So, I recently added myself as a candidate for the FreeBSD Core Team, giving a short explaination about why I can be of help in my opinion :-). So far 27% of all people had voted, so I hope that more people will vote to get the best team possible (With or without me ofcourse).
May the best team win 
So, recently I obtained several new experiences :-).
I am working with Fortigate machines (AFA1000’s) and Juniper Netscreen SSG550’s, which are both great machines to work with. I touched a couple of netscreens just a week before I started my new assignment, and now I work full time with them. Beyond that I also try to support the team I am in now with cisco/networking knowledge so that the team can keep on rolling (even if the grand-master will be on holiday within 2 months from now).
Apart from the work experience I also did some work in perl again and finished up check_honeynet.pl v2.0.3b (Which will eventually become v2.0) and I am playing around with svn and mirroring subversion stuff (For FreeBSD and my own projects).
Seeing my upcoming agenda makes it a bit challenging to properly give all my activities enough time, but I am sure I Can manage that just fine.
After writing my previous post, I thought it would be better to writeup a single (longer) story that covered all days instead of just one 
(OK it got delayed a bit :))
“The life of two FreeBSD Developers and a girlfriend traveling towards BSDCan”
BSDCan is one of the biggest BSD meetings / events in the year, many developers and contributors visit this event to share thoughts and express their opinions about whatever comes to mind.
The developers are: Ed Schouten, Remko Lodder and the girlfriend is Denise (my girlfriend)
On the 13th of may 2008, it was that time. We were going to fly with the three of us to Canada to visit the FreeBSD Developers Summit (which was planned just before the official conference) and the BSDCan Conference. Both Ed and my employer (Snow BV) asked us whether we wanted to participated in this conference and ofcourse we wanted to do so. For Ed this has a positive input on his final internship at our company, and for me it’s an opportunity to guide Ed along the path of FreeBSD, and to finally meet several people that I never met before (because they never visit Europe for example).
Thanks a lot for facilitating us Snow! We greatly appreciated it and we had a great conference!
Snow thought it was a great idea to let Ed travel to Canada to present his upcoming mpsafetty work to the developer crowd. I was also asked by the FreeBSD developers and by Snow to travel towards Canada, to guide Ed and to meet my fellow developers, some of which I had never seen before, Denise also wanted to travel along and Snow arranged everything so that we could actually go with the three of us…
The travel started very early, Denise and I needed to fetch the plane at 0715, to fly through London Heathrow towards Ottawa Airport. Ed had a flight later, and joined us at Heathrow airport before we left to Canada. We ate a bit, spotted some fellow FreeBSD members (Robert Watson, Doug Rabson and Poul-Henning Kamp), they were going to have the same plane as us (poor them :-)).
The flight towards canada was a line-flight, not entirely full, so we had space near the emergency exits, and we also had a couch for the three of us. Plenty of space! Robert Watson had a entire couch for himself, which he used to workout some details (on his laptop).. Denise, Ed and I listened to music, watched a movie (in our personal entertainment system onboard of the plane) and talked a lot.
After arriving in Canada, we started the procedure to adopt to the time, in the Netherlands it was already late in the evening, while it was just noon in Canada. Very interesting to see if you never experienced it before.. We also had great fun at immigrations, we were seperated, and Denise got asked why she was traveling to canada etc. She said she visited the BSDCan event to meet other FreeBSD people, luckily for her they didn’t ask much beyond that, because simply she doesn’t now :-). Robert, Doug and Poul-Henning where lucky to get picked up by Dan Langille (The BSDCan organiser); and we took the bus towards the university, a nice ride, with special lanes for the busses (dutch government, are you listening!?).
At the university we checked in, and put out all our stuff, and tried to find the other nerds that were also there. We found them at the Royal Oak (A cafe nearby), where we ate, drank and after a while returned to the residence to almost instantly fall asleep.
Ed and I woke up in the middle of the night, myself at 0400AM (canada time) and Ed at 0500AM, strange time to wake up, but it was already 10/11am in the Netherlands. That didn’t make us feel that well yet :(, the breakfast was served for the three of us.
Ed and I visited the two day FreeBSD Developers summit, a meeting of FreeBSD Developers and invited guests, while Denise traveled through Ottawa to see what was happening there. On the first day, Ed gave a talk about his project, and funnily enough, no resistance popped up. He even got support from various people that he should proceed, and finish this up and all. Very well presented and the results were terrific.
Other talks that day: GreenBSD (energy reducing development for FreeBSD), finstall, kernel booting through http, FreeBSD Embedded status update, Network Stack BoF, Bugbusting/Gnats BoF, Profiling and Debugging tools, release packaging tools, VImage & Virtualization BoF.
A productive first day, with very interesting topics. Later that day Denise and I headed out for dinner, while Ed joined the community and had dinner with them. Denise and I got accompanied by Colin Percival (FreeBSD’s Security Officer), we walked to the Royal Oak, had some good talks with the three of us and where we got later joined by Ed. We walked around a bit and had a drink here and there, and again headed to bed early, we needed to be fit for the second developers day.
The second day was again covered by multiple interesting talks:
Transparant TCP interception, NFS Lock manager, FreeBSD Foundation Update, What’s happening in the world of ports and portsmgr, TCP SMP Scalability en Revising Revision Control (about the big move from CVS to SVN, which happened in the timeframe between Canada and now). Ed and I also visited the syscons/input BoF, where we could speak natively, accompanied by Philip Paeps and Marcel Moolenaar. We also saw a practical example of Coverity, and we finally concluded the day with Denise and all developers in the Indian restaurant nearby the residence. One should ask Ed for his Cowboy Act, the people from Isilon can surely remember that part :-).
The third day was the real opening of BSDCan itself, again multiple talks where given by developers and interested people in the BSD community. Ed and I spoke with an Apple developer about llvm, a BSD licensed C(++) compiler. Very interesting talk with the three of us. I also took part in the BSDA certification (which I (ofcourse) got).
In the evening the three of us (Ed, Denise and I) went to the Hardrock cafe, where we ate a nice big american burger, needed to show our ID’s while ordering beer (ehm I have a 5 year old kid…).
The fourth day we spend visiting the city a bit. We didn’t had the regular breakfast but had a sneakpeak at Cora’s. Here one should eat when he is in Ottawa. Very nice (and MUCH) food! After that we phoned home and visited the city with an amphibious bus, which drove us through the city. Very good way to see a lot of the city in one go. We also visited the river a bit (hey the bus could float, lets use that). After that we returned to the university and where just in time to see the closing ceremony. A funny rehash of what all happened during BSDCan, an auction for the homeless people near the university (Where a core-signed cap was worth 260dollars! and a few shirts 100+ dollars). Again we concluded the day with the three of us (Denise needed to spend time with us after being alone for much of the period) which we did at an Italian restaurant. Good food again!
The fifth day was our final day in Canada. We packed our suitcases, got hold of Brad Davis and his friend, who hold a table in Cora’s for us, where we again had (HUGE) breakfast. After that we walked around a bit in the city, saw some places we didn’t see the day before, and returned to the residence to pickup our stuff, and returned to the airport, with Peter Wemm and Doug Rabson near us.
We had a great flight back with a couple of developers, Bjoern Zeeb made some evil pictures of the crowd, try to find them
to conclude: YOU MUST BE AT BSDCAN NEXT YEAR MMKAY?
It’s that time again, I released an alpha version for check_honeynet v2.0 (v2.0.a2 to be exact); which adds some minor new stuff to the setup. Next thing is to extend the minor new stuff (statistics, we dont warn everytime anymore, and stuff like that) and rewrite the entire codebase so that it’s even easier to use and read (hopefully); with as less packages (Externally) as possible (one should not have to install the entire perl-cpan repository to be able to use the script
Check it out in the downloads section!
During BSDCan I took the liberty to see what BSDA is all about. It’s a real good certification in my eyes to get you up and running with the BSD’s, not very difficult (or at least not for me), but attractive enough for people that need papers to show and to have a goal for studying. All the basics are in there and a couple of more advanced questions as well (security related for example).
I got mine with 83%, goodluck for others that are also persuing this
Today is almost coming to an end wrt talks and stuff like that, which will finish the second day of BSDCan (the official days), which started three days ago for Ed (mr TTY), Denise (my gf) and myself. We flew in through Heathrow towards Ottawa (very nice plane btw) and arrived in the middle of the day in Canada.
We went to the Royal Oak after settling down, we saw a couple of fellow BSDCan visitors in the plane already (like Poul-Henning said: 5 1/2 BSDCan visitors ;-)) and plenty of space to move around (not entirely full the plane, so we had not only three seats, but also used three other seats to talk etc).
In the Royal oak we had dinner, and talked a bit with a few developers, and headed to bed “early” (21.30 .ca time, which equals 03.30 .nl time); and we woke up between 0400 and 0600 am (first me, then Ed, and then Denise).
First day: Nice talks, BoF’s and good networking with all people. Ed did his TTY Presentation, which was received very well! People were excited and they discussed a few items with Ed, like Poul-Henning, Robert, Marcel (Moolenaar), Philip, and a few others :-). We again went to bed not that late, we were broken again!
Second day: Ed woke up too early again ;-), and we visited some nice talks again and again a couple of BoF’s, we skipped the Vimage part, because it was way over my head
Now heading for dinner (indian food if I saw correctly) and a few more days here.
More updates to follow..
So, I just returned from Tunesia with Denise and we both will be flying out to Canada within 2 days to visit BSDCan. We will be joining Ed Schouten (mpsafetty, facilitated by Snow BV) and Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson in the plane towards Canada. Denise, Ed and myself will be flying under the Snow BV waiver, to show a bit of presence there
Ed will also be doing a talk, and I am sure that will go just fine.
BSDCan updates to follow when possible
For FreeBSD I am busy creating a CUPS article, written by Chess Griffin and being moved to article format by me. I did some minor rewording already; and a preview can be found here:
/cups/index.html. Apart from that I am also updating the documentation set to read more information about our CSup application and demote CVSup as client side CVS client a bit (it will still be used, and it’s -the- tool to offer CVSup facilities, since csup is not yet capable of doing that, though clientside can and should be taken over if you do not need to mirror the entire cvs tree for others). I’ll hope to finish that as soon as possible! (Yes Martin I know that you are waiting for it ;-))
So, one of my little personal posts that will popup every now and then. I have a new look, and a new car :-), and a brandnew laptop! I am very happy with the three of them, if you are interested in knowing more about this, contact me and I could probably share a few details here and there :-).
Well well, All my services are migrated from the We-Dare colocated facilities to Germany, where I obtained a couple of accounts through hetzner.de, delivering me faster machines, more bandwidth, better agreements etc, for more or less the same price. I found myself a fool if I wasn’t going to persue this. So my personal colocated services and JR-Hosting colocated services moved over to Germany now, residing on dual core machines with a bit more ram then before, a lot more diskspace, and better bandwidth agreements.
Everything had been moved over now; so if you spot something interesting, please let me know so that I can fix it.
Sadly this will also call the end of the days for a couple of websites run by friends of mine, whom didn’t want to move over to Germany, so they will be resting in peace soon (since the contracts will be terminated at We-Dare), they are www.grunn.org, and www.elarial.com , with all attached subdomains with them. I think the three of us learned a lot with those mentioned websites, and I would like to thank HuMPie and Kees (Elarial founder) for their continues support and trust in me maintaining our shared colocated machine. I’ll post updates about the new machines soon (in the my machines list) and mark the soon to be dismantled onces as *A(rchived).