NetHorus Blog

Has it really been a week!?

• Presentation – the device management page is now tabbed and takes up less screen ‘real estate’, and it’s more fun to use.
• ActiveScaffold – now works on the current version of Rails in Debian ‘sid’.  It was broken for a couple of weeks.
• Visualisation – thanks to GraphViz, it’s now possible to draw hierarchical diagrams of interfaces and hardware.  You will need to install the GraphViz gem.
• Minor fixes – plenty, in particular searching for a device by serial number now works.

I’m really happy with the way NetHorus is progressing.  Check out the timeline on Trac for the latest checkins.

It’s been just over a week since the last update, and over a week since the one before that.  I want to reassure you that development is still continuing, hampered somewhat by the mysterious failing of ActiveScaffold on my Debian development systems.  I still have no idea why, and troubleshooting is proving difficult given the limited time I have right now with work and stuff.

Anyway, the bits you really want to hear:

• Unit testing – the SNMP proxy now has a couple of unit tests
• Troubleshooting – hampered slightly by a bad security fix in Debian’s Net-SNMP package and mysterious RPC-XML proxy delays, there are now benchmarks in the Device class to track down slow SNMP responders, and lots more debugging information in the SNMP proxy
• Little bugs – the adslLineTable is only displayed for interfaces whose type is ‘adsl’ and where there is no physical connector present; interfaces that no longer exist are deleted from the database; the interface traffic monitor has gone, and the ent_physical_element table has been renamed to fall in line with Rails’ naming conventions, we now log when ifHighSpeed is used for a more accurate reflection of interface speed, enums are returned in numeric and text format
• NEW – We now use EtherLike-MIB objects (currently to display interface duplex)
• NEW – Support for the Entity Physical Table, which will be used with the Entity Logical Table to build up a hierarchy of a device’s build and allow ‘impact analysis’ – showing what will happen if a card fails.