Today i attended three talks:
rwatson on the MAC Framework:
– won the price for fastest speaking because he had to compress his 1h-presentation into a 30minutes slot.,
– He gave a short overview over the differences and similarities between
SEBSD vs. SELINUX vs. SEDARWIN.
– a lot of Work is ongoing in SEDarwin, as McAffee Research’s Customers are interested in using the MAC Security policies on Desktop computers.
– He sees FreeBSD as a central Player between OpenSource OS as in Linux and other BSDS and ClosedSource as in Apple, JunOS & Co.
The next slot was Christoph Sold from DB Systems on Integrating Monitoring Data.
I had expected a bit more, especially the talk started too theoretical and all the interesting information was censored.
After that brooks on Dynamic Interfaces. Nice technical talk with lot of kernel details. He specially talked about problems with SNMP and network interfaces. phk added that bsnmpd the SNMP daemon in the base system is a nice project, not as bloated as net-snmp.
At the lunch i stand (yeah not enough tables) near to Daniel Seuffert, who said that he and trhodes have found a SPARC Hardware resource in the USA and are trying to get more sparc64 machintes into the cluster, either at Y! or somewhere else (someone mentioned Sentex).
After lunch I attended the ports BoF. I exchanged a few PGP keys and exchanged opinions on several topics. Maybe erwin will fill something into the ports TODO file. Unfortunately eik didn’t made it to EuroBSDCon so we could not really discuss his latest patches to bsd.port.mk. And of course the pormgrs were missed too (Only krion was there) and people complained about the lack of communication between portmgrs and the ports team. (Although since Erwin started to his job as secretary it got a lot better).
At the conference closing it was revealed that the next EuroBSDCon will take place in Basel 2005. Daniel Seuffert plans to join the organisation team, so this conference will be very professional.
Again this was a great conference. I knew a lot more people to talk to, than two years ago in Amsterdam, when my commit bit was only a few weeks old. i hope Patrick and Wolfgang from the organization team were happy too, although there were several problems (No VISAs for Visitors, Bad Location for the social event, Very small Conference Lobby).
After the conference closing I went to a mexican restaurant with some committers. phk ranted a lot about the current way of handling conflicts. My favorite phk quote was “Does core approve me going to pee”, he states that more FreeBSD people should adopt the Nike slogan “Just doing it” instead of waiting for core to make decisions. Later he started future predicting. Other developers were either optimists or pessimists, some predicting a glorious 5.x or at least 6.x branch, other are looking forward dealing with all kind of bug reports because of incorrect locking etc.. Suggestions how to improve FreeBSD were made, e.g. about placing freshports and the cvs summaries in a more prominent place on the FreeBSD website. The website was discussed on and off, from turning it into a CMS-like blog, rewriting it from scratch in perforce. (Quote: “Our Kernel supports XML, we should write our Website in XML too”).
My idea to add a people behind KDE like site was rejected, but people would like to see website to turn more into a dot.kde.org-like site every FreeBSD enthusiast visits daily.
It was criticized that there was no news about EuroBSDcon on daemonnews after the first day.
rwatson mentioned bsdplanet.net and said he submitted his RSS feed (about netperf changes) but it did not appear on the Website.
brooks brought up the idea of adding linux-distributionslike CD (e.g. specialized release for grid computing), someone else suggested integrating FreeSBIE into the FreeBSD releases.
brueffer brought up the recent “Theo against the rest of the world” thread and most of the senior developers agree with sam’s opinion, that this is contraproductive.
After eating we hurried to the station and got on our trains home.