and we can certainly talk. Thanks! -- Jeff McAdams "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: An enterprise-ish request (ie, basically SNMP)
On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:09:25 -0400 Jeff McAdams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I look forward to being able to answering any questions about our > desires and hope to see some discussion and progress on an SNMP > implementation. If people think some financial support would be > helpful in bringing this about, I'm certainly willing to talk about > that and work out what my company would be willing to do along those > lines. Some apache developers, including myself[1], make a living doing contract work for companies with development needs, such as yours. If you have a budget, I'll be happy to talk to you. The fact you're looking to make it available as open source will qualify you for a reduction in my standard rate. If your budget doesn't extend to a professional developer, maybe you can look for some other arrangement, perhaps working with other prospective users of such a module, or taking pot-luck with a student. But you're unlikely to prompt anyone into developing it from scratch unless they themselves have an existing need for it. [1] http://apache.webthing.com/ -- Nick Kew Application Development with Apache - the Apache Modules Book http://www.apachetutor.org/
An enterprise-ish request (ie, basically SNMP)
Over the past couple of years, the company I work for has begun to make use of Apache httpd quite a bit. At this point, we feel like we have enough experience under our belts that we've come to make a request. First, a little bit of background, if you will permit me. We use httpd largely as a dispatcher of web requests to back end application servers, we don't do much static content serving, and virtually no CGI based serving, with httpd. We're adding a little bit more, over time, as we make more use of the capabilities of httpd, but at this point, our usage of httpd for static and CGI content is very limited. We front-end our Apache httpd systems with a network load-balancing device (fail-over HA pair, actually). We use an enterprise Network Management System that is heavily based on SNMP. We have good SNMP-based visibility into the load-balancing system, and have decent (and improving) SNMP-based visibility into our application server systems. We subscribe to the concept that we call "single pane of glass" for our network monitoring system. We strive (and largely succeed) in getting SNMP-based visibility into our NMS system from basically all of our systems from network edge, back through farthest back-end servers. The glaring missing link is Apache httpd. I know there are some SNMP implementations as Apache httpd modules. Unfortunately, the capabilities of these modules, and what they report on (their MIB) is so limited as to be essentially pointless. Perhaps they provide a good basic framework to build on for a more substantial MIB reporting from httpd? I don't know the answer to that as I'm not a good enough of a programmer to critique that. So, here's my request. I (speaking for the company that employs me, as well as myself) would like to see the implementation of a good SNMP monitoring and alerting capability in httpd. It would be nice to have a good implementation of something along the lines of WWW-MIB, as a starting point. For our specific needs, I would really like to see a MIB that exposes Apache httpd's idea of the status of the connectivity and responsiveness of the back-end application servers that httpd is dispatching requests to. Currently we're largely using httpd 2.0.x and mod_jk with a smattering of 2.2.x with mod_proxy_* (including mod_proxy_balancer) with an ongoing move to 2.2.x across the board. This last meaning that a 2.2.x specific implementation would be ok in my mind, though I suspect there would be a large base of users that would love to have the capabilities in 2.0.x. Since I know that the mod_jk and mod_proxy_* mechanisms are radically different, I realize that an implementation that supports both 2.0.x and 2.2.x is unlikely. The company that I work for really doesn't have a great deal of expertise in C programming (we're mostly a Java shop), so we don't really have great resources to do this in house. We do make use of significant quantities of open source software packages, and like to "give back" to the community where we can. If we were to realistically be able to do an implementation like this, we would certainly be looking to contribute it back into the httpd mainstream source. In lieu of that, however, its likely that we could provide some amount of financial support in an effort to encourage an implementation along these lines, again, with the idea of it being contributed back into the mainstream httpd source. I don't have an official offer from my management to support it, but informal discussions show management support for the idea if that would help bring an implementation about. So, I hope that this will get the discussion started about an SNMP implementation. Like I said, I'm really not a programmer, so I'm not terribly active on dev@, but wanted to bring this idea to the attention of httpd developers. I look forward to being able to answering any questions about our desires and hope to see some discussion and progress on an SNMP implementation. If people think some financial support would be helpful in bringing this about, I'm certainly willing to talk about that and work out what my company would be willing to do along those lines. Thanks! -- Jeff McAdams "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
