OpenBSD Journal

Report from The Slackathon 2006, a Fundraising Event in .se

Contributed by mbalmer on from the special-thanks-to-the-elk-in-scene-5 dept.

Janne Johansson reports from an OpenBSD fundraising event in Sweden:

The Slackathon 2006 was a real success

More than 50 visitors decided to come and donate money in order to help OpenBSD/OpenSSH development, and meet up in general to put faces to the people we've only met online. Donation Desk

The programme was treated as OpenBSD would treat shared libraries, unpredictable order and randomized starting points, but all in all we managed to get most of the expected things done anyhow.

And the best part of it: All in all, the event raised at least EUR 4000 worth of donations.

A couple of tables showed all the bizarre and odd hardware in various stages of working, from the tiny zaurus to the smp dual-core opteron and lots in between. We also got some code done in order to attach puc(4) on the macppc machine to get serial consoles for some of the machines, since the cheapo x86 we brought for this wouldn't install correctly. The SGI O2 I borrowed also didn't boot, but one of the guests brought his(!) so we got some mips feelings anyhow. My old amiga also booted but failed to produce a stable picture, so we didn't get to run much of the 3.0 install it carries. The 4-way opteron had some issues with getting the old OS out of it but we finally got it to run smoothly with -current, except for the jet-engine wannabe fans at the back which allows for instant hairdrying. If I recall correctly, it built a kernel in 140 seconds.

While we were trying the trunk(4) experiments, we also found the already-fixed-in-current em(4) bugs you get when you send 8-9k jumboframes to it, and since we had that console up on the big-screen, we had art@, hin@, and niklas@ show off how good they are at the DDB hangman mode.

We ran interviews with Hans Insulander, Artur Grabowski, and Niklas Hallqvist, and Måns Nilsson and Vladimir Bogodist spoke about various OpenBSD-related topics at their respective workplaces.
Here's Niklas (on the left) being interviewed with the summary donation web page in the back: Niklas being interviewed

Additionally, we did sell some donated computer books and of course OpenBSD cd's, t-shirts and stickers: T-shirt/CD sales

I will put more pictures and mpegs up on the slackathon web as soon as I get hold of them, and also a summary of the donations, I'm still waiting for the bank transfer results before I present the totals but it seems to be clearly above 4000 EUR at least.

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who attended, all companies that helped with sponsoring and the people who ran the cafeteria, the donation desk, the sales table and all of you who did small jobs I sent you on.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Michael Knudsen (130.225.194.192) on

    Nice work, guys. I hope you'll be doing it again next year and I'll try making it across the river.

  2. By Dunceor (192.16.134.66) on

    It sounds all great.
    I was unable to attend because of moving but maybe this could turn into an annual event? The OpenBSD users in Sweden are quite a few I think and we should be able to have some annual thing.

    Thanks to everybody that donated.

    Comments

    1. By Johan Mellberg (194.237.142.10) on

      > It sounds all great.
      > I was unable to attend because of moving but maybe this could turn into an annual event? The OpenBSD users in Sweden are quite a few I think and we should be able to have some annual thing.
      >
      I wanted to attend and support, but i too had other commitments this particular day so making it an annual thing would be a great thing.

      /Johan, just a user (no time for developing...)

  3. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

    "If I recall correctly, it built a kernel in 140 seconds."

    nice

    Comments

    1. By Janne Johansson (82.182.176.20) jj@inet6.se on

      > "If I recall correctly, it built a kernel in 140 seconds."
      >
      > nice

      If I would be on the ungrateful side, it took some hour to get it working, so a half-bad x86 would have been done at the time, but hey, it was an interresting setup anyhow. ;)

      Also, while on the "ungrateful" side, when we did the trunk tests, we were some 10+ people going "awww" when we couldn't reach above 59MB/s, but in retrospect I figure if someone would give me such internet access at home, I probably wouldn't turn it down.

      It's fun to notice how you can have a group of people think ~60MB/s sucks, while most of us there started using computers when (or before) 300bps was the standard for inter-computer communications.

      Comments

      1. By reyk (145.253.2.238) reyk at openbsd dot org from the trunk dept. on

        > Also, while on the "ungrateful" side, when we did the trunk tests, we were some 10+ people going "awww" when we couldn't reach above 59MB/s, but in retrospect I figure if someone would give me such internet access at home, I probably wouldn't turn it down.
        >

        can you give me some more details about your setup?
        did you test round-robin, failover, or loadbalance mode?

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (130.237.95.193) on

          > > Also, while on the "ungrateful" side, when we did the trunk tests, we were some 10+ people going "awww" when we couldn't reach above 59MB/s, but in retrospect I figure if someone would give me such internet access at home, I probably wouldn't turn it down.
          >
          > can you give me some more details about your setup?
          > did you test round-robin, failover, or loadbalance mode?

          Two Dell SC 1425 (single ~3GHz Xeon, 2 em cards each internally) with one
          or two cables going in between, we tried all combinations of 1500/8K MTU and single cable vs trunk with RR. Since we weren't running -current, loadbalance wasn't an option according to the manpages. Failover isn't supposed to give speed boost if I understand it correctly, so we didn't try that one. Though we did try pulling one cable in RR mode and it worked as failover for us. =)

          The test was:
          comp1> nc -l 5000 >/dev/null

          comp2> nc -s 10.0.0.2 5000 < /dev/zero

          (We measured scp, ftp and iperf too)

          trunk setup as per the simplest example in the 3.9 manpage.

          We also did try generic.mp just in case it was an ioapic issue or something, but it didn't really matter.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (81.26.253.124) on

    Oh dear. I was going to show up to listen to all the Open people, but I completely forgot. Perhaps next time...

  5. By Anonymous Coward (200.49.144.2) on

    Do anyone have pics from the event to share?

    Comments

    1. By simmel (83.140.211.6) on

      > Do anyone have pics from the event to share?

      Yeah sure, I'll put my blurry pics up.

      I'd like to thank Janne first of all for making all of this possible and secondly for letting me and some other people stay at his house with his lovely family.

      Comments

      1. By Janne Johansson (130.237.95.193) jj@inet6.se on

        > > Do anyone have pics from the event to share?
        >
        > Yeah sure, I'll put my blurry pics up.
        >
        > I'd like to thank Janne first of all for making all of this possible and secondly for letting me and some other people stay at his house with his lovely family.

        His blurry pics are found here:

        http://soy.se/pxls/slackathon-2k6/

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