OpenBSD Journal

[c2k8]: Developer Blog jdixon@

Contributed by merdely on from the no-rm-rf-/-this-time dept.

Jason Dixon (jdixon@) writes to share his (short) experience at c2k8:

I was invited to be an OpenBSD project member just prior to c2k7, so last year's hackathon was mostly a "feeling out" process. I remember being very intimidated meeting the faces behind all the great code. I tried to be productive, but ended up leaving behind a trail of debris. I wanted this year to be different.

Jason's summary, with pictures, continues below.

jdixon@
Due to family and work commitments, I was only able to attend c2k8 for a few days. I'm already back home in the USA, but I made progress with the projects I had intended to complete. As collaborative as the Internet is, it's a unique experience getting to work side-by-side with the other OpenBSD developers.

There has been a long-standing bug with some bwi(4) adapters in G4 PowerBooks causing it to freeze at ehci(4) attach if bwi is enabled. Unfortunately, this means that neither the onboard keyboard or external usb keyboards will work, making it very difficult to get a trace of the problem. I have two of the laptops that exhibit this problem, so I brought one with me and donated it to Todd Fries (todd@) in the hopes that he'd be able to investigate the bug in his free time.

Leading up to the event, I'd been working on moving the Apache manual out of the etcXX file set and to somewhere more appropriate than the htdocs directory. As a full-time administrator, it always bugged me to deal with this mess when I was setting up new servers, configuring backups, etc. After talking with a number of fellow admins and developers, I quickly realized this was a common source of displeasure. Working with Peter Hessler (phessler@) earlier, and Okan Demirmen (okan@) more recently, we finished a diff to move the manual into the miscXX set and the /usr/share/doc/html/httpd/ directory. The move to miscXX was a no-brainer, but I had to convince some others that it was a valid move. In the end, it leaves us with a cleaner tree for routine tasks and bi-annual upgrades.

jdixon @ the bbq
While I was in my "housekeeping" mode, I took the opportunity to deprecate the legacy /etc/dhcpd.interfaces configuration file. For years I assumed this file was used by the dhcpd(8) daemon. In reality, only the rc(8) script sources this file at boot. Users are forced to manually pass the interface names if you only want to use a subset of all available broadcast interfaces. This means that dhcpd.interfaces was a functional duplication of the dhcpd_flags setting in rc.conf(8). I presented my thoughts to Todd Fries, Bob Beck (beck@), Reyk Floeter (reyk@) and Theo de Raadt (deraadt@), all of whom agreed vigorously. The diff was put together quickly and went in on Saturday.

Most of my time Sunday was spent looking at the possibility of using mod_perl for chrooting Perl web applications properly. I have some of my own programs that I've wanted to port to OpenBSD for a long time, but have always been uncomfortable with the idea of bringing all of the external bits (Perl, p5 modules, ld.so, etc) into the httpd chroot. The week of the hackathon it occurred to me that I might be able to accomplish this with mod_perl. I've really only used mod_perl for speed enhancements in the past, so most of this was new territory for me. Fortunately, I was able to finish most of the work by Sunday afternoon. This left me with a much tidier application that should port to OpenBSD with little effort.

jsg
As usual, the BBQ on Sunday evening was a blast. A large group of us took the bus, then walked the rest of the way to Bob's house. Bob and his neighbor were kind enough to let our horde of misfits stampede across their backyards. There was a handful of open fires already cooking up steaks, lamb and vegeterian delicacies. Each developer was instructed to choose something from the table of raw food and cook it themselves. There was something apropos about this theme; just like hacking, if it's not cooked through enough you have no one but yourself to blame.

Bob also provided all of the fixings: corn steamed on the grill, baked potatoes, desserts, and plenty of beer. I was stuffed early, but I was able to make room before the hurling commenced. This year's group of first-timers represented themselves well. Most of the beer avoided spraying, which is probably a better fate than it deserved (typically the cheapest beer available).

sturm
On the bus ride back I was able to catch up with Peter Valchev (pval@) and Ken Westerback (krw@). Ken and I have been discussing some things that would make OpenBSD even easier to install. There hasn't been a lot of work towards this yet, so I don't want to say much about it. Peter has begun work on a nice security utility that will make password management much simpler. As a former OS X user, I welcome something like Apple's Keychain functionality that would help manage my numerous credentials.

Most of the day Monday was spent recuperating from the BBQ hangover and testing others' diffs. I had to leave for the airport early Tuesday morning, so I opted for an early dinner at the local pizza joint with some of the other developers. We finished off pizza and beers with me and pval@ playing a few friendly games of foosball. After walking back I fiddled with ports for a bit then went to my room for an early bedtime.

phessler and brad
Tuesday was a travel day. Although my flight was delayed two hours in Chicago due to storms in Baltimore, it gave me the opportunity to check my email. Lo and behold, I saw the commit from Jonathan Gray (jsg@); working with Todd, they'd managed to find the bug causing the bwi(4) failures on ppc! This is a perfect example of how donating hardware will pay dividends to everyone.

All in all, it was a very successful hackathon for me. I'm glad to have crossed off a few things from my TODO list, but it was even better just catching up with friends from all over the world. I came away with a few new ideas and I'm already looking forward to next year.

Thanks to Jason for sharing a summary of his time at c2k8.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By James (jturner) james@bsdgroup.org on http://bsdgroup.org

    Thanks for another great c2k8 article. It's always interesting to read about whats going on and how certain things come to be. You only get so much out of reading commit logs!

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (82.161.172.147) on

      These news items are very informational and interesting indeed. Changes like the deprecation of dhcpd.interfaces should definately be on the changelog page, since i think they are noteworthy changes but also easy to miss for a user who's not actively tracking cvs.

      Good stuff guys!

  2. By Anonymous Coward (71.243.93.224) on

    Thanks again for these great articles. It is nice to see stories about people contributing in different ways.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (206.57.89.141) on

    I just hope that the "improvements" to the install process don't introduce a gui or something along those lines. I doubt that it would (since none of the 3 man *BSDs do this), but I'm paranoid since other OS's seem to be of the idea that in order to make software more user friendly, you need to have a GUI.~_~ OpenBSD. thankfully, doesn't seem to have this mindset. :)!

    Comments
    1. By jason (jason) on http://www.dixongroup.net/

      > I just hope that the "improvements" to the install process don't introduce a gui or something along those lines. I doubt that it would (since none of the 3 man *BSDs do this), but I'm paranoid since other OS's seem to be of the idea that in order to make software more user friendly, you need to have a GUI.~_~ OpenBSD. thankfully, doesn't seem to have this mindset. :)!

      Easier != Graphical

      Trust me, we (I) have no intention of introducing anything to the installation process that complicates the current process. If you couldn't tell by my recent commits, I subscribe to the "less is more" philosophy. ;)

    2. By Anonymous Coward (89.102.94.11) on

      > I just hope that the "improvements" to the install process don't introduce a gui or something along those lines. I doubt that it would (since none of the 3 man *BSDs do this), but I'm paranoid since other OS's seem to be of the idea that in order to make software more user friendly, you need to have a GUI.~_~ OpenBSD. thankfully, doesn't seem to have this mindset. :)!



      I have experience with install of Win98,Win ME,Win 2000/XP,Win Vista,a lot of Linuxes from CD,DVD,ftp,floppy and some BSD's,but don't know more easy install,that OpenBSD has.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (60.229.27.67) on

        The only GUI OS installation that comes close to the ease of installation of OpenBSD is perhaps BeOS.

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