I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but figured it was time…

I’m no longer working on an update to Weathermap to support Cacti 1.x

As I’ve said before, I don’t use Cacti or Weathermap myself anymore, so there isn’t really much motivation to work on it. It’s a job now, and I have another one of those!

It’s been 14 years, and while it was fun for the first 10 or so of those, it’s never really grown to be a collaborative project, mainly thousands of hours of my personal time (and some money too). There are a few exceptions for specific features along the way, but 5000 forum posts later, I don’t have a network ops job anymore, so it’s going to have to have some other motivation to keep going.

My immediate plans for Weathermap are to split it up into multiple repos, for at least the core map-drawing stuff, and the Cacti plugin, and possibly the editor. I will probably continue working slowly on the core, although I’m more interested in rewriting that in Javascript at this point. I’m not aware of  many issues with the core drawing and data collection, currently.

One of my design goals has been to separate out the Cacti-specific stuff for some time, to make it easier to integrate with other NMS tools (e.g. LibreNMS or Zabbix). That will also make it easier for someone with a vested interest to take on those parts for their platform, without having to deal with the others. The actual core map-drawing and data managing stuff is actually fine, and faster than ever! So someone else could take over the Cacti part – either starting from the 0.98 (“old”) version again, or carrying on with React. That said, there have been only a few outside code contributions to the project over the years. Hopefully that can change.

For anyone interested in taking on that Cacti support – it’s not as huge as it looks, once you take away the map-drawing! It’s managing entries in a few tables, plus some stuff specific to Cacti’s poller (“boost support”), and the datasource plugins that are only relevant to Cacti. A good starting point would probably be cigamit’s patches from a couple of years ago. Ask, and I will go digging in the change history for them.

I’d like to thank everyone who has supported Weathermap over the years – mostly within the Cacti community, but also outside (thanks UKFAST for hosting support in the last year, for example, and Groundwork Open Source all those years ago for a chance to meet with fellow projects). You were definitely in the “fun” part! 

Finally, I think I have enough confirmation now to make 0.98a an actual release version, too. So I will do that later today. That’s 0.98 with appropriate updates to work on PHP 7.