Faces of FreeBSD - Dan Langille

Faces of FreeBSD

Are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? In conjunction with our year-end fundraising drive we are spotlighting different people on our website and Facebook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD.

Please enjoy our next installment of our Faces of FreeBSD series!

Here is Dan Langille’s story. We helped him by sponsoring BSDCan since 2006.

Dan's Story

I am a software developer currently residing in Philadelphia, PA with a focus in sysadmin and database areas. I have been working in the computer industry for over 30 years. There have been many changes in that time and I have always enjoyed the challenges the work has brought me—from working with 4K of RAM to systems with 11TB in a tower case.

I found open source in 1998 when I was given some FreeBSD CDs. From there, I started The FreeBSD Diary, created FreshPorts, founded the BSDCan and PGCon conferences, and worked on several other projects. The communities that develop around software projects are fantastic and supportive.

The FreeBSD Foundation has helped me grow BSDCan over the years to where it is today. We started small and grew quickly, thanks to word-of-mouth and publicity from followers. We are about to celebrate our 10th year and could not have done it without the help of our sponsors like The FreeBSD Foundation. Their continued support has allowed us to bring in speakers who could not otherwise appear at our conferences. The ability to bring people together to collaborate in person and build working relationships is both rewarding and fun.

Dan Langille

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

MeetBSD Trip Report: Mark Linimon

The Foundation sponsored Mark Linimon's travel to California from October 28th to November 9th, 2012, to attend MeetBSD, the preceding Developer's Summit, the postceding Vendor Summit, and to perform work on the FreeBSD systems at ISC. Here is his trip report:

Developer Summit:

I gave a brief overview of the state of the Ports Collection, and invited those interested in more details to attend my talk at MeetBSD proper.

In addition, I answered a number of question in informal sessions from various developers and contributors, some of whom I had met before, and some whom I had not.

Among the issues brought up were ports on various architectures, cross-building ports or perhaps building ports under emulation, and plans for Content Distribution Networks.

Of particular note, I was able to interact in person with the Yahoo team (Peter Wemm, Sean Bruno, and Ben Haga) to talk about issues affecting our machines in the cluster.

MeetBSD:

I presented a session about the state of the Ports Collection on FreeBSD, and future directions.  You may view my slides online.

In particular, I focused on the progress in our new packaging system pkgng; our reworked options system optionsng; the state of ports vs. clang; and the Redports distributed build testing system.  It should be noted that hardware for both production package building and also Redports was purchased via Foundation funds.

I also attended other sessions that I found useful, especially Sean Bruno's explanation of qemu.  I hope that we will be able to use this for cross-building ports in the future.

Vendor Summit:

At the Vendor Summit mostly I was an observer.  However, I did present a brief explanation of the status of the ports tree, and how that might affect the vendors.  As well, I chatted informally with Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft's Hyper-V effort about how best to interact with the FreeBSD community.  In addition, I was able to interact with a number of other representatives from vendors who had questions about the Ports Collection, particularly about building for non-x86 architectures.

ISC:

The ISC systems needed some major work.

For one day overlapping my trip, Simon Nielsen was also on-site and did the preliminary install of 7 new Atom servers.  These were purchased by the Foundation to be administration servers for a future fallover facility for the main Yahoo systems.  I continued this work and did other work as follows:

• I moved most of the Ethernet cables from the old, unmanaged, switches to the Juniper EX3300 managed switch that Simon had also installed.
• I wired serial cables to the new Atom servers and verified that they worked properly.
• I returned one of the Atom servers to iXsystems for an RMA.  It turned out that the CPU had suffered early failure.  I reinstalled the system once they were finished.
• We still had several systems in rack B2, which ISC wishes us to vacate. Since the portmgr-owened systems there were offline due to other reasons, I relocated them.  Two systems still remain.
• I deinstalled a power controller that had failed.
• The cable situation had become sub-optimal.  In many cases, the only cables that had been on hand were 25' or more.  It was barely possible to get to the back of the systems, and airflow was a problem.  I installed various shorter lengths of cable, and correctly color-coded them while doing so.
• I verified all the connections to the console server and the PDUs.
• I attempted to install a new hard drive on our PowerPC server there. However, without a CDROM drive, that system is hard to work with. Instead, I carried the hard drive back to Austin, where I will format it up on my similar system here and send it back to ISC.
• I purchased a second power supply for the Coverity machine.
• I removed rack slides from the systems on which those slides do not fit into the shallow racks there.
• I purchased some rack shelves that will stand in for these slides to help us manage our physical space.  They still need to be installed.
• I physically labeled all the systems.
• I annotated all the above in our administration database.

*Stunning News Website Fundraising Contribution:* Over 650 new donations raise $43,200 in three days!

Astute readers of our blog know that The FreeBSD Foundation's annual year-end fundraising  drive began last week. Every year over 50% of our donations arrive during this campaign.  We were thus surprised by coverage on Slashdot and Hacker News suggesting that we were  behind in our fundraising goal. We’d never turn down additional news coverage of our work raising funds in support of the FreeBSD project, of course, but remain confident in our fundraising target.

The response to those articles was a remarkable outpouring of support — we have had over 650 new donations in the last three days alone, raising $43,196. Individual donations are absolutely critical to the business of The Foundation. Not only do they contribute significantly to our ability to financially support the FreeBSD project, but they also help us demonstrate broad public support in order to maintain our public non-profit status.

This massive increase in small donations will set a new record for individual donors in a single year. The readership of these sites has been instrumental to this success. You'll also be glad to know that the news article triggered a number of further corporate contributions from FreeBSD consumers. Our hard work is not done, however. We still have $195,000 left to go to meet our target this year–or exceed it!

Look forward to more news soon. . .

Faces of FreeBSD - Alberto Mijares

Faces of FreeBSD

Are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? In conjunction with our year-end fundraising drive we are going to be spotlighting different people on our website, blog, and Facebook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD.

Please enjoy our first installment of our Faces of FreeBSD series!

Let us introduce you to Alberto Mijares. We helped him attend EuroBSDCon 2012 by assisting him with his travel expenses. Here’s his story.

Alberto’s Story

Kirk McKusick with Alberto Mijares

My name is Alberto Mijares, I am 33 years old, and was born in Caracas, Venezuela.  I started learning about computers in a special program starting in fourth grade on 486 PC’s. By the time I got my bachelor’s degree I had learned programming languages, spreadsheets, word processors, and educational programs (LOGO, dBase, GWBasic, Pascal, and Turbo Pascal) on “cutting edge” Pentium MMX’s.

In the late nineties I studied petroleum engineering at Universidad Central de Venezuela. Later I began work at a telecom company, was introduced to UNIX, and ended up on the technology support team, responsible for monitoring the company’s IT infrastructure, composed of three IBM RS-6000 servers with AIX for the core business, a couple of NT and W2K servers for domain controlled and call center software, and ten servers with FreeBSD for web, mail, dns, proxy, dhcp, database, sms gateway, ivr, monitoring, file sharing, and other services.

Once I learned about FreeBSD I quickly became a fan of UNIX and wanted to know more. I took Linux-based courses and could compare Linux and FreeBSD. I transferred all my new knowledge to a FreeBSD environment and learned about both operating systems inspired by the same philosophy, in parallel.

In my country, public administration promoted the use of free software, which influenced the growth of development companies, training institutes, nonprofit user groups, and a philosophical-activist movement. But Linux was also mainstream because of its popularity.

I continued to work with Linux but technical issues and disappointment led me to ask my superiors to migrate the platform to a more robust operating system—FreeBSD. They still thank me for it. I’ve been an advocate to use, promote, learn more, and improve FreeBSD. I work to consolidate a group of users, support the use of FreeBSD in infrastructure projects and encourage public and private companies to help fund The FreeBSD Project.

Three years ago I was able to collaborate with Hans Peter Selasky to support a new device in the u3g driver. This year, thanks to a travel grant from The FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to meet Hans at EuroBSDcon 2012 in Warsaw and talk with him on many topics. I also was able to meet Paul Schenkeveld, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, Peter Hansteen, Chris Buechler, Chris Moore, and many other personalities in the BSD world. The FreeBSD Foundation paid for my accommodations and conference fees, and I’m very grateful for that subsidy.

The conference motivated me so much that I organized a meeting with my peers to share the experiences. In November I gave a talk about IPv6 and FreeBSD to local university students. I plan to attend BSDCan next year, take the BSD certification exam, and organize a big BSD event in my country for late 2013 or early 2014. I would like to be a facilitator of the BSD Certification exam in my country. I just submitted a PR with a new port for the FreeBSD Ports Collection. Soon I will be helping to translate the updated handbook to Spanish.

FreeBSD has become a lifestyle for me. I want to be more involved with the project as time passes.

Alberto Mijares

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/