BayLISA Monthly Technical Talk & General Meeting

Please RSVP to rsvp@baylisa.org so that we can get an idea of how many will be attending. This event is open to the general public. You do not need to be a member to attend. -------- Where: Apple Computer, Town Hall Auditorium Addr: Four Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA http://www.baylisa.org/locations/current.html -------- Date: Thursday, 16 September 2004 Time: 7:30pm - 9:30pm PST

Forests and Trees: Building an Open Source Discovery & Management Tool with XML Philippe Ombredanne

In a an ideal world everything on the network would have a simple management interface, and every tool could access it. Well, in our real world, large shops typically have at least one version of every major network equipment, hardware, and software produced in the last ten years....

As sysadmins, we rely on a mixture of commercial and open source network management tools and a lot of scripting and elbow grease to accomplish our magic. What about an open source system where all management data could be accessed remotely, without an agent to install on your 1000 servers and all protocols could be used with a friendly URL, and return standardized data that could queried and combined together regardless of where they are coming from?

The recipe? Put a dose of ssh, sftp, http, nmap, smb, snmp, wbem, wmi, nfs, webdav, dns, dhcp, smtp, wins, ldap, sql, mibs, mofs, ping, arp and a couple other in a large pot. Stir well your alphabet soup, throw in a couple RFCs for spice, then add a pinch of URI, XML, Xpath and Xquery, some scripting, heat up to a gentle boil, and you get something that might taste good, or at least different.

In this presentation, we will walk through design issues and trade-offs for such an open source system, and show new ways to extend the web and XML to network management, using existing tools, techniques, and skills. Some live demo will be made of the kind of weird and funny capabilities that are exposed.

Philippe Ombredanne is the CTO of nexB, a developer of open source enterprise applications, the last frontier for open source. He was previously at BearingPoint, Accenture, and McDonnell Douglas, where he worked as a sysadmin, developer, and consultant.

-------- BayLISA meets every month on the 3rd Thursday of the month. A short period of announcements of general interest to the sysadmin community is presented, followed by a technical talk. Anyone may make an announcement; typical are upcoming presentations, user group meetings, employment offers, etc.

For further information on BayLISA, check out our web site: http://www.baylisa.org/

Directions and details about the current meeting and future events: http://www.baylisa.org/events/

BayLISA makes video tapes of the meetings available to members. Tape library is often available at the general meeting, or for more information on available videos, please send email to "video@baylisa.org".

If you have suggestions for speakers, or would like to volunteer to present a talk at one of our meetings, please email the Board and Working Group at "blw@baylisa.org". Thanks! --------