If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can join us for a talk I am giving for the BayLISA (Bay Area Large Installations Systems Administrators User Group). http://ww:w.baylisa.org/ and participate to a talk on the design and building of a new open source system and network management tool. Attendance is free, hosted in the luxurious Apple R&D building in Cupertino. Quite often, water and fresh krispy-kremes are served.... a geek delight! No registration is required, free and open to the public. September 16, 2004 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm Apple Campus, Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, USA Town Hall *BLDG 4* Here is the event intro : Forests and Trees://Building an Open Source Discovery & Management Tool with XML 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 and network admins, 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. -- Cheers Philippe philippe ombredanne | nexB - Open IT Asset Management 1 650 799 0949 | pombredanne at nexb.com http://www.nexb.com