LaForge's home page (Posts about conferences)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/tags/conferences.atom2022-06-21T07:49:57ZHarald WelteNikolaBack from FOSDEM 2013https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20130204-fosdem2013/2013-02-04T03:00:00+01:002013-02-04T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
As (almost) every year, I attended the annual incarnation of <a href="http://www.fosdem.org/">FOSDEM</a>. It is undoubtedly (one of?) the most
remarkable events about Free Software in existence. No registration, no fees,
24 tracks in parallel, an estimated 5000 number of attendees. I also like that
it brings together people from so many different communities, not _just_ the Linux or Gnome or KDE or Telephony or Legal people, but a good mixture of everything.
</p>
<p>
I have to congratulate the organizers, who manage to pull this off, year after
year again. And as opposed to many other events, they do so quietly and
without much recognition, I feel. I'd also like to thank the many volunteers
working tirelessly before, at and after the event. Last, but not least, I'd
like to thank the local university (ULB Solbosch) hosting the event.
</p>
<p>
What made me truly sad though, is the amount of littering that surprisingly
many of the attendees did. This was particularly visible in the Cafeteria.
Imagine an event run by volunteers, who put in a lot of time and effort.
Imagine an event where food and drinks are sold by volunteers at such low
prices that there can barely be any profit at all. And then imagine people
eating there and leaving all their rubbish around, as if they were in some kind
of restaurant where they are being served and where somebody is cleaning up
after them. It really makes me feel very bitter to see this. Don't people
realize that those very volunteers who are creating the event will then have to
put in _their_ spare time just because those who just enjoyed their coffee or
lunch didn't have the extra 30 seconds of bringing their trash to the trashcan?
I feel ashamed for members of our community who behave this way. Please think
next time before acting and show your respect to the people behind FOSDEM.
</p>Some thoughts on the Erlang User Conference 2011https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20111108-erlang_user_conference_2011/2011-11-08T03:00:00+01:002011-11-08T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
It seems I'm really getting too lazy to update this blog more
frequently, which is a pity. Last week I was in Stockholm attending the
<a href="http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/ErlangUserConference2011">Erlang
User Conference 2011</a>. This was the first Erlang conference I ever
went to, and it was the first conference in many, many years where I was
not speaking but merely a normal attendee.
</p>
<p>
Some of the readers of this blog will already have noticed my
microblogging updates on identi.ca and Twitter that I made during the
conference. They were not overly excited about the conference. Let me
write some more details here. I have no idea how many technical
conferences I have attended, but I am typically speaking at something
like 10 to 14 every year, which I believe qualifies me as a
"professional conference participant" ;)
</p>
<p>
Let me start with some positive feedback: There have been excellent and
technical presentations, particularly by Kostis Sagonas (PropEr), Melinda Toth
(Change impact analysis) and also the talk on Hashes/Frames/Structs as
new built-in Erlang data types by Kenneth Lundin.
</p>
<p>
However, apart from those, i have quite a bit of criticism:
</p><ul>
<li>Some presentations ended <i>way</i> ahead of their schedule.<br>This
is a pity, as it means that some hundred-odd highly paid software
developers are then sitting in a room and wasting time. If you hold a
presentation at a conference, you should make sure that this time is
used in the most efficient way. If you have been allocated a 45 minute
slot, please don't make a 15 minute presentation + 5 minute questions
session. That's not what the audience expects!</li>
<li>Keynote presentation by Ulf Wiger contained lots of <i>hot
air</i><br>
If I go to a technical conference aimed at Erlang users (i.e. software
developers who write programs using the Erlang language, libraries and
runtime system), then I expect it to be loaded with brilliant, technical
content. I want to get excited about new developments, Erlang software
projects, etc. The last thing that I'd want is having a real Erlang
guru on stage talking about superficial, trivial aspects of embedded
computing. Of course I respect the commercial decision of Ulf and/or
Erlang Solutions to try to create a market for Erlang in the embedded
sphere. But what is the technical relevance of this to the Erlang
community? Ulf did not talk about great new schemes of optimizing the
Erlang VM for battery-powered CPUs, or how he has extended powertop to
give function or line-level accuracy on which of your Erlang code lines
burn most CPU cycles or cause the highest number of CPU wake-ups from
low power mode. <i>That</i> would have been exciting.</li>
<li>Erlang/OTP Road-map presentation without much technical details<br>
When I see a slide with "Some SCTP improvements" then I want to see what
exactly are those improvements. I think there was more than enough time
to go into more details, if Kenneth would have spoken faster and put
more content into the available time. Once again, the audience is a
room full of intelligent, highly-paid professional software engineers.
If you get their attention for whatever amount of time, I believe you
should pack it as full with information as possible, rather than bore
them with slowly and carefully reading each line from a slide... </li>
<li>No Internet available at the Tutorials
Can you believe it? In 2011, a technical conference aimed at software
developers hosts tutorials inside a facility owned by one of the largest
communications equipment suppliers (Ericsson) and then there is no
provision for Internet access. It's really ironic, especially since at
least some of the tutorial trainers expected the attendees would be able
to clone git repositories on their laptops during the workshops. </li>
</ul>
<p>
In my hallway conversations with other attendees (who also have a
background outside of Erlang and are more familiar with other
conferences in the FOSS community), they independently observed those
very same issues and agreed with my assessment.
</p>
<p>
All in all, the conference was a good trigger for me to finally sit down
and start to use dialyzer on the various Osmcoom Erlang-language
projects such as osmo_ss7, osmo_sscp and signerl. I'm already adding
type specifications all over the code and am looking forward to soon
starting with some PropEr test cases in the next couple of days.
</p>FOSS.in is dead, PRODUCTISE.in liveshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20111015-productise_in/2011-10-15T03:00:00+02:002011-10-15T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Team FOSS.in has announced lest year that the successful series of <a href="http://foss.in/">FOSS.in</a> conferences has concluded. I'm still
a bit sad that I was unable to make it to the grand finale.
</p>
<p>
But now, the very same team <a href="http://atulchitnis.net/2011/the-successor-to-foss-in/">announces
a new event called PRODUCTISE.in</a>, with a different focus. It's not
about Free and Open Source Software anymore, but about <i>product
developers</i> - where the respective products of course could be FOSS
based.
</p>
<p>
I remain curios to see what will happen to the event. Everyone who
knows me knows that I'm probably a slightly pragmatic but otherwise
orthodox Free Software fellow. As far as I can tell, the only
proprietary software that I use (and license) in more than a decade is
IDA Advanced.
</p>
<p>
But in any case, all the best to Team FOSS.in with their latest
endeavour!
</p>Jounrees Logiciels Libres / ENSA Tetouan, Moroccohttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20110502-journees_ll_ensa_tetouan/2011-05-02T03:00:00+02:002011-05-02T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've been invited to Tetouan, Morocco by the organizers of the second
incarnation of the <a href="http://www.ensate.uae.ma/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=106:software-freedom-international-days">Journees
Logiciels Libres</a>. Tomorrow I'll have the
pleasure of presenting about Free Software projects related to GSM,
including OpenBSC and OsmocomBB.
</p>
<p>
The organizers have done a great job in caring about the foreign
speakers (who include Richard Stallman and myself).
</p>
<p>
I've been listening to various talks by RMS RMS over the last 16 years
or so... but right now I'm listening the first time to him giving a
French presentation.
</p>
<p>
Overall, this trip has done more to improving my understanding French than
anything else in a long time. I once had 4 years of French from 1st to
4th grade in school, but never really continued with it. However, what I
remember, combined with my knowledge of Portuguese (and even English) is
sufficient to e.g. understand all of the French language slides that
have been presented at this conference. However, most spoken
French is too hard to understand for me.
</p>
<p>
One striking observation is the apparently much higher percentage of women
taking a communications or computer engineering degree here than what I'm used
to in Germany or the so-called western world. It reminds me of India where you
have the feeling that almost 50% of the IT related students are female. It
would still be interesting to see some scientific research why the supposedly
open and anti-discriminating, women-rights-embracing 'western world' is
seeing less women taking up engineering studies...
</p>Back from DeepSec 2010https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20101129-back_from_deepsec/2010-11-29T03:00:00+01:002010-11-29T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm back from Vienna where I attended a very exciting <a href="http://deepsec.net/2010">DeepSec 2010</a> conference. This years focus
was clearly on mobile security: The GSM security workshop by Karsten Nohl and
me, the various talks like <i>All your baseband are belong to us</i> by
Ralf-Phillip Weinmann, a talk on Android security auditing / forensics and much
more.
</p>
<p>
In a few days, I'll be leaving for Taipei/Taiwan again. Apart from the <a href="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/10/26#20101026-gpl_compliance_workshop-taiwan">one-day GPL compliance engineering course together with Armijn</a>, there will be a number of meetings with various companies - both GPL as well as GSM/3G related.
</p>
<p>
It will be great to be back to Taipei - unfortunately only for 10 days, which is
a real pity. I still miss it a lot.
</p>Hashdays 2010 in Lucerne, Switzerlandhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20101107-hashdays2010/2010-11-07T03:00:00+01:002010-11-07T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
The last couple of days I've been at <a href="http://hashdays.ch/">#days 2010</a>
in Lucerne / Switzerland. It was the first incarnation of this new IT security
conference.
</p>
<p>
The conference went great, and I think the close-to-200 attendees were a great
turnout for the first incarnation of an event. The talks were excellent, as
was the delicious food that was served by the Radisson Blu hotel.
</p>
<p>
The GSM security workshop that David, Karsten and myself held over Wednesday
and Thursday was attended by only 7 people, but we had some very lively
discussions, particularly with some folks who were working for a GSM operator :)
</p>
<p>
Most notable about the event is the <a href="http://smartdesign.ch/hashdays">electronic conference badge</a>, which was
developed and produced with a lot of enthusiasm and numerous hours. To be honest,
I think I would not have spent that much time on creating this. I mean, developing
this type of gimmick is interesting, but then actually manually manufacturing
it, without using a SMT line of any sorts - I wouldn't have done that 'just' for
a badge. Respects to the team behind that. Hopefully the source code will still
get released.
</p>
<p>
We were also running an experimental GSM + GPRS/EDGE network based on OpenBSC,
OsmoSGSN and OpenGGSN, enabling users to run port scans and the like against the
carrier-facing side of the IP stack of their own devices. While running this
network, I discovered a number of new bugs, mostly in the GPRS stacks of various
handsets.
</p>
<p>
At least one model of Blackberry seems to ignore the <i>MS identity cannot be
derived from the network</i> cause of a <i>Routing Area Update Reject</i>
message, which we send in case the TLLI of the messages from the phone is
unknown. I would expect it to come back with a <i>GPRS Attach Request</i>,
but it never does. All it does is to keep re-trying <i>Routing Area Update</i>
</p>
<p>
The other funny observation is: Several phones, including some iPhone models,
react in a strange way if you REJECT them from the GSM network but ACCEPT them
on GPRS (Assuming Network Mode of Operation III). They then seem to be perfectly
happy with this connection, but will only supply data services and no voice
service.
</p>
<p>
Getting back to the conference, though: The Radisson Blu is an quite costly,
upscale hotel. I was really surprised by the type and number of small mistakes
they made, particularly with the catering. One day they forget to put the sour
cream next to the potatoes - despite a written sign indicating that they are
supposed to be with sour cream. Another day they serve some mousse as desert,
but there are no spoons placed at the desert buffet. Furthermore, the number
of tables they provided during lunch time was always insufficient for the number
of people who had lunch. The quantity of food was more than sufficient,
though - indicating that it was not a problem of them not knowing the number of
people who were eating.
</p>ST-Ericsson glues gstreamer into Android - and makes it proprietaryhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20101027-elce2010_st_ericsson_gstreamer_android/2010-10-27T03:00:00+02:002010-10-27T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
It is always surprising what kind of things the industry is coming up with ;)
</p>
<p>
Here at ELCE, ST-Ericsson has just presented how they replaced OpenCore
with gstreamer as the supplier/provider of multimedia encoding/decoding
to the Android software stack.
</p>
<p>
This is definitely an interesting technical solution - probably one that makes
sense if you have existing gstreamer modules/drivers.
</p>
<p>
What really makes me wonder though, is their licensing. To make sure only
ST-Ericsson customers can use it, they have implemented a glue layer library
that ties into android, and this library is binary-only licensed and
distributed under terms that permit to use it together with their hardware.
</p>
<p>
Isn't it strange? Now the Android software stack is Free Software, and
gstreamer is Free Software. But ST-Ericsson needs to put some proprietary blob
in the middle. Of course, legally they are allowed to do it: Android is
Apache-style licensed and gstreamer is LGPL. But from a
moral/ethical/technical point of view, it still is blasphemy to me.
</p>
<p>
<b>UPDATE:</b> The license is actually a 'standard' proprietary license.
There seem to be technical reasons that tie this code to the specific SoC of
ST-Ericsson. Nonetheless, I keep my original criticism: It has a bad
aftertaste if you combine two FOSS programs by a proprietary layer in
between
</p>The ELCE 2010 keynote by Ari Rauch (Texas Instruments / OMAP)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20101027-elce2010_ti_ari_rauch/2010-10-27T03:00:00+02:002010-10-27T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've just attended the <a href="http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_europe10/sessions.html#Rauch">ELCE
2010 keynote by Ari Rauch</a>, where he was talking about how much TI OMAP is
committed to Linux. This doesn't really come as a big surprise to me. The
OMAP SoCs are used mostly as Application Processors for smart phones. As TI
is not a supplier of APs for Apple, Symbian and Windows Mobile are dead, this
really only leaves Linux-based operating systems like Android, Meego, LiMo &
co.
</p>
<p>
One of his main points was <i>we have to be pragmatic</i>, i.e. the customer
requirements for performance etc. are key. If there is an open way to fulfill
them: fine. If not: fine, too.
</p>
<p>
The only real question that was asked after the keynote was the usual question
of whether there will be any Free/Open graphics drivers for the Imagination GPU
thats inside their OMAP3/OMAP4 SoCs. I already predicted the response: We have
to be pragmatic about it. TI is trying to convince Imagination to open up,
but they are afraid of doing so and don't see what this would gain them.
</p>
<p>
He further added the statement if there is a competitive more open GPU, they
will look into using it.
</p>
<p>
The other bad taste I got from this keynote is the frequent mention of <i>the
industry <b>embracing</b> innovation provided by the FOSS community</i>.
Embracing was the very term that Microsoft always used when they started to
create their custom versions/dialects of HTML, Kerberos and other standards.
</p>
<p>
The think that seemed to be missing is any awareness for the <i>sharing</i>
attitude: I.e. the industry using the innovations that the community creates,
but giving back an equal amount, or at least opening up in response. This
cannot be a one-way road where the industry simply taps into the creative
potential of the community, to create closed products and profit from stuff
they have simply scraped off the community backyard.
</p>FOSS.in/2010 CfP is closinghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20101009-foss_in_cfp_closing/2010-10-09T03:00:00+02:002010-10-09T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I just want to point out: If you haven't yet submitted a proposal for FOSS.in/2010,
the <a href="http://foss.in/news/foss-in2010-call-for-participation.html">FOSS.in/2010 Call for Participation</a> is closing in less than 48 hours!
</p>
<p>
This means you still have a chance to submit a talk, workout or BoF on your
personal FOSS, hacking or otherwise technology related work and actively
participate in the event.
</p>
<p>
FOSS.in is an excellent chance to spread the word about what technical work you
have been doing, and to motivate others to participate and join your projects.
It's a great opportunity to reach out to the Indian FOSS community, meet old
friends and make new ones. Don't miss it :)
</p>Linux Kongress 2010 in Nuremberg / Germanyhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100923-linux_kongress_2010/2010-09-23T03:00:00+02:002010-09-23T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Yesterday night I took the train down to Nuremberg, where <a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2010/">Linux Kongress 2010</a> is
taking place. It's always nice to meet old friends and colleagues there,
including Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, Patrick McHardy, Lars Marowsky-Bree,
Jon Corbet, Jos Vos, Heinz Mauelshagen, Dhaval Giani, Lennart Poettering and
many more...
</p>
<p>
Being on the programme committee might make me biased, but I really think
that there is a very impressive talk schedule. What makes me a bit sad is
the relatively small audience. I don't know the numbers, but it definitely
feels like the lecture halls could hold many more attendees.
</p>On my way to Taiwan for COSCUPhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100807-to_taiwan-coscup/2010-08-07T03:00:00+02:002010-08-07T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Tomorrow early morning I'll be on my way to Tapei/Taiwan. The main reason for
this trip is the invitation to speak at <a href="http://coscup.org/2010/en'>COSCUP%202010</a>.%0A</p>%0A<p>%0AI'm%20really%20looking%20forward%20to%20getting%20back%20Taipei,%20which%20has%20become%20something%0Alike%20my%20second%20home%20during%20the%20years%20I%20was%20working%20on%20Openmoko.%20%20I've%20really%0Agotten%20used%20to%20life%20in%20this%20super-urban%20Asian%20metropolis...%20to%20the%20extent%20that%0AI'm%20almost%20a%20bit%20homesick%20while%20I'm%20actually%20at%20home%20in%20Berlin/Germany.%0A</p></body></html>"></a></p>COSCUP 2010 conference schedule has been postedhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100708-coscup2010_schedule/2010-07-08T03:00:00+02:002010-07-08T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The <a href="http://coscup.org/2010/zh-tw/program">Schedule of the COSCUP 2010
conference</a> has been posted on the conference homepage. I'm happy to see
such a large number of talks from a wide range of speakers - including many
friends from my time in Taiwan a couple of years back for Openmoko...
</p>
<p>
<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/coscup/~3/89ykCgVhbrg/blog-post_07.html">As it seems from this chinese blog
entry</a>, the organizers were overwhelmed by the number of attendee registrations,
with all 610 available seats being occupied within 85 minutes of opening the
registration. It seems they are in need of a bigger venue next year ;)
</p>The Linux-Kongress 2010 CfP is about to closehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100531-linux_kongress_cfp_closing/2010-05-31T03:00:00+02:002010-05-31T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The <a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2010/">Linux-Kongress 2010</a>
<a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2010/cfp.html">Call for Proposals</a> is about
to close.
</p>
<p>
So if you have anything interesting related to Linux that you would like to talk about at
the 2010 incarnation of one of the most traditional Linux conferences, this is
your last chance. There is no excuse, do it right now!
</p>I'll be presenting at COSCUP 2010 in Taiwanhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100520-attending_coscup_2010/2010-05-20T03:00:00+02:002010-05-20T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I have just received the great news that my attendance of the <a href="http://coscup.org/2010/en">COSCUP 2010 conference in Taiwan</a> is
now confirmed. Thanks to COSCUP for inviting me!
</p>
<p>
I'll be participating in the legal track and presenting on GPL license
compliance. The exact title and abstract is not yet decided.
</p>
<p>
As usual, I'm really looking forward at any chance to visit Taiwan,
and the trip this August is definitely no exception. Now I only need
to decide how long I'm going to stay before/after the conference...
</p>Attending DORS/CLUC 2010 in Zagreb next weekhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100430-dors_cluc_2010/2010-04-30T03:00:00+02:002010-04-30T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm looking forward to attend <a href="http://www.open.hr/dc2010/en/">DORS/CLUC
2010</a> in Zagreb/Croatia next week. DORS/CLUC is a small but nice event,
with a group of very warm and welcoming organizers. I've been there a couple
of times before and always had a very good time.
</p>Linux-Kongress 2010: Call for Proposals closes soonhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100430-linux_kongress_2010_cfp/2010-04-30T03:00:00+02:002010-04-30T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
This years will mark the <a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2010/">17th
incarnation of Linux Kongress</a>. It is scheduled from September 21st through
24th in the city of Nürnberg (aka Nuremberg), which (as a personal side
note) also happens to be the city where I was born and where I've grown up.
</p>
<p>
The <a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2010/cfp.html">Call for
Proposals</a> is out for quite some time, and will last for another month until
June 1st. So if you have something exciting to talk about that is related to
Linux and of technical nature: Please submit your proposal soon. Looking
forward to listening to your presentation at LK2010 :)
</p>I'll be presenting at the SSTIC 2010 conferencehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100429-participating_sstic2010/2010-04-29T03:00:00+02:002010-04-29T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've been invited (as apparently the only non-french-speaker) to present
at the <a href="http://www.sstic.org/2010/">SSTIC 2010</a> conference in
Rennes/France.
</p>
<p>
There will be two presentations: One about OpenBSC, the other about OsmocomBB.
Both will cover the use of the respective projects in the context of doing
security analysis on a GSM protocol level.
</p>FOSS.in/2009 has startedhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20091202-fossin/2009-12-02T03:00:00+01:002009-12-02T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I've arrived in India to attend <a href="http://foss.in/2009/">FOSS.in/2009</a>
in Bangalore. It's always great to be here and get in touch with Indian Free
Software developers.
</p>
<p>
Unfortunately I'm suffering from lack of sleep during the flight and jetlag, so
I had to miss large parts of the first day of the event :(
</p>
<p>
My keynote on <a href="http://foss.in/2009/schedules/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=88">Ooening up
Closed Domains</a> went fine and was apparently fairly well received. The main
points being:
</p><ul>
<li>There are many areas in computing, beyond the desktop PC, where there's still no freedom and openness due to a lack of Free and Open Source Software</li>
<li>There's no real reason preventing developers to bring FOSS into those areas</li>
<li>As can be seen by existing projects like OpenPCD, OpenBTS, OpenBSC: Very small teams of developers can make a big difference</li>
</ul>Leaving for FOSS.inhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20091130-taking_off_to_foss_in/2009-11-30T03:00:00+01:002009-11-30T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm just about to go to the airport and leave for <a href="http://foss.in/2009/">FOSS.in/2009</a>. Most of my time there will again
be spent <a href="http://workouts.foss.in/2009/index.php/GSM_protocol_analyisis_workout"><i>working
out</i> on GSM protocol analysis</a>, i.e. the airprobe project.
</p>
<p>
The workout wiki doesn't really have any content yet, and I shall fix that as
soon as I get the password for the Workout Wiki (apparently passwords from las
year don't work anymore).
</p>
<p>
It's going to be fun to meet all my Indian friends again - and at the same time
I'm happy that a large international community will be present, including
<a href="http://www.datenfreihafen.org/">Stefan Schmidt</a>, <a href="http://zecke.blogspot.com/">Holger Freyther</a> and <a href="http://warmcat.com/">Andy Green</a> of Openmoko fame, as well as people like
<a href="http://www.meriac.de/">Milosch and Brita Meriac</a> from projects like
OpenPCD, OpenBeacon and txtr, <a href="http://blog.namei.org/">James Morris</a> of netfilter/iptables and SELinux, <a href="http://0pointer.de/lennart/">Lennart Poettering</a> of avahi and pulseaudio.
</p>FOSS.in CfP running for quite some timehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20091022-foss_in-cfp/2009-10-22T03:00:00+02:002009-10-22T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
In case you have been sleeping throughout last week: On October 16, <a href="http://foss.in/news/fossincfp-2009.html">The FOSS.in Call for Participation</a> had been released.
</p>
<p>
FOSS.in is one of my regular conferences, and probably the only event aside
from the Chaos Communication Congress that I managed to visit in five
consecutive years. I'm looking forward for this year's incarnation, and I'll
definitely do my part to make the event more interesting :)
</p>
<p>
I hope everyone will now hurry to submit their proposals for talks, workshops
and work-outs! It's a collaborative event, and it lives by your contribution.
</p>ST-Ericsson Community Workshop 2009https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20091014-st_ericsson_scw09/2009-10-14T03:00:00+02:002009-10-14T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Today, I had the honor to hold the <a href="http://svn.gnumonks.org/trunk/presentation/2009/legal_bets_practises-elce2009/legal_best_practises.pdf">opening keynote</a> of the <a href="http://www.minalogic.com/news/SCW09/en/20090803_SCW09.htm">ST Ericsson Community Workshop 2009</a>.
</p>
<p>
At this event, ST-Ericsson presented their Nomadik STn8815 SoC, as well as
their work on getting the u-boot and kernel ports submitted back into the upstream/mainline projects.
</p>
<p>
As anyone following the linux-arm-kernel list will have noticed: For the last
months, they have worked hard on cleaning up and submitting the code for this
SoC. Like many people in the community, I personally appreciate this very
much. Finally, ARM SoC vendors actively putting resources to become a "first
class" member of the community.
</p>
<p>
The STn8815 is a ARM926EJ-S core based SoC, including a ST DSP for video codec
acceleration as well as a number of standard peripherals such as I2C, SPI,
UART, SDIO, etc.
</p>
<p>
The STn8815 reference software that they released today, includes 100% open
source drivers for everything that runs within Linux, inside Linux or on top of
Linux on the application processor. The codec implementations inside the DSP
are closed source / proprietary. However, the infrastructure to communicate
with the DSP, as well as the gstreamer/ffmpeg integration on the Linux side is
fully open source.
</p>
<p>
The attendees of the workshop are receiving the NHK-15 reference boards, which
have the STn8815 SoC plus a total of 384MByte NAND flash and 128MByte of DDR
memory. There's also a number of peripherals that you expect in such a
product, including LCM, SD card slot, Bluetooth, Audio Codec, and Wifi.
</p>
<p>
Unfortunately, the Wifi driver is closed source. However, the Wifi is a
dedicated peripheral component. The use/choice of this Wifi chip on the
NHK-15 is probably a bad design choice from an open source point of view. But:
This proprietary Wifi does not affect the openness of the actual STn8815 SoC.
</p>
<p>
Included with the kit for the attendees also a full programming manual as well
as register-level specification for the STn8815, as well as the complete
schematics of the development board. No NDA required :)
</p>
<p>
As a summary: I welcome ST-Ericsson to join the Linux community and to provide
Open Source friendly solutions, provide the documentation and holding this
workshop. However, the STn8815 is already quite 'old' hardware, as it is still
ARM9 based - while much of the competition is shipping ARM11 or Cortex-A8
today. Let's hope at some point in the future we will have more competitive
hardware with just as much openness.
</p>Cancelling my trip to Linux plumbers conferencehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090917-cancelling_linuxplumbers/2009-09-17T03:00:00+02:002009-09-17T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I might have told some of you that I'd be visiting Linux Plumbers
conference this year, but unfortunately I'm not able to make it,
despite earlier planning. There's simply too much work at the moment :(
</p>
<p>
So to everyone who will be there: Have fun.
</p>
<p>
My personal conference schedule for the remaining year 2009 is something like
this:
</p><ul>
<li><a href="http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_europe09/">CELF Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Grenoble, France</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/">Linux-Kongress, Dresden, Germany</a></li>
<li><a href="https://deepsec.net/">Deepsec, Vienna, Austria</a></li>
<li><a href="http://foss.in/">FOSS.in, Bangalore, India</a></li>
<li><a href="http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/">26C3, Berlin, Germany</a></li>
</ul>ST-Ericsson Open Source Community Workshop 2009https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090916-st_ericsson_workshop/2009-09-16T03:00:00+02:002009-09-16T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
ST-Ericsson is the maker of an ARM based SoC family called Nomadik. Over
the last couple of months they have been working with members of the community
to get their support into mainline Linux and u-boot.
</p>
<p>
They have recently announced the <a href="http://www.minalogic.com/news/SCW09/en/20090803_SCW09.htm">ST-Ericsson Community Workshop 2009</a>, a small event limited
to only 25 seats, where members of the community, together with ST-Ericsson
present on the development of GNU/Linux on their Nomadik SoC platform.
</p>
<p>
The workshop registration fee is 200 EUR, but it includes a full NHK-15
development kit for the Nomadik platform!
</p>
<p>
I really think ST-Ericsson is doing the right thing, reaching out to the
community, actively trying to get their code mainline, plus providing
subsidized development boards at a to interested community members.
</p>
<p>
If you're interested, make sure you register soon, seats are limited...
</p>FOSS.in turning from Linux/FOSS only event into more general hacker conferencehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090913-foss_in-hacker_conference/2009-09-13T03:00:00+02:002009-09-13T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
As can be seen <a href="http://foss.in/news/foss-in-wind-of-change.html">from
the FOSS.in/2009 "Omelette Post"</a>, in addition to the regular FOSS.in
schedule until 5pm every day, there will be additional <i>hacker talks</i>
until 10.30pm, which might not necessarily be directly connected with FOSS.
</p>
<p>
Since I'm personally a member of both the hacker community (in the very
specific sense of working and uncovering weaknesses in communication systems)
as well as a 100% Free and Open Source person, I obviously like this kind
of combination. To me, both go hand in hand - even though I know not everyone
will have the same opinion.
</p>
<p>
In the end, learning about and playing freely with technology is what both
communities want to do.
</p>
<p>
I'm looking forward to see the FOSS.in CfP...
</p>HAR2009 is overhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090817-har2009_over/2009-08-17T03:00:00+02:002009-08-17T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Running our own GSM network at <a href="http://har2009.org/">HAR 2009</a> has
kept me too busy to actually attend any lectures myself - apart from the A5/1
lecture in the GSM track just after my own presentations on OpenBSC and
airprobe. So I'm hoping for the recordings to be available in some
non-proprietary format soon. Apparently all they have now is some website with
flash videos, something I'd almost call an abomination.
</p>
<p>
In any case, thanks once again to the HAR Organizers for obtaining the GSM test
license. Thanks to the Agenschap Telecom for actually granting us such a
license. And thanks to the many helping hands from the OpenBSC community, as
well as the several hundreds of people who have tested the GSM network 204-42.
</p>
<p>
We shut down our operations at 2009-08-16 at 16:00 CEST. There were no
complaints of either the regulatory authority nor the commercial network
operators during the event.
</p>
<p>
We have complete debug logs of OpenBSC, as well as pcap files of all signalling
data. In the weeks to come, we'll be working on extensive statistics on
network usage / load, as well as relationship graphs i.e. who called/texted
whom.
</p>
<p>
After a 7 hour car ride to my home in Berlin, and an 8 hour stop-over to pack
my suitcases, I'm now currently in Helsinki enroute to Seoul, Korea.
Following-up to my last trip in January, I'm happy to be able to visit the
country at a time of much more pleasant weather (26-30 centigrade) this time.
</p>
<p>
I'm very excited about my work there in the coming months. As soon as there's
anything I can state publicly about it, I'll keep you posted :)
</p>Linux-Kongress date change - now longer collides with Linux Plumbershttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090726-linux_kongress-new_date/2009-07-26T03:00:00+02:002009-07-26T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
As I have just received today, <a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2009/">Linux Kongress 2009</a> has shifted
its dates to October 27 through October 30 (and changed the Location from
Hamburg to Dresden).
</p>
<p>
This is good news, since it no longer collides with <a href="http://linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/">Linux Plumbers Conference 2009</a> on
September 23rd through 25th. I guess that many speakers and some attendees
would otherwise have ran into scheduling problems - with many preferring Linux
Plumbers.
</p>
<p>
Also, the <a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2009/cfp.html">Call for
Papers</a> is out, it runs until August 31st, i.e. you (yes you, the reader!)
have more than four weeks of time to decide what kind of topic you want to talk
about :)
</p>On my way to FreedomHEC Taipei 2009https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090606-freedomhec_taipei/2009-06-06T03:00:00+02:002009-06-06T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
In about 8 hours I'll depart for <a href="http://freedomhectaipei.pbworks.com/">FreedomHEC Taipei 2009</a>, an
event where members of the Linux development community try to help Taiwanese
hardware vendors understand the Linux development model.
</p>
<p>
I personally believe this kind of event could not be any more important. The
traditional PC and embedded hardware industry still has a very, very limited
understanding when it comes to <i>properly</i> supporting Linux, aiming at the
universal solution for best end-user experience. In order to achieve this,
the FOSS development model needs to be understood, as well as the value of
going mainline with the drivers/ports.
</p>
<p>
Once that point is reached, there needs to be understanding _how_ to achieve
that. Availability of documentation is another key issue. If you want to
enable people to help you with development, bug fixing and maintenance, you
need to release programming manuals for the hardware..
</p>
<p>
I'm happy to see that this year the organizers were able to get prominent
speakers such as Jon Corbet from <a href="http://lwn.net/">lwn.net</a>, and
Greg K-H who is doing marvelous work with his <a href="http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/">Linux Driver Project</a>. Last, but
not least, Peter Stuge will be presenting on <a href="http://www.coreboot.org/">coreboot</a> as a FOSS alternative to legacy
BIOS.
</p>
<p>
I'm also happy to see more native/local speakers, such as the presentations by
<a href="http://jserv.sayya.org/">jserv (aka Jim Huang)</a> on Qi, the
bootloader that was developed as part of Openmoko - or the presentation on
VIA's experience of merging code mainline by Joseph Chan.
</p>Departing for the FSF Europe Legal and Licensing Workshop 2009https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090422-fsfe_ftf_legal_licensing_workshop/2009-04-22T03:00:00+02:002009-04-22T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
In about six hours I'll be travelling to the <a href="http://fsfe.org/news/2009/news-20090323-01.en.html">Second Free Software
Foundation European Licensing and Legal Workshop</a> in Amsterdam. I've been
to the fist workshop last year, and it was an excellent event, with all the
important stakeholders present. Corporate legal departments of companies that
already had their fair share of GPL incompliance, independent lawyers and legal
experts, as well as folks with a Free Software community background such as
myself.
</p>
<p>
The FSFE Freedom Task Force has done quite a bit of work during the last year,
and their Legal Network has been growing. So there are a lot of signs indicating
that this years workshop will be at least as good as the previous one.
</p>
<p>
I'm especially happy that this year we have a legal expert from Taiwan among
the participants. Somebody who understands both the Free Software culture but
also has had contact with the Taiwanese Embedded Industry: Florence (Tung-Mei)
Ko. Given the many GPL problems that we see in embedded gear that was developed
in Taiwan, I think many people at the workshop will be interested in the
experience and insight that she can share with us.
</p>
<p>
So for the next two days, I will once again have to put my glofiish reverse
engineering, OpenBSC and VIA related work aside and put my gpl-violations.org
hat on. Not really pleasant for the engineer that I am - but a necessity
to help bring more GPL compliance into the industry.
</p>Will be in Taipei in May after allhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090421-taiwan_may/2009-04-21T03:00:00+02:002009-04-21T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Despite the cancellation of OpenTechSummit, I will be spending three weeks in
Taipei soon (May 05 through May 25). I am looking forward to both the
business side of this trip, as well as actually enjoying the life in this
vibrant Asian metropolis.
</p>
<p>
I'll be doing some work for VIA, as well as some of my other customers
and also be doing some gpl-violations.org related meetings.
</p>OpenTechSummit Taiwan 2009 cancelledhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090414-opentechsummit_cancelled/2009-04-14T03:00:00+02:002009-04-14T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I was very sad to hear that <a href="http://open-hw.org/index.php/OpenTechSummit_Taiwan_2009">OpenTechSummit
Taiwan 2009</a> had been <a href="http://lists.openpattern.org/pipermail/open-hw/2009-April/000181.html">cancelled by its organizers</a>.
</p>
<p>
I was really looking forward to this event as an opportunity to provide some
more information to Taiwanese hardware makers about properly supporting Linux
and other Free and Open Source Software. On a more personal note, I was also
really looking forward to spending some time in Taiwan again. It's currently
questionable whether that will now happen in may, as originally planned.
</p>FOSS.in/2009 event / venue / date announcementhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090331-foss_in-announcement/2009-03-31T03:00:00+02:002009-03-31T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Much earlier than in previous years, <a href="http://foss.in/news/fossin2009-event-announcement.html">FOSS.in has
announced the date + venue for the 2009 incarnation of the event</a>.
</p>
<p>
The CfP is not out yet, but I hope it will also be out sooner rather than
later, as scheduling long-distance travelling is something that most speakers prefer
to do rather sooner than later. And you won't book your ticket before you know
your paper has been accepted, etc.
</p>
<p>
I'm definitely looking forward to it. As the frequent follower of my blog will
know, I've been there every year since 2003, which probably makes it the only
conference (next to the Chaos Communication Congress) that I've been visiting
that often in a row.
</p>Enjoying the BOSSA 2009 conferencehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090310-bossa/2009-03-10T03:00:00+01:002009-03-10T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
This year's <a href="http://www.bossaconference.org/">BOSSA</a> incarnation has
once again turned out as an excellent event. It was good to meet and talk
again with a number of people like Marcel Holtmann or Rasterman.
</p>
<p>
This year it seems the organizers went out of their way to please every
speaker. Since their conference shirts were available in three colors (but not
black), they actually prepared a special edition of a black t-shirt for me.
</p>
<p>
It will be important to see how many other conferences can live up to that
standard ;)
</p>Just booked my flights for BOSSA in Brazilhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090203-bossa/2009-02-03T03:00:00+01:002009-02-03T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
After last years' experience at BOSSA 2008, I was very interested to attend <a href="http://www.bossaconference.indt.org/">BOSSA 2009</a> in Porto de
Galinhas, Pernambuco, Brazil. This time I hope I can contribute by talking
about the various FOSS projects in the GSM protocol area, such as
gssm/gsm-tvoid, OpenBSC and OpenBTS. Lets hope I can get some more people
excited about liberating the protocol part of mobile communications devices.
</p>
<p>
Like last year, I will also add some holiday after the conference. The nice
and empty beaches of Pernambuco and Alagoas are quite irresistible during the
off-season.
</p>Presenting on Linux Coding Style / Mainline Merge and gnufiish at IIIhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20090121-presenting_at_iii/2009-01-21T03:00:00+01:002009-01-21T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Today I was invited to present at the Taiwanese <a href="http://www.iii.org.tw/">Institute for the Information Industry</a> about
two topics.
</p>
<p>
The fist talk was on <i>How to write code compatible with the Linux Coding
Style and submit patches to the mainline kernel</i>, a seminar that I have
given a number of times before, but which still raises a lot of interest.
</p>
<p>
The second talk that the III requested was surprising: About the <a href="http://gnufiish.org/">gnufiish.org</a> project, an effort to port Linux
to E-TEN glofiish PDA phones. It is a very low-level hacker-oriented talk,
and I was surprised that I should give it in front of an audience consisting of
software developers working for "the industry". But I think it was received very
well, and maybe it has made some people to start thinking about why people have
to go to that extreme (reverse engineering) rather than some hardware vendor
actually embracing the Open Source revolution and helping those people to make
more software run on their devices.
</p>25C3: Total Overloadhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081231-25c3-overload/2008-12-31T03:00:00+01:002008-12-31T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
In my 10+ years of CCC congress, I've never been trying to run any significant
project at the hackcenter so far. In the first couple of years I was just
hanging out there, chatting with people and working on stuff here and there,
operating FTP sites (like the trial we once had with then-experimental ext3 vs.
Reiserfs on machines with Gigabit Ethernet interfaces [I was operating the ext3
one]). The years following that I was trying my best with the audio+video
recording and streaming - with mixed results, as all people from that time
remember. I was just trying to help, digital A/V not being my particular area
of expertise.
</p>
<p>
So this year I decided it would be a good idea to do some serious GSM protocol
side development at the hack center, which would complement the <a href="http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/3007.en.html">talk I was giving on running your own GSM network</a>.
</p>
<p>
So far so good. The only day where I really could hack the way I wanted was
on Day 0 (the day before the event officially started) and Day 1. Friends with
various backgrounds started to join and help with issues here and there.
Everyone was excited by the numerous new possibilities a project like this
provided.
</p>
<p>
However, starting with Day 2, and particularly Day 3 and Day 4, the amount of
constant interruptions by various people was simply unbearable and brought
the development close to a complete halt. Not only that, it caused severe
lack of sleep, stress levels even beyond what I had ever experienced before,
and I developed a cold and even some fever.
</p>
<p>
In general, I am completely disappointed by many of the crowds. I would have
assumed that most people _know_ that frequent interruptions lead to
inproductivity, and that they would also know and understand that a project that literally hundreds (if not thousands) of people are excited about cannot answer
RTFM style questions that everyone would have been able to read up by
themselves on wikipedia or similar sites. Sure, there were some exceptions to
that rule. But overall, it was a very unpleasant experience.
</p>
<p>
So from next year on, I will certainly refrain from running any kind of project
in the hackcenter. I will be a regular attendee, possibly speaking on some
kind of subject or the other, preferably on the last day so people won't drive
me nuts with their never-ending questions.
</p>
<p>
The DDoS attack on the GSM/BS11/OpenBSC hackers, combined with the overcrowded
25C3 has in the end led to a point where the only two talks that I've been able
to attend were the ones in which I was speaking.
</p>
<p>
"Thank you" :(
</p>FOSS.out 2008https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081130-fossin_over/2008-11-30T03:00:00+01:002008-11-30T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
FOSS.in 2008 is over. The grand finale was <a href="http://kalyanvarma.net/">Kalyan Varma</a>'s closing keynote on how
he thinks fundamental <i>FOSS principles</i> are present in all aspects
of his work and life, even in areas completely unrelated to FOSS such as
photography and wildlife conversation.
</p>
<p>
I could not agree more to what he said. Fundamentally it is about being
curious, learning how things work, cooperating with other people with
mutual benefit, etc. - as I have to some extent outlined in one of my
previous blog posts about reverse engineering.
</p>
<p>
One particular spin was also on Security. Having an IT security background
like him, with a pretty similar FOSS culture background, I can perfectly
understand and support his point of view.
</p>
<p>
As for FOSS.in, I think it could also not have been much better. Biggest
constraints were probably the conference venue itself. Its lecture halls
inevitably create a big divide between a small number of entertainers on the
stage and a big auditorium. There also was a constant and severe lack of
power outlets at any given time or place - to some extent again a problem
with the venue.
</p>
<p>
Thanks to the Organizers, Team FOSS.in and the Volunteers. Well Done.
</p>Update from FOSS.inhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081128-fossin_update/2008-11-28T03:00:00+01:002008-11-28T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
First of all, many people have asked for the slides of my presentations. You can get the <a href="http://foss.in/2008/register/slides/Keynote__How_to_do_embedded_Linux_right_679.pdf">keynote slides</a> and the <a href="http://foss.in/2008/register/slides/LKHG__Reverse_Engineering_and_Porting_Linux_to_a_WinMobile_PDA_phone_716.pdf">glofiish reverse engineering</a> slides from the FOSS.in website now.
</p>
<p>
Giving the latter talk, I was really surprised that nobody in the audience
raised their hands when I was asking who had ever done reverse engineering of
any sort. I cannot really imagine any of my work, both in the FOSS community
as well as professionally without using whatever means to discover how things
(devices, drivers, software) work. Isn't it a most natural human trait? You
discover something new, and you want to learn how it works. So you take it
apart, learn about its components and understand how the individual parts play
together.
</p>
<p>
I've been doing this with about everything I ever got, even as a kid. Stereo
system, reel-to-reel tape recorder, my first 286 based PC, my first motorbike,
car, etc. It's simply not acceptable to be in possession of some technical
device without understanding how _exactly_ it works.
</p>
<p>
So anyway, I hope the talk was at least a bit inspirational and makes some
people try. It is not so much important that you actually fully manage to
reach the goal (like in my case getting a full-blown Linux implementation of
all the drivers done, etc.). The importance is the process, and what you
learn while doing it.
</p>
<p>
So today I was mostly busy preparing and holding that talk, later at night
I was back to working on gsm-tvoid. I'll cover this in a separate post.
</p>The first two days of FOSS.in overhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081127-fossin_workout/2008-11-27T03:00:00+01:002008-11-27T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I've been having the pleasure of holding the opening keynote at FOSS.in, where
I've been (again) using the opportunity to point out the sad situation of
Linux in the Embedded space. I think it was good to get this message not only
to the CE Linux Conference Europe attendees, but also to the various FOSS
interested Indian developers. Many of those work for companies involved in
chipsets for Embedded devices, Embedded Systems development or even BSP
development.
</p>
<p>
Despite that very sad/depressing conference opener, the feedback was overall
very positive. Some people mentioned "it was like if you were talking to me
personally". So let's see if this kind of grass-roots FOSS lobbying can help
to make a bit of a change in those Embedded Linux companies.
</p>
<p>
After the keynote I was more or less immediately starting my <a href="http://workouts.foss.in/2008/index.php/Improving_Free_Software_based_GSM_protocol_analysis"><i>WorkOut</i>
on improving Free Software based GSM protocol analysis</a>. Basically we're
looking at GSM-tvoid, gssm, gsmdecode, the wireshark patch of gssm, etc. and
coming up with a much improved solution.
</p>
<p>
So far we've added the tun-device support from gssm to gsm-tvoid, but that's
only a kludge and a temporary solution. Adding fake Ethernet headers to a GSM
Um frame and using a non-registered Ethernet protocol type is not really the
kind of "implementation quality" that I'd like to see.
</p>
<p>
So now I've come up with a 'gsmtap header' similar to what 802.11 solves by the
radiotap header. gsm frames including radiotap header can be stored directly as
a new linktype in PCAP files, or they can be sent via UDP packets through the
regular IP and networking stack, where wireshark can just grab them using the
normal network devices.
</p>
<p>
We've continued to work on those issues on the second day of FOSS.in, and we'll
also continue to work on it today. Tomorrow I'll be presenting on my gnufiish
project, i.e. the reverse engineering and Linux port plus driver development
for the E-TEN glofiish X800/M800 devices.
</p>
<p>
I personally can't really say yet how well the concept of WorkOuts has
worked-out in practise. I really need to learn more about the progress that
the other workouts have been making. I think at least for the GSM workout,
there were not many people who had the skills or knowledge about the protocols
and/or the tools involved - which is not a big surprise. But I'd hope that
some of the attendees at least got interested in the subject and will
contribute to the respective projects. There are many things to be done,
including the somewhat tedious exercise of adding dozens and dozens of new
dissector code to wireshark. If anyone else (preferably with some
generic understanding about network protocols and wireshark dissectors) wants
to help with that, please contact me.
</p>From FreedomHEC Taipei to FOSS.in / Linux and the Taiwanese Hardware Industryhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081123-freedomhec_fossin/2008-11-23T03:00:00+01:002008-11-23T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm on my way from Taipei to Bangalore, from FreedomHEC Taipei to FOSS.in. Two
very different events in two very different countries with a quite different
IT industry.
</p>
<p>
I was really happy about FreedomHEC. It is really about time that the Linux
world and the Taiwan-based chipset vendors and system integrators start much
more interaction. It is a simple economic fact that A lot of hardware
development, both in the PC mainboard, Laptop as well as the embedded device
space happens in Taiwan. It is also very true, that for whatever reason the
gradual Linux revolution in the server and desktop market in the EU, the US and
other markets such as Southern America has not really reached Taiwan. At least
from all the various contacts that I've made in Taiwan, there are almost no Linux
users, and particularly not in a corporate environment.
</p><p>
</p><p>
My experience in Germany shows that many small and medium sized companies,
as well as a noteworthy part of public administration is using Linux, at
least on the server side, and to an increasing amount on the desktop side.
Many end users have dual-booting machines. Plus, the universities and
particularly the computer science departments have a long UNIX-related tradition
- and most SunOS and Solaris workstations have since been replaced by Linux
based systems, or at least systems with dual-boot configurations.
</p>
<p>
If my completely non-representative assessment of the Situation in Taiwan
is true, then we just don't see this level of adoption there. And this has a
quite big impact:
</p><ul>
<li>Managers and Engineers underestimate the amount of Linux adoptions in their
target markets, since they don't see that much adoption in their domestic
market</li>
<li>Even if there is a [customer] demand for Linux, the Taiwanese hardware industry
has a hard time to properly respond to this demand due to the lack of know-how
about Linux and FOSS - both technology-wise, but also regarding the development
model</li>
<li>There are very few system administrators or software developers with a profound
Linux user experience. How are you supposed to administrate or develop for
a system that you haven't at least used for a couple of years?</li>
</ul>
<p>
So as a result of this, I argue that Linux hardware support <i>world wide</i>
suffers from the lack of recognition of Linux in Taiwan.
</p>
<p>
This needs to change. Recent developments like the Asus eeePC or Linux-based
Netbooks in general are not a solution either. They don't mean that Asus suddenly
cares about how well e.g. the Linux ACPI implementation interacts with the ACPI
BIOS of their non-eeePC Laptops.
</p>
<p>
I think any system integrator who understands those facts will likely gain a lot
of trust and customer satisfaction. We yet have to see _any_ laptop or
mainboard manufacturer who goes public and says "we will test our systems with
Linux like we test them with Windows".
</p>
<p>
Non-Taiwanese system integrators like Dell or HP have a competitive advantage
here. They do understand much better what Linux is, and how to work with it -
even though mostly still on the Server side. You will find Linux-based BIOS
update tools. You will see ACPI BIOSes that actually work properly and don't
just contain random bytes in those parts that Windows doesn't currently use.
</p>
<p>
Why not Acer? Why not Asus? Why not MSI? Why not Foxconn? How much of a R&D
investment is it really to do even the most minimal testing like booting some
Linux Live Distribution from CD and checking if the major features are working?
I would assume in the total Laptop R&D cost, it's less than 1%. So if only 1%
of the customers will install Linux, it should already be justified.
</p>
<p>
Especially right now, nobody has really made the first step. Anyone who starts
with the right strategy can be the first one on the market. The opportunity is
there. Don't wait until the competition uses it.
</p>FreedomHEC Taipei 2008https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081117-freedomhec_taipie/2008-11-17T03:00:00+01:002008-11-17T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
As I think I've mentioned before elsewhere in this blog, in a few days there is
the <a href="http://freedomhectaipei.pbwiki.com/">FreedomHEC Taipei 2008</a>.
If you're in Taiwan and are doing some Linux kernel/driver related development,
you should come and meet up at this event.
</p>
<p>
Looking forward to meeting lots of [new?] Taiwanese Linux developers :)
</p>About the new format / structure of FOSS.inhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081020-foss_in-discussion/2008-10-20T03:00:00+02:002008-10-20T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
There has been quite some discussion on various places on the net about
the recently-announced change of the FOSS.in conference format. Instead
of lots of talks/presentations, there is an emphasis on workshops and
similar more interactive and collaborative types of events.
</p>
<p>
I have been speaking to a number of developers who have been to FOSS.in
before and who have been putting in proposals for FOSS.in/2008, too.
They all think it is a very courageous step: going from a successful,
working 'traditional conference' scheme with presentations, sufficient
sponsors to cover travel expenses of foreign speakers, etc. to a very
different, much more developer-community oriented event.
</p>
<p>
I also think it is a courageous experiment. I have not yet heard of any event
similar to this before. Sure, there are project days and developer meetings or
miniconfs or whatever you might call them. But not to the extent as, at least
to my perception, FOSS.in is planning right now.
</p>
<p>
In any case, it depends on what your target is. 'typical' Linux conferences
are basically focussing on either one (or multiple) of the following:
</p><ul>
<li>Spread the word about Linux/FOSS, to generate more adoption</li>
<li>Provide updates on development progress to various people in the community as well both individual and professional users</li>
</ul>
<p>
However, if you emphasize on the actual FOSS <b>development</b>, then I think
it is quite legitimate to go for a event format that FOSS.in is heading to
right now.
</p>
<p>
It is exactly FOSS.in who can try such a change, since it is a true community
event without any commercial interest and without affiliation to particular
companies.
</p>
<p>
And after all, who wants to see the same kind of event happening each and
every year, with the same kind of people talking? Wouldn't that be boring
after some time? Especially if there are a number of other events doing more
or less the same?
</p>
<p>
In any case, personally I'm planning to do a FOSS.in WorkOut on a USRP+gnuradio
based GSM scanner project. India is the perfect place on earth to get this
done, since the government mandates A5/0 (no encryption) and thus all the
packets can be captured and each and every bit implemented as wireshark plugin.
</p>FOSS.in 2008 CfP is outhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081010-foss.in-cfp/2008-10-10T03:00:00+02:002008-10-10T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I have just received news that the <a href="http://foss.in/2008/10/call-for-participation/">FOSS.in 2008 Call for
Participation</a> has been released. This is good news, although I think it
is quite late, as every year...
</p>
<p>
I'm definitely looking forward to FOSS.in, like every year. There's such
a huge potential in India, so many software developers. If only some more
could be convinced to _effectively_ work on FOSS and contribute their work
back to the community, it would be a great gain.
</p>Netfilter Developer Workshop 2008 in Parishttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081001-netfilter-workshop/2008-10-01T03:00:00+02:002008-10-01T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm currently at the <a href="http://workshop.netfilter.org/2008/">netfilter workshop 2008</a> in Paris, France.
</p>
<p>
It's always sort-of a mixed experience for me. Obviously it's great to spend
some time with all the great hackers who work on various aspects of
netfilter/iptables (and now finally also its successor that is so-far called
nftables). On the other hand, it's been about three years since I last actively
contributed code to netfilter, which makes me sad. I'm still excited about it
and have many ideas that I'd love to implement. But where to find the time for it?
</p>NLUUG autumn conference / Embedded Linux Conference Europehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080929-nluug-elce/2008-09-29T03:00:00+02:002008-09-29T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've been invited to be the keynote speaker of the joint <a href="http://nluug.nl/events/nj08/">NLUUG autumn conference</a> and
<a href="http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_europe08">Embedded Linux Conference Europe</a>.
</p>
<p>
It is a great honor to me to be the keynote speaker, and I will certainly
use this chance to provide some of my insights into Embedded Linux. I feel
confident to have a thorough understanding about the market (and it's many
problems) due to
</p><ul>
<li>having a strong, 14 year FOSS community developer background</li>
<li>knowing how hard it is to do FOSS-only embedded hardware development
(for OpenPCD, OpenBeacon, Openmoko, ...) in todays secretive hardware industry</li>
<li>having seen a wider range of embedded Linux products than most other people
by reverse engineering hundreds of devices for gpl-violations.org</li>
<li>and now even knowing the chip maker perspective, after becoming VIA's Open Source Liaison</li>
</ul>
<p>
So I'm trying to point out the various problems I see in the Embedded Linux world,
and how they can be addressed.
</p>
<p>
If I know you and you're planning to attend the conference: Please drop me an
e-mail in advance so we can meet up, chat, have drinks, meet for dinner or the
like.
</p>Hackcontest at OpenExpo 2008https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080925-hackcontest/2008-09-25T03:00:00+02:002008-09-25T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've had the honor to join other experienced FOSS hackers on the Jury for the
<a href="http://www.hackontest.org/">Hackontest</a>. The idea was to let
the community collect a number of work-items for teams (of 3 developers) working
on a particular project, then pick some of those work items and see how far
each team gets within 24 hours.
</p>
<p>
I think it was a very interesting concept. Something that at least I have not
yet seen anywhere else before. The organizers did a great job with the
preparation. Setting up the website for project proposals, collecting
community votes on the individual tasks, putting together the jury.
</p>
<p>
The participants of the contest then were placed into a container (yes, the
kind of containers used for international shipping) with a fridge, beer,
snacks, Internet, power, a projector and some other gear. They had vnc running
on all of their systems, to enable a large public screen at the trade show
where people would be able to follow whatever happens on-screen right now
on a system of a random developer participating in the context. 'reality-tv
for hackers' ;)
</p>
<p>
The results and the progress were quite different between the individual
projects. I don't want to reveal the internal discussions we had in the jury,
but one thing that basically everyone agreed to was the improper use of
revision control systems. None of the teams was setting a good example on how
to use them. Either the granularity of the commits, or the changelog texts, or
the time when they committed was wrong. You shouldn't commit unrelated
changes, never do cosmetic and functional changes in one commit, etc. This
is what makes your work reproducible, readable and understandable to others,
like the jury and particularly your own user and developer community. It is
one aspect that affects a lot how easy it is for others to contribute to your
project or to contribute to it.
</p>Just arrived in Winterthur for OpenExpo Zurich 2008https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080923-openexpo/2008-09-23T03:00:00+02:002008-09-23T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've just arrived in Winterthur (Switzerland) for <a href="http://www.openexpo.ch/">OpenExpo</a> where I will present on the various
reasons and implications of the fact that 99.9% of the makers of commercial
embedded Linux products have not understood the slightest bit about Embedded
Linux or rather, embedded FOSS in general.
</p>
<p>
Those people who've ever tried to exercise their freedom to create and run
modified versions of an embedded product with pre-installed Linux will definitely
know what I'm talking about.
</p>OLS 2008 is overhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080727-ols-over/2008-07-27T03:00:00+02:002008-07-27T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Yesterday was the last day of OLS 2008. In fact, the last day of OLS in
general, since from next year on, it will no longer be in Ottawa, but Montreal.
</p>
<p>
2008 marked the 10-year anniversary for OLS. Impressive. I have missed at
least the first one (1999). I'm not sure if I started with the 2000 or the
2001 incarnation. Most likely 2000, since that was about the time I got
heavily involved with netfilter.
</p>
<p>
I had the honor to be mentioned in the 10-year-anniversary talk in a reference
to my fashion style (wearing skirts/kilts at earlier OLS's). If I only had
known, I might have brought and worn it again ;)
</p>
<p>
As for the conference itself: I don't want to follow all the various people
who have been voicing their discontempt with recent incarnations of OLS. Sure,
due to the advent of the kernel summit, the UKUUG linux developer conference,
linux.conf.au, the Linux plumbers conference and other events there now is more
'competition' to attract the Linux celebrities. However, most people should
not be attending a conference like it was some kind of fan club. There are
still quite many people at OLS who actually _do_ a lot of die-hard Linux
development work. And those poeple have interesting things to say, and it's
interesting to share ideas with them. OLS is pretty much a conference where
mainline developers can talk to other mainline developers. It's not an event
directed at users, and not an event directed at non-participatory 'consumers'
of Linux like many commercial embedded vendors.
</p>
<p>
So after all, I have to say that the conference was a success and I'd be happy
to attend it's future incarnations. Hopefully with my own paper and presentation.
</p>
<p>
There is one thing, though, that upset me a lot: At the closing ceremony,
there was something like a lottery for a handful of Linux-based devices.
Among those devices was the Motorola ROKR2 V8. For those of you who don't
know: This is a device where the vendor chose to remove your freedom to 'run
modified versions of the program'. It will not boot any non-signed bootloader,
kernel or executables. And the user is locked out of his own device by means
of SELinux. I think it is a grave insult to the Linxu developer community that
something like that was chosen by both organizers and sponsors.
</p>Arrived in Canada for OLS againhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080722-ols/2008-07-22T03:00:00+02:002008-07-22T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've just arrived in Canada for <a href="http://www.linuxsymposium.org/">Ottawa
Linux Symposium 2008</a>. After my last visit to OLS in 2005, there were two
years of intensive work that prevented me from attending the event. Last year
I actually had to cancel an already accepted paper submission :(
</p>
<p>
In Year 01 post OpenMoko, I have time to visit OLS again. Unfortunately no
company to pay for my travel expenses this time, but well, what can you do.
Due to scheduling issues with a family celebration, I didn't know until very
recently that I would be able to make it this year. Thus I happily forwarded
the invitation to talk about OpenMoko to Werner. I was surprised that it's now
actually one of the keynotes. Looking forward to it :)
</p>
<p>
There have been many rumors that OLS is not like what it used to be. Maybe
I'm now in a good position to make up my mind about it, since I've missed two
years and will be able to directly compare my memories from before with the
current event.
</p>
<p>
<b>UPDATE:</b> Astaro has retroactively offered sponsoring my travel expenses, which
is very nice of them - especially considering that I haven't been doing any
netfilter/iptables related work for years.
</p>Last minute: Presenting at LinuxTaghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080521-lastminute_talk-linuxtag/2008-05-21T03:00:00+02:002008-05-21T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
As apparently there was a last-minute drop-out in the Security track of <a href="http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/">LinuxTag 2008</a>, I have been invited to
present. It is great that I could convince them to do a talk about my current
favorite subject: Enabling more security research in communications protocols
outside the TCP/IP/Ethernet based Internet.
</p>
<p>
I don't want to spoil it by providing too much information upfront. I'm sure
there will be recordings available afterwards. For now, you can get the main points <a href="http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/de/conf/events/vp-freitag/vortragsdetails.html?talkid=156">from the abstract</a>
</p>First ASUS day of OpenTechSummit Taipeihttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080426-opentechsummit_day1/2008-04-26T03:00:00+02:002008-04-26T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
As I might have indicated before, I have the pleasure of being invited to the
OpenTechSummit 2008 in Taiwan. Two days ago, I was at the opening dinner. The
problem of that dinner was the lack of attendees. There were loads of delicious
(free, sponsored) food, but not even remotely enough people to eat it.
</p>
<p>
Today I had a bit of a problem finding the ASUS venue, since it was said to be
at "exit 2" of the MRT station. Unfortunately it had two exits of that name,
one on each side of the station :)
</p>
<p>
One presentation there I found particularly embarrassing was the one about the
eePC SDK. First of all, I will ignore my thoughts about why you actually need
such an SDK if it really is nothing more than a customized Debian Linux with
Eclipse. But even then, why fly in a foreing speaker to do a click-by-click
walk-thhrough on how to create a 'hell world' Qt program using eclipse?
</p>
<p>
My favourite of the day was definitely the presentation on the OpenPattern
router board.
</p>Review of DORS/CLUC 2008 in Zagreb, Croatiahttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080421-dors_cluc/2008-04-21T03:00:00+02:002008-04-21T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've spent the last five days in beautiful Croatia - most of the time in its
capital Zagreb. The local conference <a href="http://www.open.hr/dc2008/">DORS/CLUC</a> has been around for a couple of
years, and in fact I've been at a previous incarnation three years ago.
</p>
<p>
It's a nice, small but great event. And in fact, for the invited speakers as
myself it feels more like an all-inclusive holiday than a conference. The
organizers went out of their way to make us feel at home, including a trip to
the waterfalls of <a href="http://www.find-croatia.com/nationalparks/plitvice.html">Plitvice
national park</a> (photos will be available shortly at <a href="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/photoalbum/travel/">my public photo album</a>.
</p>
<p>
It was also great to spend some time with Alan Cox again, who to my surprise
was also attending the event with two lectures. Hope his luggage didn't get
lost again on his way home...
</p>Thoughts on FOSDEM 2008https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20080224-fosdem2008/2008-02-24T03:00:00+01:002008-02-24T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I really have been disappointed quite a bit with my visit to FOSDEM this year.
In fact, many of my observations might actually apply to Brussels as a whole, I really don't know.
</p>
<p>
It all started with arriving at Bruxelles Central station on friday, where the
entire station was so crowded it took me ages to fight my way through the
crowds. Then something like only the fourth idle cab driver was willing to
actually take us to the hotel. The others for whatever reason didn't want to
earn those 15 EUR. Aren't there some regulations forcing them to transport paying passengers?
</p>
<p>
Then, let's talk about the social event on friday. How can you hold such an
event in a place that's about one third of the required size, and which has a
music volume level that effectively prevents any form of communication. I left
after about 10 minutes there, since there just was no point at all. One wonders what happens if there is a fire. Aren't there some kind of regulations of the max number of people you are allowed to cram into tiny places like that pub?
</p>
<p>
At the conference venue the problem seemed to re-occur. All the rooms are
significantly too small. Combined with the lack of ventilation and the lack of
a PA system it was not possible to stand more than a single talk in the X.org
devroom, before I had to get out to get fresh air.
</p>
<p>
Getting in and out of the DevRooms is also a challenge by itself, since the
hallways are over-crowded and full of noisy and loud conversations. Opening
the door for even a small amount of time is barely impossible, since that would
expose the talk on the inside to the enormous noise levels on the hallway.
Especially since the DevRooms don't have any PA system, it's already quite a
challenge to understand the speaker inside the room. Somebody opening the door
just completely kills the communication flow
</p>
<p>
The entire idea of putting up all the projects with tables in the hallways
seems questionable to me. They do nothing but block the path for other people
(also blocking emergency escape paths). Furthermore, cold air gets in all the
time since many people have to use the doors in order to walk between the
different buildings. It would make much more sense to keep the hallways for what they are: Ways where people walk between rooms. The project tables should be
inside rooms. Those rooms would self-contain the noise generated by the tables, be more comfortable (warm, no wind) and keep the hallways free for people to walk on.
</p>
<p>
The same problem exists for the "BAR" where you get food and drinks. It's too
small, too crowded, and absolutely not comfortable at all (cold wind coming in
through the permanently open doors, ...)
</p>
<p>
And then consider the public transport "performance" on weekends. It took me
regularly more than an hour for something that was a 2.6km distance between
hotel and venue. That's quite ridiculous. Given how crammed those few trams
are that actually run, it doesn't seem to be a shortage of passengers that
makes them operate so few trains per hour.
</p>
<p>
All in all, I could not do anything else but to attribute FOSDEM 2008 as
something like "the most inefficient event", i.e. where I wasted a lot of time
for reasons stated above, rather than actually attending lectures.
</p>Day one of FOSS.inhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20071204-foss_in-day1/2007-12-04T03:00:00+01:002007-12-04T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
It was a great first day at <a href="http://foss.in/2007/">FOSS.in 2007</a>.
It's been surprisingly quiet at the venue today, compared with the previous
incarnations of the event. This is due to the changed structure, in which the
first two days are focused "project days" and the main conference only starts
on day three.
</p>
<p>
This does by no means imply that the project days are less important, or that
the lower number of people is bad. Quality matters, not quantity. And since
the event is about contributions, project days are a very important addition to
FOSS.in
</p>
<p>
I spent most of the day talking to Rusty and James. It has been quite nice and
I now have learned about <a href="https://ozlabs.org/mailman/listinfo/ccan">Rustys new exciting CCAN
project</a>. As a long-time perl developer (I have leanred Perl before C!), I
definitely understand the beauty of something like CPAN. With C however, the
hardest issue will be resolving the namespace problem. Unfortunately I am
currently not in the mood of adding even more unfinished things to my task
list.
</p>Looking forward to FOSS.inhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20071128-foss_in-looking_forward/2007-11-28T03:00:00+01:002007-11-28T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
In a few days <a href="http://foss.in/2007">FOSS.in 2007</a> will start. I'm
departing from Germany on Monday next week. I have a ton of things to do until
then, including a trip to my family in Nuernberg on Friday,, visiting a
industrial festival in Chemnitz on Saturday and packing my suitcases on Sunday ;)
</p>
<p>
So this will be the fifth year in a row that I visit Bangalore in late
November/early December for <i>the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore</i>.
What once started like a crazy reason for visiting India the first time (after
enjoying Indian food and bollywood music from Germany for a couple of years), has turned into a regular mark in every years' calendar for me.
</p>
<p>
I've been told that FOSS.in this year will be very different from all the
previous events. The focus has been shifted from doing just another round of
'this is free software and this is how to use it' event, the focus is now
entirely on the community developer.
</p>
<p>
India still has, to my deep regret, shown relatively few significant
contributors to Free Software - especially if you relate it to the size of the
IT industry and the number of people working as software engineers in that
country. Thus, I very much welcome any effort to nurture and foster the active, contributing part of the FOSS community there.
</p>
<p>
Meanwhile, the <a href="http://foss.in/2007/schedules">Schedule</a> has been
published by the organizers. Looking at the speakers and topics covered, it
definitely looks more than promising!
</p>
<p>
Also: My openmoko-induced absence to the major Linux events in Europe and
Canada have resulted in a way too long time since I've last met Rusty and
James, my former fellow netfilter/iptables hackers :) Make sure you don't miss
any of Rusty's talk. It's going to be fun :) And be prepared to switch your
brain's English parser into high-speed mode :)
</p>
<p>
As a final side note: I'm happy to learn today that my application for a five
year visa to India has been granted. During the last five years, I had to obtain a total of seven 6months visas - sufficient evidence to support my argument in favor of a 5 year visa.
</p>FOSS.in 2007 Call for Participationhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20070924-foss_in/2007-09-24T03:00:00+02:002007-09-24T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The <a href="http://foss.in/2007/info/Call_for_Participation">Call for
Participation</a> of this years incarnation [it's in India, after all] of FOSS.in has just been released.
</p>
<p>
This is great news. I've cut down on all other events this year: I haven't
visited at OLS, LinuxConf Europe, linux.conf.au, ...
Only FOSS.in I really cannot miss ;)
</p>
<p>
I haven't yet decided on the exact title of the lecture that I'm interested to
submit, but it seems like I'll have to decide soon. It will be <a href="http://www.openmoko.org/">OpenMoko</a> related, that's for sure ;)
</p>
<p>
If you have worked on something exciting in the FOSS world, please don't
hesitate and submit it to the FOSS.in/2007 CfP. It's a great event with a very
technical audience. And an ideal opportunity to catch a glimpse of India :)
</p>Secure Linux Administration Conferencehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20061206-slac/2006-12-06T03:00:00+01:002006-12-06T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Just one day after returning from India, I'll be one of the first speakers on
the first day of <a href="http://www.heinlein-support.de/web/secure-linux-administration-conference/slac_konferenz/">Secure
Linux Administration Conference</a> (SLAC), where I'll be talking about
hardware selection and low-level tuning for achieving best Linux networking
performance.
</p>Stupid extreme AC has made me sick againhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20061126-foss_in-sick_again/2006-11-26T03:00:00+01:002006-11-26T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Just like the 2003/2004, the insane amount of air condition at J N Tata
Auditorium has made me catch a cold once again. This is not a surprise,
considering that I had a hard time typing while sitting in there, having to
regularly warm up my fingers by sitting on my hands.
</p>
<p>
This is just something that I will never understand. When there's a
reasonable, comfortable temperature outside (let's say 25 degrees Celsius), why
would you ever do more than just exchange the air inside the hall (e.g. just
blow air from the outside into the room, and remove 'used air')? Of what use
is it to chill the room down to sub-20 degrees?
</p>
<p>
Interestingly, a lot of Indian people seem to be used to it, since they were
wearing short-sleeved shirts, while we were freezing even wearing t-shirt plus
long-sleeved shirt...
</p>
<p>
This consumes _a lot_ of energy. The AC in the main hall is at least in the
order of 30..50 kW, if not more. No wonder that India wants more nuclear power
plants. I don't want to imagine the amount of power consumption by ACs
nationwide.
</p>
<p>
Some ventilation is more than efficient in many cases. Even during two weeks
of Kerala in March this year, I was using the AC only once at a single hotel.
</p>
<p>
Please, think twice before using an AC or even turning it to ridiculous
amounts. Is the energy waste and increased health risks (think of not
regularly cleaned filters, etc) really worth a slight increase in comfort?
How weak have we become if we can't even tolerate temperatures up to, let's say,
30 centigrade?
</p>Sorryhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20061125-foss_in-sorry/2006-11-25T03:00:00+01:002006-11-25T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I want to say sorry to the many people whom I had almost no chance to talk to
during my FOSS.in visit. I know it's no excuse, but believe me, I'm just too
involved with way too many things at the same time. For any rational reason, I
should not have attended the conference, because I cannot afford that amount of
time. I have even skipped OLS in Ottawa earlier this year, Linuxtag and Linux
Kongreess in Germany, as well as I have turned down an invitation from
linux.conf.au in early 2007. I always was (and still am) a big fan of lb/FOSS.in,
that's why I thought I got to be there, even this time.
</p>
<p>
My work schedule of the last couple of months has been optimized to work at
least 12 hour per day, seven days a week, with no external interruptions and
almost no interaction with the outside world apart from checking the most
important emails about twice per day. No going out to clubs, no parties, no
movies, no TV, and close to zero meeting with friends either. Not even time for
filing tax declarations in time.
</p>
<p>
Now being at the conference, I'm suffering severely since my backlog of work is
basically growing by one day every day I'm here. This is very stressful, and I
apologize if I cannot respond adequately to those who actually are interested in
my work, or even want to offer help. I know this is not helpful, but please
accept that this time I just can't help it. My reactions have come down to
self-defense. If you ask me anything, even the smallest thing that I'd have to
add to my TODO list, you will trigger a defensive reaction, rather than a
polite and helpful one.
</p>
<p>
I hereby ask you for your understanding. I am at the absolute limit. Give me a
break. Thanks.
</p>First impressions from day1 of foss.inhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20061124-foss_in-first_impressions/2006-11-24T03:00:00+01:002006-11-24T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
The first impressions of FOSS.in/2006 are very positive. Not only were the
security guards clueful enough to not have everyone open their bags at the
entrance, but also the WiFi network was fully operational even before the
opening ceremony started.
</p>
<p>
So far, everything is running verry smooth and pleasant.
</p>On my way to FOSS.in 2006https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20061121-foss_in/2006-11-21T03:00:00+01:002006-11-21T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm now in the final stage of packing my suitcase for my third trip to India
this year. The schedule mainly consists of attending the <a href="http://foss.in/2006/">FOSS.in 2006</a> conference and meeting some
potential business partners regarding <a href="http://openpcd.org/">OpenPCD</a>
and <a href="http://openbeacon.org/">OpenBeacon</a> (which is another open RFID
related project that isn't really public yet).
</p>
<p>
This time there will be a five-person "Berlin delegation" at FOSS.in, which is
quite impressive. First, there's Tim Pritlove of <a href="http://www.ccc.de/">CCC</a> fame. Next Brita + Milosch of <a href="http://bitmanufaktur.de/">bitmanufaktur</a>, and finally Sarah and
myself.
</p>
<p>
I'm looking forward to see how this years incarnation of FOSS.in turns out.
It's again in the IISC J.N. Tata Auditorium, where the organizers (and the
event) suffered quite a bit a couple of years back. But this time, everything
shall be fine.
</p>Linux World Expo in Utrecht, The Netherlandshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20061012-linuxworld_nl/2006-10-12T03:00:00+02:002006-10-12T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Due to Armijn (of gpl-violations.org) involvement in the programme committee of the
<a href="http://linuxworldexpo.nl/">linuxworldexpo.nl 2006</a>, I have been invited
to do a session called "Free Software Master Class" together with Georg Greve
from the Free Software Foundation Europe. Georg presented on "the business value of Free Software", whereas I was talking about "how to be GPL compliant".
</p>
<p>
The presentation went quite fine, and there were good questions coming from the
audience. Hoewver, you could clearly tell that the organizers didn't really
have any experience with holding conference/seminars, but just trade shows.
</p>
<p>
First of all, the seminar area was not reasonably shielded from the background
noise of the trade show. Therefore the volume of the PA had to be quite high
to combat that background noise.
</p>
<p>
Secondly, the light situation was way too bright for the audience to be able to
read the image projected by the LCD projector. I mean, there were dozens of
neon lights (that couldn't be switched off) directly above the screen, that
just cannot work.
</p>
<p>
My third point of criticism was the organization of speaker travel and
accomodation. If it wasn't for me meeting with Armijn at the night of arrival,
I wouldn't have known to which hotel to go to. Furthermore, the hotel was
located in a different town (so you couldn't just go back to the hotel during
the day, to drop some stuff, or change clothes, or whateer). Then that hotel
was undergoing a complete reconstruction. I could only take the question "do
you need a wake up call" by the receptionist as an ironic joke. At 7.45am the
power drilling started - way after all the other noise that started about half
an hour earlier.
</p>
<p>
Luckily I had arranged for my own travel. Georg has received his ticket
information only on Monday afternoon (and was leaving on tuesday!). This is
not exactly how you professionally organize any kind of event.
</p>
<p>
I don't want to overly complain, but I just want to give motivation to improve
that situation the next time.
</p>FOSS.in Call for Papers still open until Oct. 08https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060929-foss_in-cfp/2006-09-29T03:00:00+02:002006-09-29T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Many of you know that for the last three years I enjoy <i>the</i> conference
for Linux, Free and Open Source Software formerly known as linux-bangalore, but
now known as <a href="http://fooss.in/">FOSS.in</a>.
</p>
<p>
Compared with other big international events, FOSS.in call for papers is always
tremendously late, which means that it actually is only some 10 weeks in
advance of the event. The same goes for the event website. Please don't
consider this as a sign of weak organization. It's just like this, it has been
like this, and it worked well. This 'late start' has never compromised the vitality
and success of the actual event.
</p>
<p>
If you have some interesting and technical topic in the Free and Open Source
software which you want to talk about, I suggest submitting a proposal with the
<a href="https://foss.in/2006/cfp/speakers/">FOSS.in speaker registration</a>
website. Expect an excited audience of up to 3,000 attendees.
</p>netconf'06 overhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060915-netconf-over/2006-09-15T03:00:00+02:002006-09-15T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Three days in fast-fowrard, this is how you could probably best describe how
netconf was. In-depth technical talks, just like it is supposed to be. And
I have to admit that even though I've basically paused my kernel network
development in early 2006 (will be back next year!), I could still follow
everything, so the risk of loosing track quickly is apparently not that high.
</p>
<p>
There are many exciting areas of work (and even more with interesting design
ideas/discussions), so it's just too sad that I'll have to stick with other
work for the rest of this year... embedded Linux, RFID and GPL enforcement :(
</p>
<p>
As usual at the end of the event, we had to think of where and when to hold the
next one. After northern America (twice) and Asia/Pacific (once), it's
definitely time for Europe next year. We haven't yet decided on whether to
go to Sweden, Germany or Switzerland. I'll try to locate some scenic venue and sponsoring, maybe we can hold it in Germany after all.
</p>
<p>
At the dinner today both JamesM and myself did our best to promote <a href="http://foss.in/2006/">FOSS.in 2006</a> among the networking crowd. It seems like Rusty, Jamal and Yoshifuji got hooked ;)
</p>
<p>
In other news, I couldn't resist but to buy one of those ultra-small notebooks
that are only available in Japan but nowhere else. Specifically, it is a
Panasonic R5, featuring 24.2 x 18cm size, exactly one kilogram of weight, 60GB
hard disk, 10.4" screen, 512MB RAM (needs to be upgraded) and a ultra-low-power
U1300 Intel CPU.
</p>
<p>
I've managed to install Debian unstable during the last sessions of netconf,
up till now basically everything is running and I'm happily typing this blog
into my usual vim-in-uxterm-in-ion3 setup. Let's hope this new notebook will
end the suffering of my legs due to the exctremely hot (and power-consuming)
Turion64 based MSI laptop.
</p>First time in Japan, visiting netconf 2006https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060912-netconf-japan/2006-09-12T03:00:00+02:002006-09-12T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've just arrived in Japan for <a href="http://vger.kernel.org/netconf2006.html">netconf 2006</a>. It's quite a
pity that I'll only stay one week, but my current business-related schedule
doesn't allow for anything more (actually, it wouldn't even allow for netconf,
but some events are just too important...).
</p>
<p>
So here's my report on the first couple of impressions:
</p><ul>
<li>Everywhere (airport, train stations, inside trains, ...) it is extremely
quiet. Almost nobody talks - and if, then very silently. This is extremely
convenient, and I would love to see this to a similar degree in other places...</li>
<li>At the airport, there was somebody "defragmenting" the luggage on the
conveyor belt, i.e. assuring that the maximum number of suitcases fit onto it,
rather than causing a queue of incoming luggage because of an apparent "full" belt.</li>
<li>At the immigration, an extremely long queue formed. At some point a baby
started crying. Immediately one of the immigration officers left his booth,
made his way through the queue to escort father + baby (mom was not in the
queue) directly to his booth, giving them preference. I'm impressed.</li>
<li>At the airport train station, a ticket vending machine ate my 1000 Yen bill
and responded with some buzzing and the very descriptive "Not Ready" error message.
While I was still undecided whether that is a malfunction, or the machine is
just checking that bill very thoroughly, some JR staff member was running
towards me, apologised, and disappeared in some small service room. Two minutes later,
he opened a small window next to the ticket vending machine, where he handed me
back the bill. I'm even more impressed!</li><li>
</li><li>Japan seems to be the only place (at least as far as I can tell) where "The
Coca-Cola Company" has managed to produce soft-drinks that do not contain
ridiculous amounts of sugar or artificial sweetener. (and I don't even know how
it's called because there is only a Japanese name on it)</li>
<li>At the airport I used WiFi. This is the first time that I used a public hotspot that
did actually use stateless IPv6 auto-configuration to give you a valid IPv6
address. I praise those responsible for that... stunning!</li>
<li>The only negative aspect so far is the lack of a GSM network here. Too sad...</li>
</ul>Off for two weeks of India (GPLv3 Conference Bangalore, plus some Mumbai)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060821-gplv3-bangalore/2006-08-21T03:00:00+02:002006-08-21T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm off for two weeks of India. The first hop will be the
<a href="http://gplv3.gnu.org.in/">4th GPLv3 Conference</a> held in Bangalore.
After that, I'll be relaxing for a few days at my friend <a href="http://atulchitnis.net/">Atul's</a>
place, only to go for some business appointment in Mumbai, before finally
returning on Sept 3rd.
</p>
<p>
As usual. I'll be working "on the road", but expect delay in email replies.
</p>GPLv3 and Steve Ballmer's blood pressurehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060622-gplv3/2006-06-22T03:00:00+02:002006-06-22T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm currently having the pleasure of being part of the <a href="http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/europe-gplv3-conference">GPLv3
Conference Europe</a>. It's been a pleasure to meet folks like Georg Greve
(FSF Europe), David Turner (FSF GPL compliance lab), Eben Moglen (FSF, SFLC) again.
</p>
<p>
There seems to be significant progress in the GPLv3 process since my latest
status updates at the 2nd international conference in Porto Alegre (Brasil)
some months ago.
</p>
<p>
To one part, the second draft of the license is supposed to be published in
roughly one month from now. As Richard Stallman pointed out, the most
significant changes that we're likely to see are:
</p><ul>
<li>Renaming of the "liberty or death" clause to "no surrendering others freedom"</li>
<li>More precise wordings on the frequently-misinterpreted DRM clause, removing the section
on provision for "unencrypted output". The latter clause is basically superfluous, since
if you have access to the full source, and a means to install a modified version of the
source, you can easily remove any encryption routines for the output. </li>
<li>Probably an option that if you only distribute binaries, then it's sufficient to provide
the source code on a network server, rather than having to provide it per mail order. This
still requires some feedback. I personally disagree with this, sine there really are many
[both real and potential] users of Free Software who live in low-bandwidth areas. Yes,
there might be services which download software from the net and write CD-R's for you, but
do we know that such services exist (and will continue to exist) in all those areas? </li>
<li>There was some necessity to rewrite the explicit patent license. There is no change in
function.</li>
<li>Introduce some new wording such as the concept of "conveying a copy" rather than using the
term propagation (or even the old US-centric "distribution"). This wording tries to depart
from any US legal terms and rather defines some own terms. As a side-effect, it cleanly solves
cases such like peer-to-peer sharing networks (where every downloading user
also distributes [partial] copies to other users.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Also, as I figured from conversations with Eben and David, to my personal
pleasure and acknowledgement, the wording of the "60 days clause" has been
changed in a way to make its intent quite a bit more clear.
</p>
<p>
Another interesting point was the fact that I learned about a detail in GPLv2. Apparently
the Section 3b (accompany object code with a written offer to provide the source code later
on a physical storage medium) was never intended for online distribution. This paragraph
was only meant for physical distribution. All online object code distribution should actually
also have online source code distribution. Unfortunately this intent didn't actually become
visible in the license, and now we have cases like Buffalo, where the vendor tries to actually
make it as hard as possible to obtain source code (only one product source code per cd, have
user send a CD-R with return envelope, plus some fee for copying, for each
version of the firmware).
</p>
<p>
Oh, and how does Steve Ballmer's blood pressure fit into the picture? Eben Moglen gave one of his
most eloquent and visionary presentations, in which he interpreted recent and current events in
and around Microsoft as the signs of the eve of the downfall, and that Free Software will be keeping
Mr. Ballmers blood pressure at high levels ;)
</p>Invited to participate in panel on GPLv3 at Barcelona eventhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060612-gplv3-barcelona/2006-06-12T03:00:00+02:002006-06-12T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Later this month, the FSF+FSFE will be hosting the <a href="http://gplv3.fsf.org/3rd-international-gplv3-conference">3rd
international GPLv3 conference</a>. I have the honour to be invited to
participate in panels on enforcement and DRM related issues.
</p>Returning from OSCON Viennahttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060411-oscon_vienna/2006-04-11T03:00:00+02:002006-04-11T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've just returned from my tree day trip to <a href="http://www.oscon.at/">OSCON Vienna</a>.
<a href="http://www.linbit.com/">LINBIT</a> took great care of me during my stay, and I enjoyed
it quite a lot.
</p>
<p>
The most obscure thing encountered during that trip was the word
<i>Liftkarmiesen</i>. Austrians have all these (to us Germans) ancient and
strange words in their variant of German. Anyway, it even took three native
Austrians until somebody actually knew what it was ;) If you're now curious,
try to research it on your own. It's related to curtains ;)
</p>NLUUG Linux meethttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060401-linuxmeet-nluug/2006-04-01T03:00:00+02:002006-04-01T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
During my short visit to Amsterdam, I was invited to speak at a small <a href="http://www.nluug.nl/events/linux20060331/index.html">NLUUG event</a>.
I presented on recent, current and future netfilter/iptables development, and
the presentation was very well received. Unfortunately I didn't have time to
listen to the other two lectures, since I had a meeting scheduled with Armijn Hemel,
the person who's currently helping me the most with gpl-violations.org.
</p>Invited as keynote speaker to OSCON Viennahttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060225-oscon_vienna/2006-02-25T03:00:00+01:002006-02-25T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Recently I've been invited to give the keynote at <a href="http://www.oscon.at/">OSCON Vienna</a> (please note that this conference,
to the best of my knowledge, has absolutely no relation with the O'Reilley OSCON
events).
</p>
<p>
I'm honored and I'll gladly accept this invitation. AFAIR this is the first
time I'll be giving the keynote at any FOSS related conference. The subject
was up to me to determine, and I decided about something that is both one of
the most important subjects for FOSS today, and well within the subject of
the conference: "Kommerz und Community: Schnittstelle zwischen den Welten".
It's about the interface between FOSS community and the commercial IT industry.
</p>
<p>
There are many suboptimalities at this interface. I personally believe that optimization
of this interface would greatly benefit FOSS as a whole. Which issues am I talking about?
Well, first of all, there are lots of GPL/licensing related issues. But even more importantly,
there is the lack of support from the hardware community. As long as hardware vendors
will actively hamper FOSS development by not releasing documentation, locking down their
products, claiming they "support" Linux with their proprietary binary-only drivers.
</p>
<p>
For many of these issues, there's a big communication and furthermore cultural
problem. That's what I want to address in that keynote.
</p>
<p>
There's another good point to the OSCON invitation: The trip to Vienna will
also help me to improve my <a href="http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/2005/06/07#20050607-vienna-cemetery">bad
luck and stupidity while doing photography in Vienna / June 2005</a>.
</p>Who offered me travel sponsorship for FISL7 on IRC?https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060209-fisl7-sponsorship/2006-02-09T03:00:00+01:002006-02-09T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Some time ago, probably in November 2005, somebody on IRC offered me travel
sponsorship for FISL 7. Unfortunately I don't keep IRC logs, and neither do I
remember who it was.
</p>
<p>
If you are the person I'm talking about, and you're reading this: Please
contact me immediately. I'm about to take care of my travel preparations and
need to know whether that sponsorship will actually happen or not.
</p>
<p>
Thanks a lot!
</p>Papers accepted at FISLhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060201-fisl/2006-02-01T03:00:00+01:002006-02-01T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Out of my four proposed papers at <a href="http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/">FISL 7.0</a>, three have been
accepted. To my big surprise, the paper on gpl-violations.org was turned down.
I would rather have dropped one of the other papers than this one :(
</p>
<p>
Anyway, as indicated before on this blog, I'm more than happy to be able to
visit Brazil again.
</p>FOSS.in is overhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051206-foss_in-over-sponsors/2005-12-06T03:00:00+01:002005-12-06T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm not going to write any more about <a href="http://foss.in/2005/">FOSS.in</a>,
since everyone else has already written about anything that there is to say. If you want to read all of it, go to <a href="http://planet.foss.in/">planet.foss.in</a>.
</p>
<p>
One fact that hasn't very much publicized [yet?] though, is the financial
trouble that the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore is going through this
year. This apparently is almost exclusively to blame at the sponsors (or lack
thereof).
</p>
<p>
Apparently in India it's quite normal that even if you start talking with
Sponsors more than half a year in advance, they will not commit until a few
days before the event starts. This is also the reason why the conference
programme is announced before the sponsors show up on the website (if you
checked it before the event, all the sponsor banners were empty).
</p>
<p>
Due to this strange culture, it could happen that a large Indian IT company
dropped their sponsoring commitment almost immediately before the event - that
is _after_ the organizers having committed to all the expenses. I don't think
that given those conditions, any organizer could have managed without a big
large gaping hole in the budget :(
</p>
<p>
In addition to that, it is is a pity that none of the internationally recognized
(and also locally quite present) "open source" companies Novell/SuSE and RedHat
didn't show up on the sponsors list at all.
</p>Report from FOSS.in 2005https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051201-foss_in/2005-12-01T03:00:00+01:002005-12-01T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
This is the third day of <a href="http://foss.in/2005/">FOSS.in 2005</a>, for
me it's the second day, since I arrived one day late.
</p>
<p>
I'm having a good time, and the conference has come quite some way since last
years Linux Bangalore. To highlight some of the changes:
</p><ul>
<li>Wireless Access almost everywhere on the venue!</li>
<li>Enough halls (actually: tents!) to host BOF sessions and the like</li>
<li>Lecture halls large enough to accommodate the whole audience</li>
<li>A much wider scope, Free/Open Source software in general, rather than just Linux</li>
<li>Lots of interesting presentations</li>
<li>Way better quality of food (even though it wasn't really bad before)</li>
<li>Sensible temperature instead of ridiculous amount of AC in lecture halls</li>
</ul>
<p>
Also, since the same amount of attendees are distributed over a wide area and
more lecture halls, it is less crammed/crowded than the previous year. At
least for people from a western country it therefore is way more relaxing, since there is more space between you and the people immediately surrounding you ;)
</p>FOSS.in schedulehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051123-foss_in-schedule/2005-11-23T03:00:00+01:002005-11-23T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I've just done a quick browse through the <a href="http://foss.in/2005/schedules/">FOSS.in</a> schedule. I'm honored to
give my two presentations in the "Stallmann Hall".
</p>
<p>
There's also an OpenSolaris track. I'm probably going to join that, since I
know close to nothing about it (yet).
</p>Will I be able to visit Brazil again?https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051103-fisl2006/2005-11-03T03:00:00+01:002005-11-03T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
There are chances that I'll be able to make it to <a href="http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/">FISL 7.0</a>, the 2006
incarnation of the <i>Forum Internacional Software Livre</i>.
</p>
<p>
This is not just any other conference visit. This is the possibility to visit
Brazil for the first time after my departure from Conectiva in 2001. This
means I'll be able to meet all those cool guys again (folive, lclaudio,
matsuoka, epx, ... you know who you are). Only few of them are still at
Conectiva, but to the best of my knowledge still somewhere in Curitiba or Porto
Alegre ;) or Rio Grande do Sul</p>
<p>
Anyway, I'd better organize my schedule in a way that permits me to spend some
three weeks in Brasil next year :)
</p>My flight to Bangalore was scrapped.https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051102-bangalore-northwest/2005-11-02T03:00:00+01:002005-11-02T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Northwest Airlines has been heavily advertising their
Seattle-Amsterdam-Bangalore flight, including special offers. And what do they
do <b>two days</b> before starting that flight? They <a href="http://in.news.yahoo.com/051028/48/60soc.html">postpone it indefinitely</a>.
</p>
<p>
This is certainly the right thing to do if you want to piss off new customers.
There was only one reason for me to go for NWA: Because they have a direct
flight to Bangalore, with no stopover in Mumbai or Delhi. Now that reason has
vanished. And since there's now only four weeks before departure, there's even
no chance I could get some other direct ticket for a decent price.
</p>
<p>
I'm yet waiting with my travel agent getting back to me. Apparently NWA first
informs the press, and then slowly their customers at some later point.
</p>FOSS.in/2005: Linux Bangalore outgrowing itself!https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051024-lb2005/2005-10-24T03:00:00+02:002005-10-24T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Today, <a href="http://foss.in/2005/">FOSS.in</a> (the event formerly known as
Linux Bangalore) has released their first <a href="http://foss.in/2005/speakers/intl.php">list of confirmed international
speakers</a>.
</p>
<p>
I could hardly believe my eyes, it is truly amazing. Is this the event that
I've been to in 2003, as one of the only two non-Indian (and non-Indian
origin) speakers?
</p>
<p>
Now they have a line-up including Jonathan Corbet, Brian Behlendorf, Jeremy
Zawodny - and last but not least Alan Cox!
</p>
<p>
Please don't misunderstand me, there is no 'quality ranking' of conferences
based on their number of foreign speakers. But this at least proves that
FOSS.in has become an equal event in the line of Linux Kongress, UKUUG or even
OLS.
</p>
<p>
As of now, the number of Indian Free Software developers, maintainers or even
project leaders is still very small. This especially holds true when you
consider the size of the Indian IT industry today...
</p>
<p>
So getting together the FOSS enthusiasts in India, and the international "FOSS
veterans" should create a very creative environment and provide an excellent
opportunity for lots of people to get motivated, to get involved, to write
code, to join the Free Software community.
</p>Hanging out at 0sec in Bernhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051016-0sec/2005-10-16T03:00:00+02:002005-10-16T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
0sec 1.0 (the first incarnation of a security conference / hacker meet-up in
Berne, Switzerland) has concluded today. Despite spending an enormous amount
of time writing new netfilter and librfid code, I've had some interesting
discussions and met a number of interesting people.
</p><p>
What I found especially interesting is all the work on syscall proxying that <a href="http://uberwall.org/">Uberwall</a> are doing. I need
to look into that stuff in more detail.
</p>Linux Kongresshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051013-linuxkongress/2005-10-13T03:00:00+02:002005-10-13T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
After my delayed trip back from Seville, I'm now in Hamburg for Linux Kongress.
This turns out to be an extremely busy event, I have two 'regular'
presentations, one full-day tutorial, and also have to host a number of
sessions as "session chair" on behalf of the organization committee.
</p>
<p>
This means that there is practically no progress in either the usbdevio fix nor
in the current x_tables work. However, I found some time to fix a couple of 14443B related problems in librfid.
</p>
<p>
Somehow I have the feeling that Linux Kongress has lost some of it's spirit
over the last couple of years, which is sad. Especially sad, since the first
Linux Kongress 12 years ago was the first time that Linux Kernel hackers have
ever met.
</p>
<p>
Tomorrow I'll be leaving for <a href="http://www.0x736563.org/">0sec</a> in Bern/Switzerland, which I'm looking forward to.
</p>Stuck in Sevillehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051010-iberia/2005-10-10T03:00:00+02:002005-10-10T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Iberia decided to reschedule my flight without informing me, even though that
change was executed more than one month ago. They claim to have informed my
travel agent. Not surprisingly, my travel agent claims never to have received
such information.
</p>
<p>
This means that I'm stuck for one more day in Seville, since the next flight is
only leaving at 7am tomorrow morning. Since Iberia claims it was not their fault, they're also not willing to cover any accommodation expenses.
</p>
<p>
Pablo Neira was friendly enough to invite me to stay at his place for the extra
night, which means I don't have to fight with Iberia and the travel agent for
any expenses.
</p>
<p>
Unfortunately I was scheduled to travel to Hamburg tomorrow, so I have to
alter my train reservation and somehow make sure I'll still be in Hamburg at <a href="http://www.linux-kongress.org/2005">Linux Kongress</a> for my tutorial.
</p>
<p>
I'm starting to get sick of those travel irregularities. This means I'm again
back to my (old) plan of cutting down the number of conferences next year.
</p>Heading off to workshop.netfilter.orghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20051003-workshop_netfilter/2005-10-03T03:00:00+02:002005-10-03T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Tomorrow morning at 8am, I'll be leaving for <a href="http://workshop.netfilter.org/">workshop.netfilter.org</a>, the annual
netfilter developer workshop.
</p>
<p>
For the first year, we actually have presentations that are intended for
sysadmins (aka 'users'). I'm missing the first day of this user event, but
am obviously present for the two day workshop/discussions and the two days of
hacking following up the official workshop.
</p>
<p>
I want to publicly thank Pablo Neira for organizing this years event. We've
now had workshops every year since 2002. They've been very low-profile and
small so far. But look at this year's event. It actually has a homepage
that's worth mentioning, and the sponsors seem to be literally lining up..
</p>
<p>
Looking forward to meet lots of fellow hackers, especially those whom I haven't
met since last years workshop.
</p>Planet FOSS.in has openedhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050926-planet-foss-in/2005-09-26T03:00:00+02:002005-09-26T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The organizers of <a href="http://foss.in">FOSS.in</a> have put together a
planet site at <a href="http://planet.foss.in/">planet.foss.in</a>, featuring the
weblogs of all speakers. Incidentally that includes this blog ;)
</p>
<p>
If you have trouble resolving the foss.in domain, that's probably due to broken
nameserver responses from their current domain hosting provider. At least my
bind9 cannot parse their responses... I've now set up a set of 'real' name
servers, and Atul is trying to get the whois data updated... sorry for any
inconvenience.
</p>I'll be in Bangalore again :)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050809-bangalore-2005/2005-08-09T03:00:00+02:002005-08-09T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Well, according to the organizers it's just a formality, but "just for the
record", I've now officially been invited to
<a href="http://linux-bangalore.org/">the-conference-formerly-known-as-Linux-Bangalore</a>. It will happen Nov 29 to Dec
02, but due to timing overlap, I'll probably only be there from the 30th
onwards.
</p>
<p>
I've already tried to raise awareness for this fabulous event with almost
everybody I met during my vivid conference travel. Let's hope I have managed
to convince a number of high-quality Linux hackers to consider submitting a
paper (and let's hope the CfP will be published really soon now).
</p>Netfilter workshop dateshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050809-netfilter-workshop/2005-08-09T03:00:00+02:002005-08-09T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Pablo is working on <a href="http://workshop.netfilter.org/">workshop.netfilter.org</a>. But at least the dates are fixed now:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Oct 4th: some unofficial user-related event with the local lug</li>
<li>Oct 5th-6th: The workshop itself. discussions, presentations.</li>
<li>Oct 7th-9th: Hacking on code.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Expect more news soon...
</p>Back home in Berlinhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050726-back-in-berlin/2005-07-26T03:00:00+02:002005-07-26T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
After one day for travel and sleeping-over-the-jetlag, I'm finally back on
track at my home in Berlin.
</p>
<p>
I just decided to skip <a href="http://www.whatthehack.org/">WTH</a>, since it
would require me to leave again in only two days (and I have another travel
coming up on 1st August. So I'd rather spend the time to continue my current
netfilter projects, taking care of accounting and tax declaration, etc.
</p>
<p>
Unfortunately I'm bound to using slower/older machines and my notebook, since
the warranty replacement for my workstations' liquid cooling system has not yet arrived :(
</p>OLS: Wireless Kernel Configuration BOFhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050721-ols-wlan-bof/2005-07-21T03:00:00+02:002005-07-21T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
James Ketrenos (the ipw2xxx maintainer) was running a BOF to get input on ideas
for a new wireless kernel configuration API from the Linux community.
</p>
<p>
Due to excessive coding (see in some different entry of this journal), Patrick
and me came in a bit late. We tried to convince the audience that netlink was
the way to go, and that the current ioctl() interface could be served by some
compatibility layer that converts the ioctl's to netlink messages.
</p>
<p>
Also, I raised the requirement for integrating this config interface with a
unified userspace interface for association and authentication (i.e. management
frames).
</p>
<p>
Unfortunately James had to leave quite early, so we couldn't finish the
discussion in a more detailed way in a smaller group.
</p>OLS Day 1https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050720-ols-day1/2005-07-20T03:00:00+02:002005-07-20T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I didn't actually visit any of the talks, but instead read some of the papers
in the written proceedings, hacking lots of code and talking to various people.
</p>
<p>
I've also managed to convince GregKH that support for async URB submission from
userspace needs CONFIG_BROKEN. libusb doesn't use it anyway, and the number
of users of this interface is limited. Unfortunately one of my customers is
one of the users, so I might be forced to implement a cleaner interface for
the same purpose.
</p>First day of netconfhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050715-netconf-day1/2005-07-15T03:00:00+02:002005-07-15T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The first day of netconf went quite fine, but we basically lost quite some
amount of time waiting. First waiting for free tables at breakfast, then
waiting for the bloated enrollment procedures of the Security Guards at the
Ericsson venue...
</p>
<p>
Added with technical issues with the 800x600-only projector and the amount of
time spent travelling from the hotel to the venue, we lost a lot of time and
therefore actually didn't have the time to fit all talks into their respective
slot, but only 60%.
</p>
<p>
The most cool work I've seen at this first day is Thomas Graf's work on a unified Linux kernel networking configuration and statistics tool...
</p>Heading off to netconf in Montrealhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050713-off-netconf/2005-07-13T03:00:00+02:002005-07-13T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Later today I'll be heading off towards Montreal for <a href="http://vger.kernel.org/netconf2005.html">netconf 2005</a>. I'm really
looking forward to that event and the interesting discussions with my fellow
Linux networking developers.
</p>
<p>
I'm actually meeting Patrick McHardy in Paris, as we'll be on the same
transatlantic flight. I hope we can get some of the pending netfilter/iptables
issues discussion meanwhile ;)
</p>
<p>
After netconf, most of us are heading to Ottawa for Kernel Summit and <a href="http://www.linuxsymposium.org/">OLS</a>. I've turned down the invitation
to the kernel summit, since usually there is nothing on the agenda that even
remotely touches the packet filter or even the core network stack, so I'd
rather make space for somebody else.
</p>
<p>
I'm supposed to have network connectivity almost all the time, so I don't
expect big delays in email responses.
</p>(Non-)Internet at LSM/RMLLhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050707-lsm-rmll-network/2005-07-07T03:00:00+02:002005-07-07T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Did I ever mention that having reliable and fast Internet access is the single
most important factor for me (and other busy developers, especially those who
are self-employed or run their own company) when visiting a conference or other
event?
</p>
<p>
When visiting a conference, I basically have to leave all my work behind for a
number of days. I can only do that if I at least respond once per day to
customer emails, and deal with the most important things that pile up in the
incoming queue of business-related email and faxes.
</p>
<p>
So at LSM the first issue with the network was authentication. You were
required to enter your login name and password that you used to register for
the conference [several months ago]. For those people who don't reuse the same
password for multiple sites again and again, and who don't have monster brains,
this means that the password is not something they will remember off their
head. In my case that password is securely stored in an encrypted keyring on
my nfs serve at home.
</p>
<p>
Obviously it wouldn't be a problem to bring that password to the event, if
somebody actually had cared to spread the information that it would be required at the event.
</p>
<p>
After some discussion with multiple people, a new account was created for me.
It was supposed to work within 15 minutes, but it didn't.
</p>
<p>
Even better, the wireless network was shut off at 6pm. Jeez. They don't get
it. When at a conference, I need to use the nights in order to cover up for
the lost working time during the day. If there is no Internet access in the
evening or during the day, I'm unable to do so.
</p>
<p>
On Thursday it was even better: The wireless network was shut off at 12 noon.
Somebody told me that this was to motivate the incentive for people to go to a
speech by the mayor of Dijon. This speech would no doubt be very interesting -
if only I understood a single word of French. So the best thing the foreign
visitors (among them a number of speakers) could have done during that time was
to catch up with their email and work - if only there was network access.
</p>
<p>
So as a matter of fact, I've now spent the longest period offline (four working
days) for years. I can only imagine how upset some of my customers will be. Thanks, LSM.
</p>
<p>
This will be my last post about this horrible event. I only wish I had taken
the first train back after running into the problems finding an accommodation on Tuesday.
</p>Libre Supper at LSM/RMLLhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050707-lsm-rmll-libre-supper/2005-07-07T03:00:00+02:002005-07-07T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The problems with this conference continue.
</p>
<p>
The social event <i>libre supper</i> costs real money, and about the only thing
you get for it is a nice venue. It was held in the city hall.
</p>
<p>
The buffet was not set up in the middle of the hall, but in some separate room
next to it. So the bottleneck was not the buffet itself, but the door between
the hall and the buffet-room. This further prolonged the queue lining up unnecessarily.
</p>
<p>
So at the time I ended up at the buffet, there weren't even any glasses left -
meaning that I had to "enjoy" my dinner without wine or water. Obviously
everyone would line up for a second and probably third helping. People like me
who refuse to line up for half an hour and only enqueue when the queue is
shorter don't actually get any of the desert.
</p>
<p>
I've probably never wasted my money and time more efficiently.
</p>Chaotic Organization at LSM/RMLLhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050706-lsm-rmll-chaos/2005-07-06T03:00:00+02:002005-07-06T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
After my voluntary 6-hour stopover in Paris, I finally arrived in Dijon at something like 7pm.
</p>
<p>
During the train ride there, I wanted to read the instructions on how to get onto the campus. I've received an email regarding that subject some time ago, but I didn't yet read it, since I have all my email synchronized to (an encrypted partition on) my notebook. Sadly it turned out that this email didn't contain any instructions but just a link. Obviously the link is useless unless you have online access. Ok, I can't blame the LSM/RMLL for not having read the email before - but it's also been the first time in all of the conferences I visit that such vital instructions haven't been sent by mail.
</p>
<p>
Luckily I ran into some LSM/RMLL attendees in downtown Bordeaux who told me how to find the campus.
</p>
<p>
At the campus, I found dozens of LSM/RMLL signs pointing in contradictory directions - and nobody there.
</p>
<p>
So I called the only other person at LSM/RMLL of whom I had the cell phone
number: Werner Koch, one of the other speakers. He was lost, too :( So I made
the only reasonable decision: Get back to the city centre and look for a hotel
room. Obviously, the tourist information was long closed. So I walked from
one hotel to the other. The first two were fully booked. At the instance of entering the third hotel, Werner called again.
</p>
<p>
Luckily he ran into some other attendees (not organizer!) who managed to talk
one of (obviously non-English speaking) officials at the student dormitories
into accepting the two of us for one night.
</p>
<p>
Obviously I didn't have the breakfast vouchers at the time of breakfast
(since registration opens only after breakfast is finished, and it's a 15minute
walk to the restaurant). So I end up at the conference venue without breakfast.
</p>
<p>
I think this is the way you _not_ want to organize a conference. I don't think
there was any other event (even the previous LSM in Bordeaux I've been to)
which had equally non-existent speaker care. At most events, you get picked up
from the airport / railway station, brought to your accommodation, and at the
hotel reception you receive printed instructions, such as a map of the campus,
Instructions on when to be where, and (most importantly) some contact phone
numbers in case you get lost or have any other problems in a country whose
language you don't speak.
</p>
<p>
At my presentation (as the presentation of David Turner, FSF GPL Compliance Lab
Engineer) were about 10-15 people in the audience. So I'm actually leaving an
ever-growing pile of work behind in my office, choose to not do any paid work
for three days, paying for the accommodation myself (travel is covered), going
through all the hassle of the travel as described above, to talk in front of
that small an audience. I guess this really was my last LSM.
</p>
<p>
And yes, I could continue this rant now about the wireless network, which
requires you to log in with the account data you used to register for the
conference. That data is securely stored on my hard drive at home. Why would
I bring such data with me, if nobody tells me upfront that I would need it?
*sigh*
</p>Heading off to LSM/RMLLhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050704-lsm-rmll/2005-07-04T03:00:00+02:002005-07-04T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm heading off towards <a href="http://2005.recontresmondiales.org/">LSM/RMLL (Libre Software Meeting)</a> in Dijon (France) tomorrow.
</p>
<p>
I'm looking forward to this event, especially since I'm going to meet David
Turner, the new head of the FSF's GPL compliance lab. We've got a lot to talk
about with regard to cooperation/coordination between the gpl enforcement efforts of the FSF and gpl-violations.org.
</p>
<p>
Travelling will take me enroute to Paris, so I'll spend a couple of hours
stopover in the city to visit some of its famous cemeteries. With some luck the
weather will be ok for photography...
</p>
<p>
For those who are curious: I'll be back to Berlin by Friday evening.
</p>Network Access at LinuxTag (and Vodafone hotspots)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050622-network-at-linuxtag/2005-06-22T03:00:00+02:002005-06-22T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Same procedure as every year. One of the hardest things at <a href="http://www.linuxtag.org">LinuxTag</a> is to get Internet access. My
experience this year is a follow-up to long discussions in the previous years
following-up to my complaints. However, the problem seems to be persistent.
</p>
<p>
First of all, the WLAN is not working. WLAN access is provided by a different
organization than wired Ethernet access, and nobody from the WLAN team was
around to comment on why.
</p>
<p>
Wired access is almost impossible to get, since there are only _three_ public
Ethernet ports available at this time - apparently due to a lack of multi-port
Ethernet switches. The network admins were nice enough to allow me access at
one of the non-public infrastructure switches, though.
</p>
<p>
Even after finally having access to an Ethernet port, I wasn't much more
excited. The only thing that worked was HTTP via a proxy, and SSH. So no way
to do speak commonplace protocols such as IMAP-over-SSL on port 993. Or to
access Subversion-over-Webdav servers on non-standard ports. Or to build up an IPsec tunnel :(
</p>
<p>
Luckily I'm in the situation to be able to do SSH tunneling, but not everybody
has shell accounts on their mailservers...
</p>
<p>
Then I tried the Vodafone hotspot available in the Conference Hotel. Not only
do they charge ridiculous EUR 24,95 for 24h access, but they also offer
something that barely can be called "Internet access". So far, I've only been
able to establish HTTP(s) sessions and IMAP-over-SSL. There's no outgoing SSH
working, and also no IPsec. <!-- Also, I cannot establish trusted connections
to SSL websites, since vodafone uses a re-encrypting proxy. They always send
me a Vodafone Certificate for any 3rd party site, which I obviously don't
trust. This is rediculous. -->
</p>
<p>
This leaves me now with the option to run between the two adjacent conference
and hotel buildings. SSH works in one place, but IMAPS only in the other.
Surprisingly, I never have similar problems at any other conference that I
attend - and if you look at my schedule, you notice I travel to a lot of
conferences.
</p>
<p>
I've already decided to have my bank cancel the Vodafone credit card charge
since they promised me Internet access, but all I got was WWW-and-IMAP. They
should have told me before, then I wouldn't have bought their services.
</p>Missing 2nd day of reboot7https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050611-reboot7/2005-06-11T03:00:00+02:002005-06-11T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Trying to get some work done (and meanwhile all hardware items of my new
notebook running) has prevented me from going to reboot7 in the morning.
</p>
<p>
While I then tried to get to reboot7, part of the metro train ride was supposed
to be replaced by busses because of construction. The authorities somehow
forgot to put any signs or instructions _where_ exactly the replacement bus
line is supposed to go. After some searching I decided to go back to the hotel
for some more stupid hacking.
</p>
<p>
I've already discovered the location of the main cemeteries here in town. I'm
planning to start my mandatory cemetery tour tomorrow morning.
</p>Arriving at reboot7https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050610-reboot7/2005-06-10T03:00:00+02:002005-06-10T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I just arrived in Copenhagen for the <a href="http://reboot.dk">reboot 7</a>
conference. Travelling went fine, actually the first time I was using easyJet
(one of the new European low-cost airlines). The flight was in the evening, so
I don't know if they also try to sell you beer at 6:30 am (like AirBerlin) ;)
</p>
<p>
reboot7 seems to be quite different from the usual conferences
that I'm attending. It's way less technical, so I actually reorganized my
gpl-enforcement slides adding some more high-level overview on the subject of
the GPL, motivations for copyleft licensing, etc.
</p>Impressions from ph-neutralhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050528-phneutral/2005-05-28T03:00:00+02:002005-05-28T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I've been invited by multiple people to visit <a href="http://www.ph-neutral.org/">ph-neutral</a>, a small but nice meeting of
hackers organized by <a href="http://www.phenoelit.org/">phenoelit</a>. Since
I've already been invited (and registered) last year but somehow missed it, I
had to be there this year.
</p>
<p>
The strength of the event seems to be in the "meeting, having fun" part, since
at least those two talks/presentations that I've been to were a huge
disappointment. I don't want to be more specific and hurt anyone's feelings...
but in both cases most of the audience knew more than the self-designated
"expert".
</p>Arrived in Zagreb for CLUChttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050420-cluc-zagreb/2005-04-20T03:00:00+02:002005-04-20T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
12 hours after leaving my apartment in Berlin yesterday I finally arrived in
Zagreb, Croatia. No, I didn't go by car, but I was using planes.
</p>
<p>
First I took a MALEV Berlin -> Budapest flight, only to learn in Budapest that
the connection to Zagreb has been cancelled. After a four hour delay, they got
me onto a Flight back to Germany (this time Frankfurt), where after two more
hours I was scheduled to connect to Zagreb.
</p>
<p>
When arriving in Zagreb, my Luggage didn't appear, so I went to the lost
luggage office. To my surprise, the luggage had arrived before I did. This
despite the fact that the Malev representative in Budapest re-routed the
luggage to assure it would always accompany me on my trip.
</p>
<p>
Anyway, I finals arrived at about 8pm and went for some dinner and beers with
Vlatko, one of the organizers of the <a href="http://cluc.linux.hr/">CLUC</a>
conference.
</p>
<p>
Today I gave a four hour workshop on netfilter/iptables firewall
administration. To the best of my knowledge that went quite well.
</p>
<p>
Tomorrow I'll be giving a regular netfilter/iptables presentation, something
that I didn't do for quite some time. Feels good to talk about technical stuff
again, after all the presentations on legal issues and gpl enforcement.
</p>Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2005https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20050305-clt-return/2005-03-05T03:00:00+01:002005-03-05T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
this was probably one of my shortest conference visits ever. I took the train
to arrive about three hours before my talk, and left two hours after it.
It's a pity that I had to skip the social event, but I really don't have any leftover time at the moment.
</p>
<p>
The presentation went quite fine, though I now remember all the items that I
wanted to add, but forgot during the presentation. Too many strange questions
interfering throughout the talk.
</p>
<p>
Anyway, I almost forgot how nice CLT was. Apart from their very professional
organization (they even send you paper printed city maps via snail mail!),
their speaker care-taking is extraordinarily. I haven't been to any other
event that provides free food for speakers throughout the day - ranging from
freshly prepared sandwiches (no dull catering service)to pastries... at any
given time in the speakers lounge.
</p>
<p>
So now I'm sitting in the train back from Chemnitz and am working on the
Aftermath of Rusty's 'newnat2', hopefully the last rework of the conntrack/nat
helper infrastructure.
</p>