Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, November 20 at 11am EST (UTC -05:00) in the #zenoss IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (port 6667). Please drop in and bring your questions, answers, suggestions and feedback. We can discuss the recent 2.3 release and recent events in the Zenoss community.

We’ll log the session and repost them here if you can’t make it.

Don’t forget you can search for answers to common questions by visiting the Zenoss forums.

Here is a reoccurring calendar event reminder: Zenoss IRC Session (iCal/Outlook)

Tags: development, irc, Zenoss

Zenoss will be exhibiting at LISA ‘08, the Large Installation System Administration Conference put together by USENIX in sunny San Diego. Please stop by our booth to learn more about Zenoss, ask questions and get a quick demo. While you’re there you can sign-up for a chance to win a Chumby and take our survey to possibly win an Asus EeePC. We’ll be sharing a demonstration of a Zenoss/Deki mashup we put together with our friends at MindTouch. Plus we’ll be co-hosting a Birds of a Feather session, Open Source for Large Enterprises. LISA is a great conference for system administrators and we look forward to seeing you there!

Tags: Community, conferences, deki, lisa, mashup, wiki, Zenoss

Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Friday, November 7 at 11am EST (UTC -05:00) in the #zenoss IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (port 6667). Please drop in and bring your questions, answers, suggestions and feedback. We can discuss the 2.3 beta and recent changes in the Zenoss community. Also please note that we have moved it to Friday this week because of an internal scheduling conflict.

We’ll log the session and repost them here if you can’t make it.

Don’t forget you can search for answers to common questions by visiting the Zenoss forums.

UPDATE:
Here’s Friday’s IRC log

http://www.zenoss.com/community/discuss/irc/archives/dev-chat-11-07-2008
other logs are available here:

http://www.zenoss.com/community/discuss/irc

Tags: Community, developers, irc, Zenoss

We’re happy to announce we’re releasing our new Getting Started With Zenoss guide to help ease new users into understanding Zenoss and what it can do for them. It’s intended to help you navigate the application and quickly walk you through several basic tasks that demonstrate Zenoss’ capabilities. After logging in to Zenoss, you will learn how to:
• Add a device, and then view its status and performance details
• Set up, observe, and acknowledge an alert

There are sections that dive a little deeper into the user interface and system features, and show you how to:
• Configure your network for Zenoss
• Add devices to Zenoss through discovery, and then use device classes to monitor them
• Monitor devices and servers, using thresholds for performance event generation
• Create and manage user accounts

Please check it out, we think there’s a lot of useful content and that it’s a great introduction for new and veteran Zenoss users alike.

Getting Started With Zenoss (PDF)

Tags: Community, docs, pdf, Zenoss

You may have noticed we recently added a pair of new forums to forums.zenoss.com to focus some of the discussions going on in the Zenoss community, Zenoss-Testing and Zenoss-Windows.


Zenoss-Testing is our new forum for discussing issues related to the current and future beta tests. When posting regarding beta issues, please verify your defect is a regression from previous versions and if you open a ticket, please followup on your post and add the link. You may use the zenoss/zenoss account to create tickets or use your own account. If you don’t have a Trac account and would like one, please contact me and I will get one created for you.


Zenoss-Windows is a new forum dedicated to all discussions of monitoring Windows servers from Zenoss. Hopefully we can improve the focus of forum discussions and get more accurate and timely answers to issues related to WMI, SNMP and any other Windows questions. I’m sure Windows issues will still be discussed in Zenoss-Users, we just felt that the amount of traffic in Zenoss-Users was getting a bit much so we’re spreading the load and hopefully providing more relevant discussions.


Like all of our other forums, you may subscribe to either forum as a mailing list if you prefer. Just go to http://www.zenoss.com/mailprefs_form and select the forums you wish to receive under “Receive emails”. We look forward to seeing you on both of the new forums and Zenoss-ZenPacks, Zenoss-Dev and of course, Zenoss-Users.

Tags: Beta, Community, forums, testing, windows, Zenoss

Zenoss will be exhibiting at Ohio LinuxFest this weekend in Columbus, OH. Ohio LinuxFest is the showcase for what people in Ohio and the surrounding states are doing with Linux and open source software. It’s great a place for Linux enthusiasts to get together to share their passion for what good software can do. This is an opportunity for everyone… satisfy your curiosity… get free stuff… ask experts… explore the latest in software technology… support freedom… experience the magic of grassroots software.

Please stop by our booth to find out more about Zenoss and to sign-up for a drawing for a Chumby.

We will also be doing a presentation on Zenoss Core at 11:30 a.m. Saturday morning on the Open Source Solutions Stage. Please come by and ask questions and see a demo of Zenoss Core.

Tags: Community, linux, ohio, Zenoss

Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, October 9 at 11am EDT (UTC -04:00) in the #zenoss IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (port 6667). Please drop in and bring your questions, answers, suggestions and feedback. We can discuss the 2.3 beta and recent changes in the Zenoss community.

We’ll log the session and repost them here if you can’t make it.

Don’t forget you can search for answers to common questions by visiting the Zenoss forums.

UPDATE:
Here’s Thursday’s IRC log

http://www.zenoss.com/community/discuss/irc/archives/dev-chat-10-09-2008
other logs are available here:

http://www.zenoss.com/community/discuss/irc

Tags: Community, development, irc, Zenoss

Zenoss is proud to take part in the Texas Python Unconference 2008 on October 4-5 in Austin. This is a FREE event at the University of Texas. We’ll be presenting and hope to see a big turnout of Python fans from Texas and beyond. Presentations are open-format, so if you have something you’d like to demo or present, please sign up.

Tags: Community, Events, Python, unconference, Zenoss

Community member Nathaniel McCallum’s provided instructions for making Zenoss use LDAP or ActiveDirectory for Authentication and Authorization recently had a very important update from Scott Haskell. Users were reporting very slow UI response times and Scott narrowed it down to those installations using LDAP. He tracked down the Zope RAM Cache Manager and updated the documentation on how to greatly improve performance:

Enabling Caching

LDAPMultiPlugins has the ability to cache expensive LDAP look-ups and other operations. This ability, however, is not enabled by default. To enable caching:

• Login to the ZMI (Zope Management Interface) at http://servername:8080/zport/manage
• Click on ‘acl_users(PAS)’ from the center pane or the top-level ‘acl_users’ from the left navigation pane
• From the drop-down list in the upper right, select ‘RAM Cache Manager’ and click add.
• Give the RAM Cache Object a name; e.g. - LDAP Cache
• Click on the newly created object to configure it
• Tweak the properties as needed
• Click on the ‘Associate’ tab
• Click ‘Locate’
• Your LDAPMultiPlugins object (whatever you named it) and userManager will appear as objects that you can associate with the RAM Cache.
• Check your LDAPMultiPlugin object and select ‘Save Changes’.

Caching is now enabled for LDAP.

Scott went even further and documented his debugging and troubleshooting of the problem. Thanks again to Scott for this great tip!

Tags: Community, ldap, tip, Zenoss, Zope

Zenoss is more than happy to announce our sponsorship of Software Freedom Day 2008! Zenoss is committed to supporting the open source community and to helping spread the adoption of open source software. We see first hand the positive impact our software has on businesses, government, and educational institutions around the world, and want to participate in the growth and evangelism of open source software like ours. As a sponsor of Software Freedom Day 2008 we hope to further expose software users and developers to the benefits of transparent, collaborative software development.

Zenoss Austin will be participating in local Software Freedom Day events sponsored by the Austin Linux Users Group and the Austin Ubuntu Team, please come out and join the fun! For more details: http://austinlug.org/node/294

Tags: austin, linux, software freedom day, ubuntu, user groups, Zenoss