Better late than never...

Here is the link to the documentation for ITM 6.2.1

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v15r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.itm.doc/welcome.htm, right where it belongs :)

 

-- Robert

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

Nothing technical in this post, it's more philosophical in nature.

The little piece of land I come from, Israel, has a chaotic history. We have numerous commemoration events for our many, many wars and our many. many fallen.

Despite this, I have always liked the symbolism of Armistice Day/Remembrance Day/Veteran's Day.
Both the symmetry of the time chosen, and the name of the War it commemorates - The War to End All Wars.

It seems like since then, every armistice is actually a temporary crease fire to reorganize for the next war.

The following poem, is probably the best known of World War I's poems:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae

I do not hear it, or read it, without getting a lump in my throat.

While most of my examples will, necessarily, be local, I believe that most of what I will be writing is universal in nature. Bear with me, if you can get through the wall of text.
I have two commentaries on it I would like to share.

First, the third stanza can be read as war time propaganda. It may well have been, but since interpretation is on the part of the reader and not the writer, I prefer to interpret The torch not as the weapon used by the soldiers, but as the cause they fought for. This is a cry to the survivors - make sure that soldiers, sent to sacrifice their lives for their fellow men (and women), are fighting for a cause which is to be held up high. Do not break faith. Do not let this sacrifice be for selfish, ignoble,  low reasons.
The soldiers, laying down their lives for the greater good, deserve this courtesy - they did not die so that war could continue - they died so war could be stopped.
Here in Israel, it is common wisdom that combat soldiers who finish their army service after doing their regular conscript's time  (2-3 years) and have spent a lot of time doing "dredge work"  - 19 year olds who man roadblocks, deciding whether a woman is in labor or is hiding dynamite under here clothes, picking and choosing who shall cross the roadblock to work and who shall return with empty pockets to their homes, often leave the army as hawks - thinking that the only language their adversaries understand is violence and shows of strength. How can they think otherwise when their mind has been dragged in the mud for years?
Contrariwise, senior officers, when they leave, often seem more dovish - thinking that there is only so much that can be done with shows of strength and understand that violence can only contain violence from the other side. It cannot "cure" it. Only diplomacy can do this.

To my mind, those who choose to continue the status-quo with violent means without seeking a proper, diplomatic solution simultaneously are guilty of breaking the faith with those who laying in their countries equivalent of Flanders' Field.

My second comment is an observation. Poppies grow well in Flanders' Field because the ground is rich in humanity. The grounds around Nazi Death Camps, where millions of people (especially Jews) were cruelly tortured, executed and cremated is likewise rich in beautiful flowers.
If there is a God, the transformation between the ugliness of death and the beauty of nature must be an omen of some kind.

 

--Robert

ITM ODBC Universal Agent tips

As you know, (or don't know,) Tivoli Monitoring has a quick-and-simple way of extracting data from databases on windows machines. By creating a Universal Agent of the type ODBC, you can simply write your select into the mdl file and go from there. On Unixes you need to use a script UA and do a little more work.

Two things which I've dealt with in the past week:

• There is a limit to how many lines the UA will pull out of the database. So if your select results in hundreds of lines, only the first 100 will actually be displayed in the portal or will cause situations to fire. You can change this maximum in the ENV file, by setting the parameter KUMP_ODBC_MAX_ROWS to whatever you need.
• The SQL query in the mdl file must be on one line. I had a nicely formatted looong SQL which ran along a number of lines. The results were... not what I wanted (although the mdl compiled properly and there were no SQL errors). I suppose the newline character did some mischief with the SQL parser during runtime and it's not used by the mdl compiler.

Anyway, hope this helps someone :)

--Robert

New versions...

I guess it's just that time of the year again!

TBSM 4.2 came out recently, as did Impact 5.1.

Yesterday I saw both TADDM 7.1.2 and ITM 6.2.1 in passport advantage.

Here's a brief list of TADDM changes from the release notes:

TADDM 7.1.2 gives you the rich details of configuration items with automated, agentless discovery of the assets and their application dependencies, as well as a Discovery Library technology to help leverage data from other sources.

TADDM is a configuration management tool that helps IT operations personnel ensure and improve application availability in application environments. The operational staff gets a top-down view of applications so the staff can quickly understand the structure, status, configuration, and change history of their business-critical applications. This view immediately isolates issues in times of performance or availability problems and enables more effective planning for application change without disruption. An agent-free creation and maintenance of a Configuration Management Database (TADDM database) is delivered without requiring custom infrastructure modeling. TADDM also provides complete cross-tier dependency maps, topological views, change tracking, event propagation, and detailed reports and analytics.

The following list includes the functionality that was added for the TADDM 7.1.2:

• BIRT Report Infrastructure
• Limited IPV6 Capability
• Console Installation Capability
• Improved View Performance
• Improved Details Performance
• Improved ECMDB synchronization times
• Improved API query performance
• Improved post-discovery processing performance
• Improved TBSM Integration
• Drill Down Capability for Business Applications
• Comparison Report From Domain Manager
• Cross-Domain Comparison reports from ECMDB
• Additional MQ Cluster Information for zOS
• Reduced WAN traffic during anchor usage
• Upgraded first failure data capture tools
• Weblogic 9.x and 10.x sensor support
• Simplified migration from previous releases
• Windows 2008 Support
• AIX 6.1 Support
• Bug Fixes

Updated documentation is here.

ITM 6.2.1 doesn't seem to have updated the documentation yet, but here's a list I have of it's changes:

• Adaptive Monitoring
• TEPS Changes
• Event Slot Customization - replaces my older post!
• Managed node search bar
• Zoom in charts
• SSO with Java Webstart
• SPB bundles for TCM/TPM
• More CLI abilities
  • Replace wadminep function (getfile, put file, list dir, execfile)
  • CLI for historical data configuration collection
  • Remotely invoke pdcollect tool
  • Expand tacmd createsit (display item, consecutive samples, state)
• Agent Builder
  • Support 100+ connections for remote monitoring
  • Browser for logfile/script monitors
  • Add CIM provider
• Out of the box Agentless OS monitoring packages
• Infrastructure improvements
• 64-bit zLinux and AIX support
• Support TDW on zOS
• Support TEC events from z Hub
• Manage agent fail-over
• Asynchronous Deployment
• Support 64 bit counters
• Agent Manager Services - an extra agentlet who manages the regular agents
• Improved TADDM integration

Of those, the Adaptive Monitoring and Event Slots seem extremely interesting and I really want to try them out!

-- Robert

Edit: forgot a few things in ITM...

Ancient Greek Technology

An exhibition on ancient Greek technology titled "Greece and Technology: a perspective through time" will be soon be hosted at the premises of the "Teloglion Foundation of Art" in Thessaloniki, organized by the University of Thessaloniki (Faculty of Sciences).

 

The exhibition will open on November 12 and will run through January 11, 2009. The purpose of the exhibition is to highlight the recent scientific findings which show that ancient Greeks were technologically more advanced that it was previously thought.
Within the framework of the exhibition a series of lectures has been announced to take place within 2008. 
Among the lectures delivered, one will focus on the famous Antikythera Mechanism , a device which could predict eclipses decades in advance and was also used to record the four-yearly cycle of the original Olympic Games.

 

Visit the co-organizing bodies: Thessaloniki Science Center and Technology Museum (in Greek)
and the Society for Ancient Greek Technology Studies; Ancient Greece OnLine

 

-- Robert

How shall I TADDM the network, if I don't know what it's like?

TADDM, which I've written before, is IBM's detective. It sniffs out and find everything that's connected to the network, interrogates them to find out what's inside and maps out the relationships (who's talking to whom and and who's ignoring whom).

Now, the first time I have to remove the dewy-eyed look from users is when I inform them that, yes, TADDM can discover their unique 3rd-party/in-house applications, BUT... we have to tell TADDM what these products look like so that it can "tag" them correctly. They want TADDM to be able to "guess" or even divine which of the thousands of processes and files scattered around the network are related to which business service they run. TADDM can do that, but it need at least a little help!

The other thing they don't like is when I have to feed TADDM the TCP/IP address scopes and user/passwords of their servers. They say "Why do I need to enter all these things if TADDM is supposed to discover everything by itself?". I must then reassure them that they do not want TADDM to be able to hack into their secure systems without the right credentials!
OK, so TADDM requires the users/passwords for the servers (it can also get the passwords from the organizations LDAP repository) but why does it need me to enter the IP addresses?

For two good reasons: (1) So that  you can give each IP list (scope in TADDM jargon) it's own set of credentials, i.e. IP 200.100.10.1 through 200.100.10.255 uses a certain user/password and a another scope uses a different one. (2) So that you can schedule discoveries by scope, and that way you're not doing the whole net each time.

But... what happens when an organization doesn't know how to split up it's IP range into separate environments? Say there are 200 servers, split into development, test, production and DRP environments all overlapping in the same IP scope. If I tried running discovery, I'd get tons of errors for using wrong user/passwords and I'd get a lot of unneeded devices when all I want is the production environment, unless I matched up IP to environment first.

Of course, the whole point of TADDM is that you don't necessarily know your network ahead of time. So what do you do?

The solution is a bit iterative, but you're not running into errors on the way and you don't need to feed TADDM any knowledge about the way the network is mapped ahead of time. What happens is that TADDM creates something called Logical Connections between devices when it detects that one uses the other. Logical Connections can be between application servers and databases, web servers and storage area network devices, switches and ... you get the idea). Now, once TADDM has completed a discovery, it maps out the Logical Connections between items which lie within it's scope. LC which go beyond the scope are listed, but not displayed on the map.

To leverage this, what we do is get our nose under the tent - we discover a few servers we know are in the right environment, find out which servers they are connected to, add them to the scope and continue till we have discovered everything in the environment we are interested in.

There are two ways of listing Logical Connections outside of the TADDM GUI:

1. ./api.sh -u username-p password find LogicalConnection
   api.bat for Windows users.
2. Connect to the database and run select distinct fromip_x, toip_x from logcconn

The first command will create an XML file with all the data, the second regular SQL. I used the second command (slightly modified to ignore 127.0.0.1 and output the data nicely) to create a script file which runs loadscope after the select and then I get an ever expanding scope which contains items which are talking to each other.

Don't forget that loadscope looks for a file formatted like this:

IP_Address/range/subnet, Exceptions, Description 
IP_Address/range/subnet, Exceptions, Description 
IP_Address/range/subnet, Exceptions, Description

Thanks to Byron for the help :)

Hmph.... This post seems a little too long for what I wanted to say... I hope I was clear in the end.

-- Robert

Hannibal - The Webcomic

Many people's first exposure to the ancient world of Rome is through the books they read as children. I first encountered Julius Caesar in reading the legendary comic book series Asterix. Mixing the old world with new technologies means that web-comic interpretations of the classical world  were just a matter of time:

From <http://newsok.com/hannibals-epic-campaign-comes-to-web-based-comic/article/3309191>:
=============================================================================
Hannibal's epic campaign comes to Web-based comic
WORD BALLOONS
BY MATTHEW PRICE
Published: October 10, 2008
Most have heard the story of the Carthaginian general Hannibal leading elephants across the Alps to face the Romans. Writer Brendan McGinley wants you to see it.
"There's already plenty of good prose about Hannibal, (but) no good visual medium for a story that crackles with so many unforgettable images, like elephants on the Alps or Mago Barca spilling dead Romans' rings on the Senate floor," he said. "Maybe Vin Diesel's long-stalled film will change that; Victor Mature's sure didn't."
McGinley and artist Mauro Vargas, along with colorist Andres Carranza, bring the Hannibal story to life — with some humorous asides — re-enacting the second Punic War on the Shadowline Web comics page, <http://www.shadowlinecomics.com/webcomics/#/hannibalgoestorome/>.

Vargas "really defines and expresses his characters; you need that where history meets comedy," McGinley said. McGinley said the trickiest part of creating "Hannibal Goes to Rome" is sorting which Carthaginian did what.
"There are so many Hannos, Hannibals, Hasdrubals and Giscos!" McGinley meshes historical accounts to create the tale, which he then passes on to Vargas to draw. "The historians and artist make it easy for me; all I have to do is throw a little observational humor into the mouths of the poor schlubs caught up in events," he said.
"Hannibal Goes to Rome" was first a candidate on DC Comics' Zuda site (www.zudacomics.com). Zuda is a site created to seek fresh talent.
After competing on Zuda, McGinley hooked up with Shadowline's Jim Valentino, who was looking to launch some Web comics.