Aint Your Ruby

When meeting new people in the programming community, we frequently share what we do in our day jobs.  By day I primarily use Perl, though I have been slowly building up an arsenal of Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications.  But before learning Matz's Ruby, I learned a different flavor of Ruby.  And this 'aint your ruby.'

When I first transitioned to the team I am on now, my primary duties were to provide tier three support of specialized networking equipment.  Our team can be split into two roles:  Tech Support/Project Management and Automation/Programming.  Over time, I migrated over to the Automation side. We use Perl for our tool server scripts and Ruby to get things started.  Off to the internet I went to learn Ruby, only to quickly find that our Ruby was not the Ruby I found online.

The Ruby we use at work stands for:  Rules yoU Build Yourself.  I believe the foundation or underlaying language is Java.

In a nutshell, our networking equipment sends events/traps to a trap collector.  That collector then does some processing on the event and forwards to our Ruby system.  We then perform certain actions using our Ruby based on the received alarms/events.  Below is a small example of code of 'our' Ruby:

// Ping failed to LoopBack interface. IP=
// Able to extract an IP Address
rule DI0780_0020
{
  packet = DI0780;
  when
  {
    ?a: ModemsAlarm(isTypeNull() != 0;
        isStringMatch(?a.getObject(), "^[a-z][a-z][a-z0-9][a-z][a-z][0-9][0-9]+(kvm|mve|rrs[0-9][0-9][a-z][a-z][a-z]*)") == False;
    isStringMatch(?a.getService(), "ALPHA|BETA") !=0;
    isNameMatch("Ping +failed +to +LoopBack .*IP=") != 0);
  }
  then
  {
    modify ?a
    {
      setType("DI0780_CiscoInterfaceDown");
      setContainer("IP",?a.getToken("IP= *([0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+)",?a.getAlarmText()));
      setContainer("ROUTER_IFNAME","Loopback");
      setContainer("DEVICE_NAME",?a.getToken("([a-z0-9]+).els-an.att.net",?a.getSource()));
      setContainer("EVENT_CORELATION_NAME",?a.buildString2("%1 %2",?a.getContainer("DEVICE_NAME"),?a.getContainer("IP")));
      putRubyLog2("DI0780_0020", ?a.buildString1("Received a Generic Ping fail to Loopback alarm, %1", ?a.getName()));
    }
  }
};

Pretty wild stuff, eh?  This is just a short snippet - there is a lot more going on in our 'library' of packets and rules.

Learn Something New Every Day

Last Edited by: John on November 11, 2015