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+<?php
+$title = "Altruistic Angelshark";
+if (isset($early) && $early) {
+ return;
+}
+include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/includes/head.php');
+?>
+
+<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.
+
+ TLDR: <a href="https://github.com/adpllc/altruistic-angelshark">Here is the GitHub to a Communication Manager automation suite</a>.
+</p>
+
+<h2>Background</h2>
+
+<p>
+ Altruistic Angelshark is an automation library, command-line application, and
+ HTTP 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 prone to crashing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ Another issue with the tools available to us is we run more than one ACM at
+ our company (about a dozen). 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 12 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 forms. 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(1)</code>, or from pretty much
+ anything that can make HTTP requests. The logins are all in a config file with
+ the same format as the CLI. 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>
+
+<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>
+
+<p>
+ <a href="https://github.com/adpllc/altruistic-angelshark">Here's the GitHub repo where Angelshark lives.</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ I'm pretty proud of this project. It's not a very large project, but that's
+ one of the things I'm proud of. It went through a couple of iterations, and
+ with each I actually ended up removing code that wasn't being used to solve the
+ primary problem. It's the first time I've gotten the chance to release an
+ internal project as FOSS and I'm super stoked. Hopefully someone else will
+ benefit from its release. Maybe I'll delve into its inner workings in another post sometime.
+</p>