• pkgsrc release engineering
• pkgsrc on SmartOS
• Mancoosi tools for the analysis and quality assurance of FOSS distributions
• Go On NetBSD
• Rehabilitating pkglint
• DeforaOS and pkgsrc (presentation with workshop)

• NetBSD and MirBSD developer Benny Siegert gave a talk titled "pkgsrc on MirBSD" - see his slides! pkgsrc is a framework for packaging and building 3rd party applications from source. Besides MirBSD, it runs on many other platforms like Linux and Mac OS X.
• While building from source is fine, it costs a lot of time. pkgsrc can also create binary packages, and to manage those, there is "pkgin", a binary package manager. Its developer, Emile 'iMil' Heitor introduced it in a talk - see the slides (PDF)!

• MINIX3 and BSD, by Arun Thomas
• The Lua Scripting Language in the NetBSD Kernel, by Marc Balmer
• Touch your NetBSD - towards tablet integration, by Pierre Pronchery
• pkgsrc on MirBSD, by Benny Siegert (slides)
• Introduction to pkgsrc, and to package creation in NetBSD, by Noud de Brouwer
• pkgin, a binary package manager for pkgsrc, also by Emile Heitor (slides)
• Automated package building, by Nicolas Thauvin

We are looking forward to seeing you!''

Indeed! :-)

[Tags: Events, hackathon]

``EuroBSDcon2012
18 - 21 October 2012, Warsaw, Poland

EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for people working on and with BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDcon 2012 is the 11th EuroBSDcon and will take place in Poland, 18-21 October 2012 in Warsaw. EuroBSDcon is a great and unique time to learn more about the powerful BSD systems we use everyday and to connect with other developers around the world. ''

[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events]

Dan continues: ``BSDCan 2012 will be held 11-12 May, 2012 in Ottawa at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 9-10 May.

NOTE: This will be Fri/Sat with tutorials on Wed/Thu.

We are now accepting proposals for talks.

The talks should be designed with a very strong technical content bias. Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not appropriate for this venue.

If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal. Whether you are developing a very complex system using BSD as the foundation, or helping others and have a story to tell about how BSD played a role, we want to hear about your experience. People using BSD as a platform for research are also encouraged to submit a proposal. Possible topics include:

• How we manage a giant installation with respect to handling spam.
• and/or sysadmin.
• and/or networking.

Conference Location: Cooper Union, New York, NY Conference Dates: November 12-14, 2010''

Submission of NetBSD related entries is highly appreciated! See the call for papers for more information on important milestones, subsidizing of speakers and the mailing list to stay upto-date.

[Tags: Events, nycbsdcon]

9th European BSD Conference
October 8 - 10, 2010
Karlsruhe, Germany
http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/

Introduction

The European BSD Community will meet again this year for the ninth conference in the EuroBSDCon series. This is a great opportunity to present new ideas to the community, inform your fellow BSD enthusiasts about the newest developments and work for the continued success of your favorite operating system. The two day conference program (October 9 - 10) will be preceeded by a tutorial day (Oct 8). Call for Papers

We are inviting contributions on all areas relating to the BSD family of operating systems, e.g. applications, architecture, implementation, administration and security of *BSD operating systems ranging from embedded systems to mainframes. Investigations on economic aspects regarding the operation of BSD systems are also welcome.

Prospective authors of contributions to the technical program are requested to submit an abstract via http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/. Presentations should last about 40 minutes including time for questions from the audience. Authors of accepted submissions should provide a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings and give permission to the organizers to publish the results in the printed proceedings and on the conference web site at www.eurobsdcon.org.

Call for Tutorial Proposals

Selected tutorials will be offered on the day before the conference. If you are interested in presenting a tutorial, please submit your suggestion on the conference website using the same mechanism as for submitting a paper. Please indicate if this would be a half- or full-day tutorial.

Sponsorship Opportunities

We are seeking companies or institutions to sponsor various elements of the conference in order to keep delegate fees as low as possible. Sponsorship opportunities include: paying for a speaker's travel or accommodation; providing bursaries for delegates who cannot pay the conference fee themselves; sponsoring the social event or the printing of proceedings. Please see the conference website for details.

Important Dates

Final abstract deadline: July 6th 2010
Final tutorial deadline: July 6th
Final papers due: September 1st
Tutorial day: October 8th
Conference: October 9 - 10

For more, see http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/''

[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events]

• People owning a Marvell PCMCIA WiFi card can how have a look at the malo(4) driver. If you use this on a gumstix ARM board, have a look as some fiddling with drvctl(8) is needed to get the card recognized properly.

• Speaking about Gumstix, KIYOHARA Takashi has declared the porting effort as finished. Support for the baex, connex, verdex and verdex-pro modules is available, as is support for the support modules.

• Staying in the "embedded" corner, KIYOHARA Takashi has announced that Plathome's OpenBlockS600 (AMCC 405EX) can now boot NetBSD via NFS. See the posting for dmesg output. The OpenBlockS600 comes with a AMCC 405EX PowerPC CPU, two GigE ethernet ports and a bunch of other goodies for a price of about $600US.

• Coming from hardware to software, pkgsrc-2009Q4 was released some time ago, and of course binary packages are available for a number of platforms: 5.0/macppc, 4.0.1/sparc and 5.0.1/sparc, 4.0.1/i386, 5.0.1/i386 and the same for 4.0.1/amd64 5.0.1/amd64. Also, binaries of pkgsrc-2009Q3 are available for 5.0/shark.

• Google's Summer of Code was a big success for NetBSD and all of the Open Source community, and it seems there will be one again this summer.

  Preparations are in an early stage, but there are already a FAQ and a timeline as well as the Program Terms of Service. From the NetBSD side, we're always happy for project suggestions (please use our mailing lists for discussions), and in NetBSD, we are currently working on out projects page. If you plan to submit a proposal for a project with NetBSD, please see our project application/proposal form If you plan to submit a proposal for a project with NetBSD, please see our Project Application/Proposal HowTo.

• Getting back to the NetBSD code, a number of interesting changes were made in the previous weeks. The first to mention is that David Young has continued is work on the new shutdown order for device drivers: ``cgd, dk, dm, md, raid, and vnd gracefully detach from the device tree during shutdown. I believe that ccd is the only virtual disk that does not detach.'' This allows having arbitrary stack of file systems, and still have them unconfigured properly in the right order on system shutdown.

• Another major change that went into NetBSD recently is that terminfo was imported into NetBSD-current. Terminfo replaces termcap, but provides a backward compatible termcap interface. This move follows discussion from last summer, and docs by The Open Group (the people who make things like the POSIX standard and the Single Unix Specification), which indicates that the termcap specification will be withdrawn in the future.

• Moving from userland inside the kernel, David Holland has proceeded with work to unhook LFS from UFS. Historically, the Log structured File System was written after the Berkeley Fast File System. With the idea of sharing the core "Unix File System" code for both file systems, this resulted in a strong relationship between LFS and FFS, which was/is not always the best for the advantage and stability of either one: ``sharing ufs between both ffs and lfs has made all three entities (but particularly lfs) gross. ffs and lfs are not similar enough structurally for this sharing to really be a good design.''

• Another major addition to the NetBSD kernel was made recently by Darren Hunt: ``Courtesy of CoyotePoint Systems, I've been working on a port of DTrace [...] to NetBSD for i386.'' Citing Wikipedia, ``DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.

  DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes. It can also provide much more fine-grained information, such as a log of the arguments with which a specific function is being called, or a list of the processes accessing a specific file. ''

  The code is available in NetBSD-current. I haven't looked into this yet, but I'm looking forward of reports and blog postings if the wikipedia command line examples work.

  (I think like with ZFS, Dtrace could use a hand with documenting the NetBSD side of things. Any takers?)

• The last kernel change to mention is related to security: mapping the address 0 from userland was disabled. This issue went through the press late last year, and it this is now addressed in NetBSD, too. Those that still beed to map address 0 can do so via the USER_VA0_DISABLED_DEFAULT kernel option or the vm.user_va0_disable sysctl.

• So much about about the NetBSD code for now. Of course having all those fine features added screams for an immediate (*cough*) release, which brings me to the fact that NetBSD 5.0.2 has been released: `` NetBSD 5.0.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons.

  Please note that all fixes in critical/security updates (i.e., NetBSD 5.0.1, 5.0.2, etc.) are cumulative, so the latest update contains all such fixes since the corresponding minor release. These fixes will also appear in future minor releases (i.e., NetBSD 5.1, 5.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements. ''

• There's a hackathon going this weekend (Feb 20/21 2010)
• Volunteers are wanted to setup & man a NetBSD booth at FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich, Switzerland, on Sep 17/18 2010
• pkgsrcCon 2010 will be held in Basel, Switzerland, from May 28ths to 30ths 2010.

Oh, and if you go there and do a NetBSD booth, that would be most excellent! :-)

[Tags: bsdcan, Events]

NetBDS related ones include:

• Sleeping Beauty - NetBSD on Modern Laptops, Jörg Sonnenberger
• A Portable iSCSI Initiator, Alistair Crooks
• Logical Resource Isolation in the NetBSD Kernel, Kristaps Dzonsons

This channel allows us to post full hour long lectures from FreeBSD conferences. The first four videos that Julian Elisher recorded at MeetBSD have been posted, and more are on the way.''

So this is all Web 2.0 and 2008... cool! There's just a bit of a lack of contents right now, esp. with a focus on NetBSD. I still have a bunch of 19c3 and 21c3 presentations here on my harddisk, maybe someone can kick^Wencourage me to upload them (and tell me how to do that, for mp3 and avi). Then again, they're pretty old, and I'm sure there are more recent talks that would be appropriate for presentation. Any takers?

Until there's more NetBSD content on that channel, feel free to have a look at all the NetBSD videos already present on YouTube - it's a few, just not from conferences.

[Tags: Events, youtube]

• NetBSD achieves permanent charity status: ``The Foundation has been a 501(c)(3) charity since 2004, but previously the status was given under an advanced ruling period, i.e. it was of limited time. The permanent charity status is also known as 170(b)(1)(A)(vi).

  Being a public charity is important to us, as it means that we are eligible to receive employer matching donations, as well as to enjoy the most beneficial tax treatment. ''

• Metadata journaling support added to FFS: ``In case of a crash or unexpected power loss however, the journaled file system will not need a lengthy file system check at boot time, but instead the kernel will replay the log within seconds. This allows faster crash recovery, less overall downtime and higher availability.

  Converting an existing system to use the log feature is as easy as updating (both kernel and userland), making sure the kernel option WAPBL is selected (this is the default for GENERIC kernels now), adding a ?log? option to /etc/fstab and rebooting. Note that WAPBL is not compatible with soft-dependencies, so please ensure that you first remove the ?softdep? option if present. See the wapbl(4) manual page for more information. ''

  Kudos for this go to Wasabi Systems, Darrin B. Jewell, Simon Burge, Greg Oster, Antti Kantee, and Andrew Doran!

• Uli 'rhaen' Habel wrote me that he wrote a blosxom plugin for gnats: ``During my work for pkgsrc I started to write articles for my blog and I referred to several PRs from the NetBSD gnats system. However I just wanted to type the PR in the form of e.g. NetBSD PR pkg/39230 and would like to have my blog software to link to the webpage automatically''.

  Blosxom is the blogging software that Uli and I use, and you can learn more about his GNATS plugin, and download it, here. (Apparently I didn't get to install this plugin yet, that's why you don't see a link on the above quoted text :-).

• Stefan Schumacher wrote me that the german magazine Die Zeit has an article on operating systems showing screenshots of several operating systems, starting with C64 Basic V2, going over MS-DOS and Windows to more esoteric ones like Mac OS X, Solaris, and *cough* BSD. Check the screenshot of the latter one! ;)

• Another one from Uli Habel: His (NetBSD|pkgsrc) blog is now syndicated on www.onetbsd.org.

• Wilhelm Buehler hints me at EuroBSDcon 2008: ``EuroBSDCon is the european technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDCon 2008 will take place in Strasbourg, France 18-19 October 2008 at University of Strasbourg.''

• There's an article by Warren Webb titled "Free software encircles embedded design" at Electronic Design, Strategy, News (EDN). The article starts by illustriating open source software as a natural (and cheap, or course) alternative to commercial systems, describes benefits of the development model and the wealth of applications and how they can be used in an embedded environment. It continues talking about licenses, tools, and alternatives to Linux, including NetBSD.

• Those into funky gadgets may like the MoPods may be for you: ``As if a little charm pet wasn't reason enough for being, the MoPods are actually practical. When your mobile phone rings or receives a text within a metre of your MoPod then the little blighter will get in a tizz, spin round and round and a little light will flash wildly in reaction. The perfect visual warning if your phone is on silent or you are in a noisy bar.

  Whether hung on your bag, your clothes, your keys or your mobile, MoPods are a must-have, or as they say in Japan, a "hitsuyou".''

• Back to our fine operating system: Ian Hibbert, who has written NetBSD's bluetooth stack, has worked on a PAN daemon for NetBSD. This allows to perform personal area networking in various ways:

  NAP

  Network Access Point is like an ethernet bridge

  GN

  Group ad-hoc Network is a NAP with no external network

  PANU

  Personal Area Networking User in both host (like GN but a single connection) and client (the device that connects to all the others) mode.

  All this will come in an upcoming NetBSD release (well, and FreeBSD too, it seems, as they like it :-) near you pretty soon, see Iain's mail to tech-net.

If you have any suggestions, would like to offer your help, plan on attending or have any other comments, please contact <jschauma at netbsd dot org>.''

[Tags: Events, nycbsdcon, summit]

The new call for papers is here: http://2008.eurobsdcon.org/cfp.html ''

[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events]

This is a general call for presentations for pkgsrcCon 2008. To be successful, we need developers and users to give talks at the conference. Talks should be about pkgsrc-related topics, e.g. what neat new pkgsrc project you're working on, how to use pkgsrc effectively as an admin, how to be an effective pkgsrc developer, etc. There is no requirement to submit a paper -- just go ahead and present, though if you have materials that you'd like to distribute to the audience, we will be happy to produce copies for the attendees.''

See the pkgsrcCon 2008 homepage for more information, if you want to submit an entry for a talk, see here.

[Tags: Events, pkgsrcCon]

• Antti Kantee and Alistair Crooks: ReFUSE: Userspace FUSE Reimplementation Using puffs (Paper)
• Brooks Davis: Using FreeBSD to Promote Open Source Development Methods (Slides)
• Brooks Davis: Building Clusters With FreeBSD (Slides)
• Claudio Jeker: OpenBSD as routing platform (Slides)
• George Neville-Neil: Network Protocol Testing in FreeBSD and in General (Slides)
• Isaac 'ike' Levy: FreeBSD jail(8) Overview, The Virtual Server (Slides)
• John P. Hartmann: Real Men's Pipes (Slides, Paper)
• Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick: A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem (Slides)
• Marc Balmer: Supporting Radio Clocks in OpenBSD (Slides)
• Marko Zec: Network stack virtualization for FreeBSD 7.0 (Slides)
• Pawel Jakub Dawidek: FreeBSD/ZFS - last word in operating/file systems (Slides)
• Peter Hansteen: Firewalling with OpenBSD's PF packet filter (Paper)
• Pierre-Yves Ritschard: OpenBSD: Load-Balancing using HostStated: (Slides)
• Robert Watson: FreeBSD Advanced Security Features (Slides)
• Ryan Bickhart: Transparent TCP-to-SCTP Translation Shim Layer (Slides)
• Soeren Straarup: An ARM from shoulder to hand (Slides)
• Sam Leffler: Long Distance Wireless (for Emerging Regions) (Slides)
• Sam Smith: Fighting "Technical fires" (Slides)
• Simon L. Nielsen: The FreeBSD Security Officer function (Slides)
• Stephen Borrill: Building products with NetBSD - thin clients (Slides)
• Steven Murdoch: Hot or Not: Fingerprinting hosts through clock skew (Slides)
• Yvan VanHullebus: NETASQ and BSD: a success story (Slides)

• bootprops: As an update of turning knobs on the NetBSD kernel without recompiling, Jared has issued Patch #3 and Patch #4 with lots of feedback, and he went on to work on boot properties in his own SVN now, see his blog entry.

• pkgsrc logo: It seems I've started yet another discussion about a pkgsrc logo. Given that people ask on and off about an official logo (e.g. for pkgsrcCon t-shirts), I think it would be nice to have. Entries so far are Chris Wareham's entry, and a cute idea (in varying colors and several different shapes, and readability plus an ASCII and a Java-enabled online version X-) by Thomas Bieg.

  Looking at this from someone that raised and left pkgsrc, and who's doing public relations these days, I'm looking forward to see an official pick by the people managing pkgsrc this time!

• Chaos Singularity (cosin): Hernani Marques Madeira ran a NetBSD booth with many presentations at swiss Chaos Singularity, and he also wrote a lengthy (german-language) report and sent a link to pictures.

• Automatic TCP socket buffer sizing: Mindaugas has ported automatic TCP socket buffer sizing from FreeBSD, and is looking for testers. This code should render some benefit while reducing the need for manual tuning in highspeed network scenarios.

• Package security auditing now part of package tools: Originally, audit-packages was a script that matched every entry in a file against all installed packages to indicate known security problems. After some intermediate speedups, this was finally integrated into the package tools package, "pkg_install" now - see the link for more details. Kudos to Adrian Portelli from the pkgsrc-security team!

Update: Thomas Bieg has made a webpage that documents the progress of his logo suggestion.

[Tags: bootprops, Events, logos, networking, pkgsrc, Security]

Here are a few articles that may be of interest:

• Thread clustering: sharing-aware scheduling on SMP-CMP-SMT multiprocessors, by David Tam, Reza Azimi, Michael Stumm

  Talks about impact of scheduling on multi-core machines in SMP and CPU affinity

• hFS: a hybrid file system prototype for improving small file and metadata performance, by Zhihui Zhang, Kanad Ghose

  Introduces a FreeBSD-based implementation of a mixture between FFS (for in-place metadata updating) and LFS (for out-of-place metadata updating). Includes performance measures against a port of NetBSD's LFS.

• Competitive prefetching for concurrent sequential I/O, by Chuanpeng Li, Kai Shen, Athanasios E. Papathanasiou

  How to detect and handle IO balancing. May be of interest WRT last and this year's "QoS" Summer-of-Code project.

• Dynamic and adaptive updates of non-quiescent subsystems in commodity operating system kernels, by Kristis Makris, Kyung Dong Ryu

  Having kernel modules is one thing, being able to replace subsystems that are in use is a different problem, solved here. Shows how to replace like functions, and subsystems like a full scheduler while running. Impressive!

• Antiquity: exploiting a secure log for wide-area distributed storage, by Hakim Weatherspoon, Patrick Eaton, Byung-Gon Chun, John Kubiatowicz

  Possible, BSD-licensed alternative to existing distributed file systems (NFS, Coda) that's designed to handle failure of arbitrary machines. Code is available from http://antiquity.sourceforge.net/.

* Report from Linuxtag Berlin 2007

I was in Berlin from May 31st to June 3rd to visit the Linuxtag, and here 
are some of the impressions, facts and rumours that I came across:


*** NetBSD at the Linuxtag:

This year featured a "BSD day" workshop, that had, well, BSD related
topics. Mostly. Unfortunately this took the whole BSD group into a
distant room for one day, where very few people found us. The schedule
of the day can be found at
http://www.linuxtag.org/2007/de/community/workshops/bsd-day.html.

Besides a track of BSD-related talks, NetBSD also had a booth where
we've handed out CDs, flyers and t-shirts, and demonstrated NetBSD on an
StrongARM platform and in a virtualized environment with Xen, showing
NetBSD run both a KDE desktop setup to access two Tomcat web application
servers, which were connected to two Postgresql database server. The
booth got a lot of attention, and Joerg Sonnenberger, Stefan Schumacher, 
Georg Schwarz and I (Hubert Feyrer) had a lot to do, answering questions.

Besides the BSD booths, the BSDday track had some presentations where
people could learn about BSD.  A few details on my talks:

  * Vom Dach bis in den Keller - Statusbericht NetBSD

    English-language slides:
    http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/linuxtag2007-netbsd.pdf

    Questions I got after the presentation:
     + Is there a system for binary updates for the base OS, like
       available in FreeBSD?
     + What can I say about the quality of NetBSD manpages vs.
       FreeBSD / OpenBSD?
     + Why are there no books on NetBSD?

  * Portable Software- Installation on Linux, Solaris & NetBSD with pkgsrc

    I gave this talk with Stefan Schumacher, my slides are here:
    http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/Jul2005darcy-pkgsrc.pdf, Stefan's slides
    can be found on his homepage:
    http://net-tex.dnsalias.org/~stefan/nt/netbsd/pkgsrc-vortrag.pdf

    This talk was a replacement for another talk where the speaker
    didn't show up. It was chosen after pkgsrc received many questions
    at the NetBSD booth, esp. from people who want to use it on
    Solaris.


Other random comments on NetBSD's appearance at the show:

  + I was told that GMD, a major german research institute, did a port
    of NetBSD to PowerPC platform quite some time ago for their "Manna"
    project. I'm still investigating details here.
  + I was asked about the setup that I use on my notebook for both
    wireless and ethernet. It's based on ifwatchd to detect what
    interface is up, and wpa-supplicant for handling out WLAN
    configs. I'll write something with more details into my blog the
    next few days (feel free to remind me :).
  + I've never heared of the company "tarent" before, but they
    supported developers of free software projects (of which there were
    quite a lot at the LT) with free food for lunch. Choices were soups
    with and without meat on all days of the fair. Nice! (We need a
    Free Food Foundation :)
  + Hardware that people asked for WRT NetBSD on it included several
    inquiries about NetBSD on the IBM NetWork Station (ibmnws),
    NetBSD on the Amiga 1 (amigappc) as well as the status of NetBSD on
    the Sony Playstation 3, esp. with how the interfacing towards the
    Cell processors work.
  + Harald Welte offered a prototype board for the "OpenMoko" mobile
    phone platform, including development kit and documentation.
    Any takers?
  + pkgsrc needs advocacy!!! Articles targetted at non-NetBSD
    audience for Solaris, Mac OS X and Linux would be good.
    Any writers? Talk to me for ideas & input!


*** BSD Certification Group at the Linuxtag

The BSD Certification Group (which I'm a member of) also had a booth
at the Linuxtag. There was a talk on the status of the group by
Machtelt Garrels, all made in OpenOffice.org:

  * Full text:
    http://tille.garrels.be/training/bsd/20070601-LinuxTag-BSDCert-MGarrels.odt

  * Presentation with notes:
    http://tille.garrels.be/training/bsd/BSDCG-Status-200705.odp

At the Linuxtag, the BSD Certification group also did two beta runs of
the upcoming BSD associate (BSDA) certification, with about 20
participants that were using some BSD for quite some time, or that had
quite some Unix/Linux background. The general opinion was that the
examn was hard, but fair - and that you WILL have to study! :)

In general, there was great interest in the BSD certification, and
Linuxtag was a success for the BSD Certification Group as well.


*** Upcoming events

The following events need NetBSD presence with booths and
presentations:

  * Linuxtag Essen - no idea when exactly, Essen, Germany
  * CCC Summercamp - Aug 8-12, near Berlin, Germany
    URL: http://www.ccc.de/updates/2007/camp2007-hackersonaplane
  * FrosCon Bonn - Aug 25/26 2007 in St. Augustin, Germany,
    CfP is until Jun 4th. URL: http://froscon.de/
  * EuroBSDCon - Sep 14/15, Copenhagen, Denmark.
    URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org/

  * Fosdem - ~Feb 2008, Brussels, Belgium
    URL: http://fosdem.org/
  * GUUG Fruehjahrsrachgespraech - ~Feb/Mar 2008 in Munich, Germany
    URL: http://www.guug.de/

If you're interested to setup a booth or join in with other BSD
people, please let me (hubertf@NetBSD.org) know, I can help to get
t-shirts, pins and flyers.


*** Pictures etc.

Stefan's pictures are available at
http://net-tex.dnsalias.org/~stefan/gallery/LinuxTag2007/ and
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=532085527&size=l.

Axel Gruner made pictures of both the BSDCertification booth, see
https://bilder.bsdgroup.de/galleries/LT2007/208.html, and Linuxtag in
general, see
https://bilder.bsdgroup.de/galleries/LT2007/overview.html. Make sure
to check again in a few days, there are more pictures to come.

Axel's (german language) reports can be found at http://www.grunix.de/.


*** Summary

I'm very happy we've survived the event, and Linuxtag 2008 will be at
the same place, i.e. Messe Berlin. I'm looking forward to have more
NetBSD people at the booth - don't be shy, join in, it's fun!
The same goes for the other events mentioned above, as well as for
writing articles and doing NetBSD advocacy in general!

NetBSD needs _you_! 

Update: Here's a link with a few (slightly oversized) pictures of Stefan at the NEtSBD booth. Are we CoolBSD or what? :-)

[Tags: certification, Events, linuxtag]

• Quentin Garnier: Using virtualisation and pkgsrc in heterogeneous networks (ODP)
• Amitai Schlair: Packaging djbware (HTML)
• Christoph Badura: From the trenches: experiences from a user's point of view (ODP)
• Amitai Schlair: Platform status update Mac OS X (HTML)
• Roland Illig: Platform status update Solaris (HTML)
• Roland Illig: Platform status update Irix (HTML)
• Lubomir Sedlacik: pkgsrc Release Engineering: the work behind the scenes (HTML)
• Joerg Sonnenberger: Another year of pkgsrc: News since last pkgrscCon (HTML)
• Joerg Sonnenberger: Reorganising tools, buildlink and build phases (HTML)
• David Maxwell: Building development code from pkgsrc (HTML)
• James K. Lowden: pkgjam: Moving away from the One True Tree (HTML)
• Roland Illig: Unprivileged builds (HTML)

• AsiaBSDCon paper: SHISA: The Mobile IPv6/NEMO BS Stack Implementation Current Status, Keiichi Shima (Internet Initiative Japan Inc., Japan), Koshiro Mitsuya, Ryuji Wakikawa (Keio University, Japan), Tsuyoshi Momose (NEC Corporation, Japan), Keisuke Uehara (Keio University, Japan)
• AsiaBSDCon paper: A NetBSD-based IPv6 NEMO Mobile Router, Jean Lorchat, Koshiro Mitsuya, Romain Kuntz (Keio University, Japan)
• AsiaBSDCon paper: Implementation and Evaluation of the Dual Stack Mobile IPv6, Koshiro Mitsuya, Ryuji Wakikawa, Jun Murai (Keio University, Japan)
• AsiaBSDCon paper: puffs - Pass to Userspace Framework File System, Antti Kantee (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland) (OK, i already had that somewhere... :)
• NYCBSDCon 2006 mp3: Brian A. Seklecki: A Framework for NetBSD Network Appliances
• NYCBSDCon 2006 mp3: Johnny C. Lam: The "hidden dependency" problem

Talks include

• A NetBSD status report by me (Hubert Feyrer)
• Doing backups with Bacula by Stefan Schumacher
• OpenBSD and Linux: Insights into a migration project at the INI by Stephan Rickauer
• Status of the BSD Certification by Machtelt Garrels
• DesktopBSD 1.6 by Daniel Seuffert
• FreeBSD security mechanisms by Jörn Pernfuß
• The silent network: Denying the spam and malware chatter using free tolls by Peter Hansteedn

Update: There is a page in the BSDgroup Wiki on the event with more details.

[Tags: Events, linuxtag]

The fifth NetBSD Hackathon took place from Friday, 6th of April, until Sunday, 8th of April 2007. Titled "docathon", the main focus was on bringing the NetBSD WWW pages and documentation into a consistent and more up-to-date state. Here are the results:

• All .list files that are not related to translations have been converted
• Many of the ports pages were previously either available in XML or HTML. To unify them, all the HTML-pages have been converted to XML (or are under conversion).
• The wscons FAQ has been converted and merged into the NetBSD Guide's "console drivers" section.
• Other parts of the documentation previously only available in plain HTML have been converted to XML.
• Obsolete ports pages have been removed in the process of the sh5 and evhsh5 port removal which happended during this weekend, new ports paves have been properly linked.
• Various minor updates and fixes have been applied

Overall, the event was a great success, and given esp. the short notice still a number of people have helped to make it so - thank you very much to all of them!

If you want to learn more about the 5th NetBSD Hackathon, you can find information at the NetBSD.se Wiki at http://wiki.netbsd.se/index.php?title=Hackathon5. People interested in working on any of the open issues feel free to communicate via the netbsd-docs@NetBSD.org mailing list.

Let me add a few notes on my own:

• The NetBSD.se Wiki is a WONDERFUL tool for short-term, online collaboration and management of working lists
• Our documentation needs more reading, and consecutive updates. We should do a Readathon soon. :)
• Emacs with nxml-mode (pkgsrc/textproc/nxml-mode) is a nice tool for updating documentation, esp. one with bad structure and lots of missing closing links.

To participate, fire up your favourite IRC client and drop by on #NetBSD-code on Freenode.

[Tags: Events]

BTW: We're fully aware that a lot can be said about NetBSD's documentation and documentation systems like Docbook, XML, Wikis and whatnot. This discussion is left for some other time and place. The point of this hackathon is to get the existing documentation into a state that can be converted with one converter (Docbook/XML), not three (Docbook/XML, .list, HTML).

[Tags: Events]

• Linuxdays Chemnitz: I was only there for my presentation on sunday, due to not feeling too well the days before. Still, Stefan, Jörg, Charlie and many others staffed the booth just fine, and I think every single household in and around Chemnitz has a NetBSD install and/or Live CD now. :)

  Related talks to mention are Stefan Schumacher's talk on hardening systems with systrace and deleting data. My own talk was not too NetBSD specific, showing an application on how to implement dynamic DNS with some retail web/domain hoster. Slides for my talks are available as OpenOffice .ODP and as PDF. (I'll reconsider the move from TeX/prosper to OpenOffice after it was NOT as easy as I expected to find a machine running OOo for presentation purpose, after my laptop's harddisk crashed on the way to Chemnitz!)

• While at roadshows: Stefan Schumacher has made DIN A4 pkgsrc flyers in english and german language.

• NetBSD's puff-based FUSE implementation "refuse" is now in a state to also run the NTFS-g3 filesystem, which offers read/write support for NTFS. It's available from pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g.

• Google News found me an article that NetBSD stack supports Geode NAS design: ``Wasabi Systems Inc.'s BSD-based NAS (network attached storage) software stack now supports a Geode-based reference design from AMD. Wasabi Storage Builder for NAS, combined with AMD's Geode LX NAS RDK (reference design kit), provides a secure, reliable platform for the development of NAS devices, according to Wasabi. ''

  While that's all fine for Wasabi, it should be noted that whatever the company Wasabi offers is not automatically available in the freely available operating system called NetBSD. Integration efforts would have to happen first, so the headline of that article is unfortunately misleading if not to say plain wrong!

• Another article that's more to the point: Julio M. Merino Vidal has worked on getting multiboot support into NetBSD, and in his article ``Making NetBSD Multiboot-Compatible'' he talks more about it.

• Andrew Doran has done lots of work on NetBSD's thread and SMP implementation recently, and he has made a comparison between performance of the Scheduler-Activations-based code in NetBSD 4 and the one that will be in NetBSD 5 (AKA NetBSD-current, currently numbered as 4.99.13). See his mail to tech-kern or watch the images for 'make cleandir' on an empty source tree and the MySQL supersmack benchmark.

• Google runs another Summer of Code, and this year it's not clear upfront who will be allowed as mentoring organizations. NetBSD is ready to participate again, and there's an official announcement from NetBSD about this, including pointers to our suggested/wanted list of projects and the project application HowTo. People interested in submitting a project proposal (via google!) are encouraged to use the remaining time until the deadline to discuss their proposals on the public NetBSD tech-* lists! (Personally I'll try to stay out of GSoC this year to finish some reallife work. At least that's the plan so far ...)

• Three new security advisories were released:
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-001: Integer overflow in ktruser()
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-002: Integer overflows in Render and DBE extensions
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-003: BIND multiple denial of service vulnerabilities

• Another article that doesn't mention NetBSD but g4u: ``How to Install a New Hard Drive: Tech Clinic'' by Joel Johnson. From the article: `` To make your new drive work like your old drive, you'll need a disk "cloner." There are a myriad of options, from commercial solutions such as the old favorite Ghost from Symantec ($70; symantec.com) and Copy Commander from VCom ($35; v-com.com) to free applications, such as MaxBlast from Maxtor, that come bundled with hard drives. If you're comfortable mucking around with Linux/BSD, I've had great luck with the free g4u application. If you have a local file server, you can even send the disk image from your laptop to an FTP site, install the larger drive, then FTP it back to your laptop, obviating the need for a drive enclosure''.

FWIW, EuroBSDCon 2007 will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark 14-15 September 2007, see the homepage for more information.

[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events]

This is a general call for presentations for pkgsrcCon 2007. To be successful, we need developers and users to give talks at the conference. Talks should be about pkgsrc-related topics, e.g. what neat new pkgsrc project you're working on, how to use pkgsrc effectively as an admin, how to be an effective pkgsrc developer, etc. There is no requirement to submit a paper -- just go ahead and present, though if you have materials that you'd like to distribute to the audience, we will be happy to produce copies for the attendees.''

For more information, see the presentations section of the pkgsrcCon 2007 webpage.

[Tags: Events, pkgsrc]

Jörg Sonnenberger has sent mail with more details to tech-pkg@.

[Tags: Events, hackathon]

Very nice presentation, watch the video!

(While I don't want to get into the habit of linking to videos, I was able to download this into something that mplayer can actually show without having flash, so if it's OK for me I think it's OK for everyone else :-)

[Tags: Events, nycbsdcon]

• Brian A. Seklecki: A Framework for NetBSD Network Appliances (mp3)
• Johnny C. Lam: The "hidden dependency" problem (mp3/slides) and my favourite:
• Dixon: BSD Is Dying (mp3)
• ... and many others

Tuesday, Oct 24th: 2nd Systems day

• NetBSD's procfs with -o linux has /emul/linux/proc/$$/exe as hardlink, while Linux has a symlink. This breaks compatibility that some database applications expect, see my posting to http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2006/10/25/0000.html
• Some user feedback: "NetBSD documentation is outdated - it used to be great for 2.0, but it's lacking now." -- We need a documentation-hackathon to fix stuff: htdocs/Documentation, htdocs/guide, src/distrib/notes
• There was interest in offering NetBSD as alternative operating system from a company working on mobile producs with AMD Alchemy (= MIPS) and Geode (=i386). I've pointed them at our list of possible consultants and the port-mips@, port-i386 and netbsd-jobs@ lists
• One company offered to do a funny kind of (free!) advertizement for us: have our logo and a slogen printed on invoices they do for their customers. The customers would be people in traditional office environments handling invoices, so I'm not sure what message to tell the average secretary... any ideas?
• A user asked about NetBSD on Cobalt machines, and how to install; I've pointed at the Restore CD (http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html/nb_20060403_1314.html)
• We had a NetBSD/Xen showcase, consisting of a PC with a 2GHZ AMD CPU, 2GB RAM, 19" TFT etc. showing X with KDE and a webbrowser accessing Tomcat web application services (JPetStore) on two seperate domains, which were in turn talking to PostgreSQL servers running in two other domains.

  The showcase attracted many people, and there were lots of questions about Xen, mostly of general kind about Xen (what is it, what does it do, running DOS & Windows XP, ...) . Too bad the showcase still has Xen2 running - there are already plans to change that for the next event, though! :-)

• A company inquired about supporting NetBSD from their hardware debugger
• In her opening speech of Systems, the mayor of Munich thanks Limux project and Linux New Media publishing for bringing Open Source to Munich & Systems. Unfortunately no word about Systems and C&L who did the real work of bringing all the projects there - and no word on those, either. Sounds like bad communication, and I'm thinking abour writing her a letter and thanking her for the great time we're having.

• 25 of 50 burned CDs gone after two days, with an easy monday; 30/50 gone after day three - maybe should have brought 100... (also: have the CD surface printed, plus get some paper bags for the CDs next time... preferably in NetBSD-orange :-) (Note: ordered 200 orange paper CD sleeves)
• There was an inquiry about the state of native Java - still pending, I'm afraid, waiting for ALL the regression tests to pass.
• Someone had an urge to run SCO binaries for some database systems and business applications in a production environment. Pointed them at compat_ibcs2(8).
• XenMan is a nice GUI frontend for managing local and remote Xen domains, allowing domain startup and shutdown, accessing the console, etc. - see http://sourceforge.net/projects/xenman/ (someone please put this into pkgsrc!)
• A company was interested in using NetBSD on settop-boxes, using handheld/embedded hardware - got them in contact with someone who's working in that environment.
• We should document our build environment for custom ramdisk and boot images for embedded devices, as this raised quite some interest when I gave an introduction (crunchgen, src/distrib, makefs, ...)
• I've learned that my town, Regensburger, has a Linux user group. They didn't know about our BSD user group "HappaBSD" either.
• Several people asked about using pkgsrc on Mac OS X and Debian, I've pointed them at my (now a bit outdated...) 21C3 paper (http://www.feyrer.de/Texts/Own/21c3-pkgsrc-paper.pdf) and the generic NetBSD documentation

One observation I've made during the whole event is that NetBSD needs to do more work on building up a user community - attracting people, handing out CDs (and assorted stuff like t-shirts and posters won't hurt either!), and encouraging them to participate at user group events and tradeshows like Systems.

NetBSD as an operating system has a lot to offer, and given it's ancestry of BSD, the classic platforms we inherited and the new embedded and server platforms we've added makes an excellent operating system - now we just have to market it. Join us!

[Tags: Events, hubertf]

• The overall impression was that the first day was pretty quiet - I've noticed people at many booths (not only the Open Source ones, esp. many of the "business" type ones) standing idly, waiting for visitors to come by.

• At the NetBSD booth there was a moderate stream of people dropping by, which left me enough time to get the NetBSD/Xen showcase going that Daniel Seuffert brought: A 2GHz AMD PC with 2GB RAM, running Xen with five domains: two database domains running PostgreSQL, two "application server" domains running Tomcat and the JPetstore Demo (which access the two PostgreSQL database machines), and one domain for the "client" stuff - KDE, xcon, two Konqueror windows to show the two JPetstores on the two different machines (identified by ther IP address), a Konsole terminal with tabs for Dom0 and the four DomUs as well as some vncviewer windows to show how DomUs can be managed graphically. All domains were running NetBSD, of course.

  Overall the Xen showcase was quite an attraction for people, and overall feedback was very good!

  (A screenshot of that showcase can be found here)

• FreePascal needs work for porting to NetBSD - they have several options for generating code, ranging from assembling with binutils (possibly setup for crosscompiling!) and linking against libc to emitting code that does bypass libc and issue system calls directly(!!! all in the name of supporting old Linux systems...).

  For a working port, a first step would be to go the "use binutils and libc" way. For that, the equivalent of crt0.o need to be setup. (Now where's the source for crt0.o again?)

• Wikipedia.de pointed out that the German language NetBSD entry needs work!!! I also asked Henning Schlottmann about adding our logo to the Wikipedia Deutschland (which was removed twice because we didn't waant to give up our copyright / trademark), and it seems it's added again now! Thanks Henning!

• People asked why there is no native OpenOffice 2 for NetBSD. Good question - any takers?

!!! We're low on NetBSD booth staff! If you're at/near the Systems roadshow in Munich and can help out at the NetBSD booth, esp. Wed/Thu/Fri, send mail to hubertf@NetBSD.org. Thanks!

Besides CeBit, Systems is the second largest computer show in Germany for "business professionals" and "information technology". Thanks to the work of Rosa Riebl from Computer- und Literaturverlag (CUL) and Daniel Ettle, there are a number of booths for Open Source projects again this year, and NetBSD is among them. Being the poor sod who's manning the booth, here are some first impressions from today, which consisted mostly of arrival and booth setup, the show will open its doors to the public tomorrow at 9am:

• Driving to Munich & booth setup

• Daniel Seuffert brought some NetBSD flags, flyers and his Xen showcase (machine with NetBSD/Xen preinstalled plus 19" TFT)

• Material from me includes more flyers, posters, my Shark running a slideshow, and some candy to attract people. I expected things like t-shirt sales to not be allowed at Systems and left them at home; I only learned later that it would have been ok. Oh well.

• I had a chat with a guy from the Joomla booth, and they asked when we will import Joomla into pkgsrc. Given the short episode (import & immediate removal due to "security reasons") the other day, I think there's some more focussing needed in pkgsrc to get to it's goal of providing software easily (and not making it NOT available because our current procedures can't handle things).

  It would be nice to offer such systems like Joomla to be available out of the box with a full set of packages, without further fiddling. (see usability/user friendliness...)

• FreeBSD and OpenBSD will have several people manning their booths all the time. Unfortunately the NetBSD people that helped out in past years are all either sick or busy this year, so that I'll have to run the NetBSD booth alone all the time, and Danie 'DaN' Ettle will help me out on thursday and friday, when I'll have to get back to my job, too. I'd hope for a bit more activity from our user community:

  !!! We're low on NetBSD booth staff! If you're at/near the Systems roadshow in Munich and can help out at the NetBSD booth, esp. Wed/Thu/Fri, send mail to hubertf@NetBSD.org. Thanks!