Author: arved

Ryan McBride gave an impressing presentation about building a redundant Firewall with PF and CARP using two Soekris boxes at EuroBSDcon.
I had to buy a Soekris box immediately and today I put it into production replacing my old EPIA based Firewall.
This went well, all i had to do was replacing the vr-interfaces of the EPIA with the sis interfaces of the Soekis in /etc/pf.conf.
I have not played around with CARP and PFSYNC yet, because all Howtos and Manpages are based on an OpenBSD configuration (yes even the FreeBSD manpages), so they are a bit difficult to read.
My main problem is, that my Firewall also terminates my IPv6 tunnel, and i am not sure i can use the gif interface as a carp interface. I probably have to ask for help on freebsd-pf.
But first i have to finish my work for this terms university courses…..

I wrote before, that i wanted a webcam, that is supported by BSD.
A few weeks ago i bought a Creative Vista without checking if it was supported by FreeBSD, because it was really cheap (IIRC ca. 16 EUR).
Today I finally tried to get it working. It is supported by the graphics/spcaview port.
Here is one of the first pictures:

Yes the quality is quite bad, but what would you expect from a cheap camera.
Checkout this page for a recent page.

On Sunday it was naturally hard to get up early to arrive at roberto’s talk in time. I must admit i still don’t see the need for a Distributed Sourcecodemangementsystem especially with todays ubitous Internet access.
Afterwards i listened to Andre’s talks on FreeBSDs TCP/IP stack. The first one didn’t contain much news for people following the FreeBSD Mailinglists but the second was quite interesting but unfortunately he ran out of time.
After lunch at the university mensa i listened to Riondas talk about jails. Although i am using FreeBSD jails for a few months now “in production” i learned something new.
The mystery session was a bit poor, although the panel did a good job it ended up in a bikeshed, because everyone wanted to tell his opinion about BSDs PR whithout listening to the previous comments.
After the end we went to a strange Kitsch-pub to drink a few beers because we had a few hours until our train to Vienna left in the evening. While changing trains at Zürich main station we met Rionda for his train back to Italy.
Now i need to catch up sleep and other stuff…

Later I went to silby’s TCP/IP talk, which had some quite interesting graphs how broken Linux is and how many differences there are between the different BSDs.
After lunch was the X session. Matthias Hopf of SUSE showed some nice 3D effects and Matthieu Herrb announced the death of imake with Xorg 7.0. Next i went to Emmanuel Dreyfus’ talk about IPSEC, where he tried to explain the whole mess of IPSec extensions and implementations.
In the OpenBSD Firewall talk Ryan McBride demonstrated redundant firewalls and used an axe to hack a Twistedpair cable, good show. Finally Ed Maste talked about locking of FreeBSD network stack, he did a good job as rwatson incarnation of the day.
The social event was in a nice cellar. There were ugly beers from all over Europe (yes we made the mistake of trying most of them) and a spicy gulasch to make the people thirsty. There was a drinking contest of the various Operating Systems teams. Of course FreeBSD went ahead of the other projects fast because most of the attendees were FreeBSD people and we wondered what happend if the beer glass stats that show the consumed beers overflows.
But later a lot of FreeBSD people left being sure they will win the contest. Now the OpenBSD people took over by confusing the Barkeepers with singing Humpa songs and giving OpenBSD shirts to them.
I think we left around 1:30, so i am not sure if they managed to take over the lead.

Today the “real” con started. The opening talk buy the university host was a bit strange, he tried to link the Unix time line to molecular biology.
Later a guy from ix magazin tried to explain why they don’t publich more *BSD articles and phk told the auditorium what rwatson did in his early days.
In the first slot i went to Adrian Steinmann “Single User Secure Shell”, which is basically a RAMDISK containg an SSH daemon. It was a nice talk, and it might be useful in FreeBSD hosting environments.
Next i will attend the GEOM Hard Disk encryption talk
BTW It looks like IMAPS/POPS is much more common than last year. I haven’t got any useful passwords yet.

Today after eating breakfast we went into town buying stuff, i spent a fortune at Musikhug, bought CDs for 280,- CHF. And i am still tempted to spend more money there. The CD range was a lot better than any shop in Vienna. And of course they had Swiss Mundartmusi :-).
After taking a lot of pictures ( I will upload them later, i have forgotten my camera cable at the hotel) we went back to the hotel to detect that the WLAN gateway asked for another 15 CHF although we had paid another 10 hours. So we went to university to use the free conference WLAN instead.
It looks like Basel closed its university for EuroBSDcon, the whole University is reserverd for us.

We have been travelling to Basel by train today. Most spectacular event on the travel, at Landeck we had to leave the train and mount a bus to Bludenz, because the railroad was unpassable. The Bus drove below the Arlberg through several long tunnels. In Bludenz we were told, that our train doesn’t drive to Basel, but to Zürich, and we had to change trains there. We spent 20 minutes investigating the Zürich main station shopping center before moving on to Basel. In Basel we had no Problems to find the Hotel. We checked in and than went into the cold to look for something to eat at a reasonable price.
We ended at the “Bierhalle” of Brauner Mutz were you could drink Feldschlösschen beer and eat suisse dishes. They even had some kind of live band.

We finally decided what train to take. We will be travelling on thursday, arriving at Basel around 19.30 if nothing goes wrong.
My Plan for Friday is buying Christmas presents and CDs for myself at Basel City and maybe later visit the FreeBSD devsummit.
On Saturday I will _not_ participate at Basler Stadlauf, although it would have been fun.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the weather will be warmer than here. Next year EuroBSDCon needs to take place in the t-shirt season again.