Month: October 2004

Talks continued

Later I attended the ALTQ talk by Adrian Penisoara. I persuaded Arjan van Leeuwen to install SubEthaEdit and it seems to work, although there are some limitations to a real revision control software.
Next talk was by dinoex about his work on a lightweighted package cluster and Yannick Cadin about DHCP (spent most of the time reading email so i didn’t get much of the content). The last talk of the day was by Henning Brauer about bgpd. Interesting presentation but typical OpenBSD argumentation.
After that we left for the social event, an exhibition by Luigi Colani with a lot of airplanes and cars. Maybe I will upload some pictures later. Unfortunately the exhibition hall was cold and the band made a lot of Noise while trying to fight the enormous echoing.
We left early and drank a lot of beer at some pub mlaier recommended.
Today I am awake an hour too early because I forgot about Daylight saving time 🙁
In 10 minutes rwatson starts the second day of talks.

Talks1: Application Checkpointing

Antti Kantee – “Using Application-Driven Checkpointing Logic for Hot Spare High Availability”
–> See conference proceedings.
– Good technical talk. interested attendantes.
– Outlines the possibilies, advantages and disadvantages of Userland Checkpointing.
– Good: Application knows about all the relevant data Bad: Every Application needs to adapted, Some parts like Network which are provied by the OS are difficult to access
agc & uwe@NetBSD.org: NetBSD on Handhelds
— Nothing works out of the box, as usual with NetBSD :-). The Beamer doesn’t recognize the screen resolution, slides are too large.
— Nice Image of a portable Computer made out of a normal PC
— showed a Journada with Windows CE.
— lots of experimental stuff.
— As usually agc’s presentations are too long

keynote jkh

Here are my short, badly formatted notes on jkh’s keynote.
JKH
– showed a few stats, that BSD is the most common used UNIX (even more than Linux). 12.5 Million MacOS X users (Gartner Group?), 2.5 Million FreeBSD users (netcraft).
– introduced the BSD parts of MacOS X and IOKit.
— Tiger will have UFS2 Userland based on FreeBSD 5.1
– outlined parts where Mac OS X is ahead of the BSDs, and where BSDs
needs work to stay state of the art
— Authentification ACLs, nsswitch, OpenLDAP and Co.
— Sound, FreeBSD users play mp3 and …mp3
— *BSDs don’t support embedded machines without MMU (e.g no NetBSD on the IPOD)
— Standards UNIX 03, Common Criteria etc.
— Rendevouz
– Apple using OpenGL helps people avoiding DirectX
– promises that Apple will try to cooperate better with the OSS and more actively push back changes..
– He will continue to advocate UNIX and OSS inside of Apple. In the earliy 10.0 days he had to persuade people inside Apple needed to be persuaded to ship Terminal.app, today it is getting more popular.
–> promised to put slides later onto the Conference Webpage
BTW there are nearly more Macs than FreeBSD Laptops attending.
BTW2. If you are at the Conference and use a Mac, you can fix my notes using SubEthaEdit.

Soundtrack

Last Week we learned that my life is an mpg. Since plot and actors are already known (sort of), what’s missing is the Soundtrack.
So here is the Soundtrack for “My Life – October 2004” (oh, we need a better title too..) compiled from my iTunes and JuK rotation.

Sertab Erener – Kumsalda
Vanessa Mae – Devil’s Trill
Texas – Saint
The Pogues – A Pair of Brown Eyes
Die fantastischen Vier – 4 gewinnt
Athena – Senden, Benden, Bizden
Guesch Patti – Fleurs carnivores
Army of Lovers – Walking with a Zombie
Stephane Pompougnac – Pour faire le portrait d’un oiseau
No Doubt – Sixteen

Countdown to EuroBSDCon

Only two days left until EuroBSDCon starts. I still haven’t organized a train ticket nor have i prepared my journey, because i am quite busy with university at the moment.
Unfortunately I can’t attend the FreeBSD dev summit, because it start on Friday morning and I will arrive at Karlsruhe in the afternoon.

Committed to FreeBSD

Two years ago I became a FreeBSD committer.
According to Peter’s CVS statistics since October 15 2002 I made 1664 commits to the ports repository (Currently rank 18), 29 commits to the doc+www repository, one src and one sys commit.
Because of the time consuming math courses this year, i failed to keep my rate of 1000 commits/year, but 663 is still nearly two commits/day. Additional I mentored two ports committers during their first steps as FreeBSD committers.
I have to thank Daniel and Jared who donated Hardware to support my work and of course the great FreeBSD community. I am looking forward to continue working on the FreeBSD world domination project with all of you.

The most common insecure protocol

After TELNET has been replaced by SSH in many cases and serious admins have started to replace FTP with SFTP/SCP the most common insecure protocols are IMAP and POP3.
Although most Emailprograms support a secure Emailprotocol the insecure variants are still much more common. I have installed the dovecot IMAP/POP3-server on my mailserver, but unfortunately at the moment it does not support SSL because the gnutls version in the FreeBSD ports collection is incompatible, so i read mail via SSH/mutt which is probably a lot faster than waiting until Mail.app has synced my 70MB mailbox over my ADSL line.
At university i always wonder that even computer science students don’t think when they start their MUA while connected to the university WLAN.
And I wonder even more when I read their passwords, more than 15% of my small sample (a 45 minutes course) use their surname as password.