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-<p class="description">
-  I finally got the opportunity to release a long-term project from work online
-  as free and open-source software. Woohoo! It's called Altruistic Angelshark
-  and here's what it's about.
-</p>
-
-<h2>Background</h2>
-
-<p>
-  Altruistic Angelshark is an automation library, command-line application, and
-  RESTful web service for more easily performing CRUD operations on Avaya
-  Communication Managers. If you're not from the world of voice/telephony IT,
-  you should probably know the ACMs use a precambrian mainframe interactive
-  terminal interface to create, modify, and remove stations, extensions,
-  hunt-groups, etc. Your only other choice is a graphical, also interactive,
-  user interface that can perform bulk operations and generate reports in the
-  form of Excel spreadsheets.
-</p>
-
-<h2>Impetus</h2>
-
-<p>
-  Neither the interactive, VT220-style terminal nor the GUI application (Avaya
-  Site Administration) are very easy to work with. When I say that I mean
-  they're not easy to automate over. At our company, it's important for us to be
-  able to automatically clean up old stations in bulk, as an example. Or
-  sometimes we want to automatically run audits on possible malformed data and
-  even fix those entries when they're found. The terminal requires a user's
-  input to constantly paginate through data, or tab through form fields to
-  insert a new entity. The GUI is worse. While it does let you automatically run
-  certain reports to extract useful data, it has to be running to do it. That
-  means a dedicated Windows server, and not a headless one. It's also pretty
-  crash-prone.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-  Another issue with the tools available to us is we run more than one ACM at
-  our company (think > 10). The interactive terminal and GUI are only good for
-  running one operation or "command" on one ACM at a time. This makes it
-  annoying to, for example, search for a particular user's extension on all of
-  the ACMs if you don't know which one it's on. In a worst-case scenario, that
-  means logging into 11 different servers and running the same command.
-</p>
-
-<h2>OSSI: The Dark Magic Enabler</h2>
-
-<p>
-  Long story short, there's a proprietary protocol called OSSI. This protocol is
-  the backbone of ASA, the GUI app. It's a terminal interface, but it's for
-  machine reading and writing instead of interactive use. If you packet sniff
-  ASA you can learn a lot about how it's getting its data and the different
-  things you can use the OSSI terminal for. However, no documentation was made
-  available to us on OSSI because Avaya guards it pretty closely. So, I had to
-  improvise. We already had some knowledgable architects who knew a trick or
-  two. There were also a couple of useful forums available online that gave us
-  more information. Eventually I figured out enough to replicate 99% of what we
-  were doing in ASA. Maybe more on that another time.
-</p>
-
-<h2>Architecting Angelshark, Altrusitically</h2>
-
-<p>
-  Angelshark can do anything ASA can do by reading and writing to an OSSI
-  terminal over an SSH connection. It works on top of the SSH2 library, so you
-  don't need an SSH client installed. It can also run commands on one or more
-  ACMs at a time. All of your logins are stored in a config file.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-  Angelshark's functionality is exposed in a couple of different methods. First,
-  there's a command-line interface, which lets you write commands on STDIN, runs
-  them on the ACMs they're intended for, and then writes their output on STDOUT.
-  It can also automatically parse the output into JSON, CSV, or TSV. This is
-  nice for quickly building Excel reports like ASA.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-  Even better though (I think) is the Angelshark Daemon. This runs Angelshark as
-  an HTTP service, listening for incoming requests. You can submit the same
-  kinds of commands and which ACMs you want them to run on as JSON POSTs. It
-  feeds those to a runner, which executes commands just like the CLI app. It
-  then feeds the results back to you over JSON. You can use this functionality
-  from the browser, in a script with <code>cURL</code>, or from pretty much
-  anything that can make HTTP requests. The logins are all in a config file
-  local to Angelshark and commands are queued. That way multiple users don't
-  have to share passwords and won't overload the ACMs. To speed things up,
-  commands on separate ACMs are run in parallel. That way your output only takes
-  as long as the longest running ACM.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-  There are a couple of relevant projects that I found online which do something
-  similar but don't take it quite as far. They either send OSSI commands from a
-  file over an SSH client with <code>expect</code>-like functionality or
-  automate over an interactive terminal.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-  This second method was something that I was also interested in implementing.
-  In ASA you can dump terminal screenshots for an entire command's output. Some
-  of my team members had tools in place that relied on this. A third sub-project
-  of Altruistic Angelshark is <code>asa-cli</code>, and it does exactly that.
-  For any <code>list</code> or <code>display</code> command, it emulates a VT220
-  terminal and dumps all pages of output to STDOUT.
-</p>
-
-<h2>Free and Open Source</h2>
-
-<p>
-  I got to thinking that this would be a great project to let other developers
-  worldwide use. If it's helpful to us it's got to be helpful to someone else
-  out there. I pitched the idea of open-sourcing Angelshark to management and
-  they were a mix of enthusiastic and indifferent. "Sure, sounds fine," they
-  said as long as nothing internal to the company be divulged with the project.
-</p>
-
-<h2>Tooling and Development</h2>
-
-<p>Rust, libssh, HTTP, etc.</p>