As you may or may not be aware, a lot of work is being completed in the development branch (master, tagged as 1.9) right now to add support for IPv6 to OpenNMS.  The key feature for the 1.10 release is IPv6 along with significant updates to Provisiond so that we can deprecate Capsd (or at least make Provisiond a more complete replacement).  In other words, IPv6 is the impetus for making a 1.10 release and World IPv6 day, June 8th, 2011, is our target date.

There is still a significant amount of work to be completed in order to just tag our next stable release (1.10) and we're making our best efforts.  But, it could be that there just isn't enough time to fully vet all the code changes for a release on that actual day.  A release for that day would mean tagging fairly soon.  More on that later...

In the meantime and more to the point of this message, we're very excited to be actively supporting the World IPv6 Day participants and the ISOC.  OpenNMS' participation means that we will be providing a monitoring service that, by way of our remote pollers, will be monitoring the status of each hosting participant's website.  This will also help ISP participants better understand if there are location specific IPv6 issues.

There will be a status summary page on the ISOC's website that links back to an OpenNMS server's a page on the OpenNMS server, possibly the Distributed Status Map, showing the status of the IPv6 sites from all the remote monitoring locations that we're able to define, based on the locations of volunteers from this community.  So, we are asking for volunteers to run OpenNMS remote pollers on IPv6 connected hosts.  I suspect that the polling intervals will be configured to about every 15 minutes and the polls will be HTTP service checks for each of the participant's IPv6 and IPv4 address.  We will probably also use the PSM and configure the 'host' attribute so that we can verify that IPv6 DNS checks are working, too.  I'll be creating a sample configuration and will solicit your feed back.

If you are interested in volunteering, please contract me directly (david <at> opennms.org) and we'll start coordinating with you with respect to installation and testing (we still have a lot of setup to do on the backend).  I suspect that we will be making OpenNMS 1.10 T-shirts to celebrate our 1.10 release.  For your participation in World IPv6 Day, you'll receive a special addition shirt "OpenNMS Fanatic" 1.10 T-shirt.  (Something a long those lines... I leave the savvy slogans to "rangerrick" :).  I wanted to get this solicitation out to you, now, so that we can better plan the server side configuration (remote monitoring locations, server resources, etc.).

As far as getting 1.10 tagged and released around the time of World IPv6 day, we hope that as many of you as possible can begin running test a instance for the 1.9 snapshot code so that you can update frequently to the latest code and give us feed back in Jira (http://issues.opennms.org).  Install OpenNMS via the snaphshot yum/apt repos and let's get 1.10 vetted for release ASAP.

http://yum.opennms.org/#snapshot

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Installation:Debian#Unstable_.28Nightly_Snapshots.29

Thank you for this brief interruption and I return you to your regularly scheduled programs.

David Hustace

The OpenNMS Group, Inc.