Evilcoder.org

So after almost a year I was in Eindhoven again yesterday. I needed to go there to attend a planned teammeeting from collegue’s near Rotterdam and collegue’s within Limburg, this was the most accessible point for all of us.

The meeting itself was interesting, though rephrased things that I already heared, but it was fun to see the other people from the Networking Management team that I never saw before. I hope that we can meet up again some day and chat a bit more. The meeting went through a bit long, and we left the compound late in the evening. I remember leaving around 19.00hrs from the compound to drive homewards, where I arrived one and a half hour later (traffic was actually coorporating this time. I normally took the A58 to drive homeward, but I took the A2 instead).

One thing that amazed me is that I noticed several Snow car’s while I drove to the facility’s within Eindhoven. Not one but three Snow car’s were spotted that day, interesting to see so many cars around the same place

Onward to the next meetings and the rest of my project for the Telco Provider

written by Remko

Several hours after 7.1-PRERELEASE name had been created within 7-STABLE, not branched!, 6.4 had also been named for the time being from 6-STABLE. That means that that branch will also soon split into 6.4-RELEASE (the final branch) to continue for the release. As well as for 7.1.. NO PANIC! It will all be over soon, and you can use a brand new release

written by Remko \\ tags: 6.4, 7.1, FreeBSD, RELEASE, STABLE

Tommorrow I am heading over to Eindhoven at some point during the day. I need to get there for work. The telecom provider is sending me and the teams around me towards the city of Eindhoven for a teammeeting. It had been some time ago that I was there.

written by Remko \\ tags: Eindhoven, Telco, Telecom Provider, Work

As some might have seen already on the cvs-* mailinglists, we have started the preparations for the 7.1-release build. That means that the 7-STABLE branch is renamed to 7.1-PRERELEASE and finally gets branched at some point after which it will be 7-STABLE again.

DO NOT PANIC if you read this in your kernel after updating today. It’s nothing to worry about. We are trying to get a new release out soon, please headsup for that. Bring along your towel if you are really afraid

written by Remko \\ tags: 7-STABLE, 7.1-PRERELEASE, FreeBSD, Releases

Last week Denise and I had been shopping at Ikea’s where we bought some new things for our upcoming house, yes OUR house :-), and we did an inventory of potential victim’s eh furniture for our house. We had a great time looking around and talking to eachother over what we liked and disliked for the house. I think we have around the same ideas wrt. how to build up the house. That said, we have at least one good candidate house so far, and we are going to inspect another house this week if possible. We envy one of the houses we saw (i wont tell which one :-)) so that is a potential (did i say good potential) candidate for our future house.

We also share more and more time together, with Luca and with the two of us, so we are really really progressing forward. Perhaps not as fast as people would have hoped, but hey, we do not overrush things now so that we can do it right.

We had visited Jeugdland yesterday btw, and that was great, Luca had a great time and we walked around and did things with him that he really really enjoyed. Good idea Denise!

Personally my progression is also going well, I am learning a lot at my current assignment, doing much Juniper/Cisco work and some uSyscom (UMTS) and other related machines as well as Windows management (yes I am an Unix Specialist but hey, I understand this as well, which is not that bad, but I still envy the various *nix distributions, it’s so much easier in a networking environment).

I also received my first Juniper certification and I am planning the second one already, including my CISSP and other things (which I will do at a little lower pace because those projects are somewhat bigger to obtain, more theory and more to learn). It remains great that Snow supports me this well!

written by Remko \\ tags: cisco, Denise, FreeBSD, House, Ikea, Juniper, living together, luca, Snow, Unix, Windows

A long time discussions and development had been done on USB. Hans Peter Selasky (hps) had rewritten the entire USB stack and it seems to be moving forward enough so that Alfred Perlstein is willing to commit this into the FreeBSD tree.

Ofcourse things do not go without resistance, there are always (and will always be) people that are sceptic, against it, afraid of it etc. Not only developers, but consumers and people using this commercially as well. Nothing new there, nothing wrong there either.

So, with a bit of luck the new code will be in so that it can mature for the 8.0 release of FreeBSD.

Did you all know that there had been a lot of development for 8.0 btw? MPsafeTTY, USB, Dtrace, new ZFS drop, we migrated from CVS to SVN, we are working on LLVM (Contribute people!), even beter ULE support, Superpages got improved by alc@, NFS Locking and GSSAPI crypto, perhaps NFSv4, VImage (Marco Zec’s virtualized networking stack), and many many more new features that are not in the current -RELEASE tree’s, and will probably never be in these tree’s (it will be in future branches ofcourse). Ofcourse the above is no promise it will actually be in there, but as it currently looks like: chances are they will be there

written by Remko \\ tags: featurelist, FreeBSD, FreeBSD 8.0, HPS, roadmap, USB, USB4BSD

Today is a big day, for me, for Ed Schouten and for FreeBSD (And it’s consumers ofcourse). Why? Ed Schouten today integrated his MultiProcessorSafe (MPSAFE) implementation of the TTY Layer for FreeBSD. From the beginning that I heared about the project, Ed and I had been in contact, both working at the same company (Snow B.V.), we flew to Canada together (Facilitated and sponsored by Snow B.V.), visited eachother, been in contact for ages (or at least it feels like ages, which is a positive point in this case). Ed also gratuated in the meantime by working on this TTY layer. So a lot of good things had been evolved because of this!

For FreeBSD this means that finally the TTY layer is GIANT-less. One more big obstacle removed to entirely getting rid of the GIANT lock ;-), as Poul-Henning Kamp mentioned at some point: This is one of the latest chapters that needed rewriting (since a long time as far as I know).

So I am really happy about this. Good Work Ed!!!

written by Remko \\ tags: FreeBSD, mpsafe, mpsafetty, Snow, tty

Today I did the exam for Juniper Networks Certified Internet Associate (JNCIA-FWV), which is something I had been studying a lot throughout the last week before the certification. I studied every single night to get the theory into my brain, and did some tests prior to the exam. I made it. So my first Juniper exam is in the pocket. Onwards to the next exam, then CISSP and then some other things that I can do within a better spread timeframe (some larger things).

written by Remko

Today we learned that George Neville-Neil leaves the FreeBSD Security team due to lack of time. It’s sad that George leaves the team, but he leaves a lot of good work behind and he was a great asset to our Security Team. Therefor “Thank you for working with us George!”

written by Remko \\ tags: FreeBSD, FreeBSD Security Team, secteam, security

Yesterday I needed to refuel (again, something that always appears to come back, perhaps we should invent vehicles that do not use something that depletes at all :-). The km statistics were the record for my all-time Volkswagen Golf 5 so far. I drove 970km on one tank. The onboard computer calculated that I could easily drive another 130km still. The “need refuel” icon didn’t light up yet as well. So, I did a very nice job I think :). The last 2000km I drove around 1:20,2 l/km which is my best global statistic so far. I also have the record of 1:28 l/km for a single travel (Rotterdam to The Hague, passing two 80km zones, driving ~95-105 (on the dashboard, not GPS) for the remaining track.

I am proud on that! I was one of the first 5 cars in the Netherlands that was a Volkswagen Golf 5 Bluemotion, and I already have the Dutch record with that car (or at least Van Udenhout didn’t hear about these statistics before :-)), so I would like to remain driving in line with other cars, not breaking the speed limits, and driving as economical as possible

written by Remko