The NetBSD Foundation 2010 Annual Report
The NetBSD Foundation held its Annual Group Meeting of all members of the NetBSD Foundation. It took place from 22:00 UTC to midnight on May 21st 2010. This is a report from the presentations of the various groups within the NetBSD project about their past achievements and future Goals. This report is mostly a verbatim version of the text presented in the online meeting, with a few places edited slightly.
- Welcome and Intro remarks (Matthias Scheler, Alistair Crooks)
- Presentations from the Executive Committees
- membership exec (Martin Husemann)
- finance exec (Christos Zoulas)
- core (Alistair Crooks)
- releng (Soren Jacobsen)
- security-officer (Alistair Crooks)
- pkgsrc-PMC (Amitai Schlair)
- pkgsrc-releng (Matthias Scheler)
- pkgsrc-security (Tim Zingelman)
- www (Jan Schaumann)
- gnats admin (David Holland)
- admins (S.P.Zeidler)
- marketing (Darren Reed)
Introductory address from Matthias Scheler on behalf of board:
A welcome to all members of the NetBSD project who made it to this meeting at this late or early hour, depending on where you are. Another year has passed and despite the usual rumor the NetBSD project still isn't dead. Quite to the contrary, several remarkable things have happened: - The NetBSD project took part in Google's Summer of Code 2010 for the sixth year in a row. We got awarded six slots and all projects were completed successfully. Five of those projects were already integrated into the source tree. This year the NetBSD project did even better. For our seventh consecutive participation Google assigned nine slots for projects to us. The new projects will officially start on Monday. The board would like to thank all the mentors and administrators who made Google Summer of Code a big success story for the NetBSD project. - NetBSD 5.1 was released which is probably our best update release ever with e.g. new Xen features, RAIDframe parity maps, new drivers and a lot of other improvements. - While NetBSD 6.0 wasn't finished a lot of interesting work has happened on it. New kernel modules, TLS, Rump, NPF, LVM, MIPS64 and a lot of other features have already been completed. More exiting changes like Xen SMP Support are still being worked on. - Thanks to a massive effort led by Antti Kantee NetBSD now has an impressive set of regression tests managed via ATF. Andreas Gustafsson created an infrastructure which periodically builds, installs and tests NetBSD/current on a virtual machine. The results of these automated test runs are available as a web page. They provide a chronological view of the quality and an early warning system for regressions. A lot of bugs have already been caught early by our new test driven development methodology. This will greatly benefit the quality of future NetBSD releases. Even better, other BSD projects are starting to see the benefits of continuous automated testing. For example, Junos recently adopted ATF and FreeBSD is interested in doing the same. We are glad to be leading the efforts in this area. - The pkgsrc project is thriving. MirBSD is the third BSD operating system which adopted pkgsrc as their primary package platform. - The Board of Directors and the Core Group have started to use the foundation's money to fund targeted development. NPF, TLS and Xen SMP Support are examples of such projects. While the underlying process still needs to be improved the results are already encouraging. - NetBSD can now be run on Amazon's Web Services. There is ongoing work to make the necessary images available. And the completion of the Xen SMP Support project will greatly improve NetBSD's performance on this platform. Of course the project suffered setbacks as well. The unexpected death of Martti Kuparinen in June last year was a particularly sad moment for all of us. The board's plans for the future are: - Make sure that the project keeps running smoothly. - Improve the process for funded development and spend more of the project's money on improving NetBSD. Suggestions for funded development are very welcome. - Provide administrative and financial resources to improve the project's build infrastructure. The board would in particular like to see frequent pkgsrc binary package builds for all supported NetBSD releases. At this point we would like to take the opportunity to thank Alistair Crooks and David Maxwell who leave the board of directors after many years of dedicated service. We would also like to welcome our new board members S.P. Zeidler and Julio Merino.
Alistair Crooks presented some thoughts as leaving president of TNF:
I'd just like to add a few words Just a short few sentences from me. I promise. I have been a director of the NetBSD Foundation since 2003, when it was established. For the last 6 years, I have been the President of the NetBSD Foundation. I have now decided that we have many good young people who are now developing software for NetBSD, and that it is time to give them a chance of introducing new ideas, and trying new ways to manage things. I'd like to thank you all for your support over the last 9 years of being a director. We wouldn't be where we are now without you, the developers, who put it all together, and keep it running, and put so much hard effort into making NetBSD relevant in the future.. The last 9 years has seen many, many transformations; we will see many more over the next few years. That is good. If we stop developing, we will die - there is no comfortable middle age for an operating system, and its packaging software, and we have to keep moving to stay in the same place. I know we will, and I know we are in good hands. I'd like to thank you all once again, and look forward to the next few years immensely.
Martin Husemann presented the report from the membership committee:
Good evening! The main responsibility of membership-exec is handling new member applications for the NetBSD project. Since the last AGM we handled 16 new developer applications, and got 15 new members. Unfortunately at the same time 15 developers left the project. For the election, membership-exec updated the list of active and inactive developers. As of today, the NetBSD Foundation, Inc., has 190 active and 9 new members. Last year we reported that we had to reject one application. The good news: the formerly reject applicant has worked with his sponsors and the community and, after another application round, now has joined the NetBSD foundation. Sadly one developer rejected the invitation after his application got accepted. He was intimidated by some legalese in the membership agreement, and asked for changes. We do believe the same rules should apply to everyone (and board concurred), so a personalized agreement was rejected. The applicant is still contributing code, and we hope he will change his mind or find good legal advice (part of the problem might be the difficult translation of the legalese in the agreement to foreign - and very different - law systems). The other responsibility of membership-exec is handling developer issues and disputes. We are happy to say that last year was quiet in that regard. The current members of membership-exec are: * Christos Zoulas <christos> * Ken Hornstein <kenh> * Martin Husemann <martin> * Matthias Scheler <tron> * Lex Wennmacher <wennmach> * Thomas Klausner <wiz> That is all from us, thank you.
Christos Zoulas presented the report from the finance committee:
Financially 2010 was a robust year with moderate income and expenses. Most of our income came from a 5 large donations ($35,500), but we've received many (123) smaller ones for a total of $11,759.35. We again spent less ($16,650.58) than we made ($47,493.24), adding to our total balance ($223,892.72) a good $30,842.69. Our donations are still balanced well enough for us to maintain our 501(c)(3) status. - This year board has created a budget for 2011 based on the expenses from 2008 and 2009. This budget allows for total expenses of $77,541.00 broken down as: - - - Standard (hardware, legal, marketing) $20,447.00 - - Consulting $42,094.00 - - Developer (hardware/docs/xen smp2) $15,000.00 - - Misc (travel, events, t-shirts) $12,450.00 - The standard category is generous and allows for more than $10,000.00 in new hardware and $5,000.00 in marketing. The consulting expenses are already committed and are for XIP, NPF, TLS, XEN/SMP1 development. We don't expect to spend all that in developer expenses, and we can decide what to do with the optional ones item by item. - We have not started a fundraiser for two years now so perhaps we should consider doing so after the 6.0 release. If things keep as they are we can assume to have a stable income of approximately $20,000.00 per year, but our fixed expenses (legal, fees, hardware) are a quarter of that and if we are going to keep wanting to pay for consulting projects we need to do better than that. - This year I ended up doing all the tax work, which is not too much fun. It is fun if you do it for a few times, but I've been involved in it for many years, so any help is appreciated. The good thing is that this year I spent some time building on Lex's work on documenting and automating the process so it is not going to be too tough in the years to come. - The merchandise sold at Cafepress is down again this year to $233.89 (from $258.44 last year and $381.24 the year before and $696.86 the year before that). We need someone to take this over, get some new art and products in and promote it better. - The breakdown of our expenses in 2010 amount to $16,650.58 (down from $17,716.84 last year and consist of hardware ($468.76), bank and paypal fees ($445.42), travel reimbursement ($460.40), consulting fees ($10,000.00), conference fees ($1,500.00), and legal expenses to run the Foundation ($3,776.00 USD). - The initial balance on Jan. 1, 2010 was $193,050.06 and the final balance on Dec. 31, 2010 was $223,892.72. - I'd like to return to the donations we received in 2010 and provide you some statistics. As I said, the number of individual donations was 123 (down from 130 last year). Excluding the 5 large donations: The average amount donated was $77.94 (down from $87.58 last year and $456.00 the year before), while the median value was $18.92 (down from $48.25 and $57.36 last year and the year before, respectively). - The split of the donations by value is: Value Number of Donations USD < 10 56 101.05 >= 10 && < 100 41 2609.45 >= 100 && < 1000 24 6885.28 >= 1000 0 0 - As always the financial results for each year are available in http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/financial/ - that's it for now
Alistair Crooks presented the report from the core team:
The core team consists of agc, christos, chs, matt, mrg, and yamt. For most of the year, we also consisted of pooka, who recently decided to stand down for personal reasons. As you'll see from what happened in core-land, pooka's influence was inspirational, energetic and very effective. Core is the technical management for the NetBSD project. Some of the achievements we have mentioned here are not down to core's involvement -- however, they are notable and might not get mentioned elsewhere, and they are part of NetBSD. We're proud of them, and wanted to share them with you. A quick review of the year finds these highlights: + copying pkgsrc policy on including a summary of useful changes when importing code into src and xsrc - thanks, mrg + NetBSD/EC2, which has had an interesting history, but is now very much a reality - jym, jans and others were the main force here, and david even facilitated a meeting with the FreeBSD developer to fix some miscommunication. See jym's wiki on this: http://wiki.NetBSD.org/amazon_ec2/ Our virtualization strategy is leading the way folks; if you doubt this, then remember that FreeBSD are installing a NetBSD dom0 for one of their main clusters. + there was a joint core and board meeting last august, which helped with a number of areas + we gained lua in october, thanks to marc's perseverance. + releng released 5.1 in december; a number of meetings and email threads have taken place about 6.0 - watch this space + the modular/monolithic kernel debate comes up again every so often + pooka delivered the tiering system, which documents the status quo that we've had for the last N years + bounties for bug fixing are another area which pooka felt strongly about - we tried this year, and it was a great success. Thanks to all who participated, and, if you think you fixed something and didn't get your bounty, please send mail to core. + there has been emphasis placed on funded development, and core has helped out on the technical side of this, with reviews and advice. When you see TLS, Xen SMP, and NPF mentioned, these were made possible by the funding of the Foundation. The bug bounties are another example. If you have more ideas for funded projects, please send them to board and core. We do not have endless funds, and want to fund work that is otherwise too large to be done by people in their spare time. In particular, core has project managed the following projects: ++ NPF (rmind): This project is now complete, the code has been committed to the repository and work is beginning to support IPv6 as part of the SoC. ++ TLS (joerg): Mostly done; support for most platforms has been committed. ++ XENmp (cherry): In progress, 50% done. + arguably foremost of pooka's achievements was the concentration on testing using jmmv's atf framework. Others are now following suit, and we have all seen how easy it is to notice regressions when they happen. Personally, I must admit to some skepticism when this was first suggested, as we'd tried the same thing at Amdahl in 1997/1998, and the results there were negligible. I was happy to be proved wrong by pooka, and think that he has achieved many things in his short time in core - he should be happy, and I am very thankful to him for so many things. + we have seen some interesting new ports arrive in-tree, including the mips simulator from Microsoft, and other MIPS and arm ones. + we are likely to see chuq's work on gcc 4.5 in src/external soon, and joerg has been working on clang/llvm support, and plunky on pcc. Great work, guys! + together with releng, we have been planning for 6.0 -- while it has not materialised just yet, the automated testing that is being done means that once we are ready to branch, we believe that the release process will go much more quickly than before. In summary, we believe that core has been more responsive to email than in previous years, that we've seen a large amount of innovation, and improvement from the whole community. Please keep this coming.
Soren Jacobsen presented the report from the releng team:
We are: abs, agc, bouyer, he, heas, jdc, jmc, martin, mkirby, msaitoh, ober, phil, riz, sborrill, snj # Here's a brief summary of the past year: - Released 5.1 in November. Good. - Processed approximately a zillion pullup requests. Good. - Got back to using all of our build cluster's muscle. Good. (Thanks, admins!) - Didn't put out any 5.[01].x security/critical releases. Bad. - Still didn't put out any further releases for 4.0. Bad. # A word on security/critical releases: they don't work. When we moved to our new x.y.z numbering scheme, we thought we could push out security/critical releases quickly and easily, but experience shows that this is much easier said than done. There is a lot of hassle surrounding releases, whether the release is major, minor, or teeny. Having these security/critical branches is great, but we need to start thinking about faster ways to get security fixes to our users. In short, it would be great if you all could consider this a kickstart to yet another discussion^Wflame war about binary updates. # Looking forward, we need to branch 6.0 soon. There are a couple things we'd like to see hit the tree first, but we're getting very close. # I'd like to close with a couple gentle reminders about pullup requests. First, please remember that changes submitted for pullup should be grouped logically. As an example, if you update a driver to support a new chip, and the changes were committed to HEAD in multiple steps, all of these changes should be submitted in a single pullup request. That includes any documentation updates. Second, please remember that security/critical branches (e.g., netbsd-5-1) are for security fixes and critical bugfixes only. In other words, if your pullup request is not clearly marked as a security fix, your request should include a justification of why the change should be applied to a security/critical branch. # That's all I've got. Thanks again to all of you developers who take the time to think of our release branches and submit pullup requests.
Alistair Crooks presented the report from the security-officers:
The security-* role has been reorganized lately. The NetBSD security officers are now the people who have the security officer PGP key and handle communication with "the outside". Please remember not to use the old 1024 bit key for communication with them any more, but to use the new 4096 bit key. Current security officers are agc, christos and tonnerre security-alert is a list consisting of security-officer, core and david. Its role is to see that incoming issues get a reaction. security-team, which existed previously as well, is supposed to do the body of the work, adopting an issue, finding (someone to create) a fix, writing an advisory if appropriate, and correcting each others advisory drafts before handing them over to security-officer (who gives it a final sanity check and publishes it). security-team has now a rotation, martin and spz are currently on it. The main task of the people on rotation is to make sure issues do not get lost (ie, be reminder service). security-team currently are billc, cyber, drochner, joerg, martin, mouse and spz. security-officer and core are also members of security-team by function inheritance. Thanks to all the people who were active on security-* in the past and have now moved to other tasks, especially dan and jnemeth. releng plays a vital role in keeping our release branches safe, thanks! There have been 15 security advisories since the last meeting. Advisories get written for security issues that are not a local DoS nor a "root can shoot themselves in the foot" and are present in a release branch. We currently have 48 open tickets where there is no conclusion either if that is a vulnerability in the first place, or if the problem is fixed. We currently only have 5 tickets younger than a year, of which three are likely to be closed with 'not a vulnerability'. This is likely not due to there being no issues, but due to security-officer / security-alert / security-team not being made aware of them. If you fix something, please don't assume that it will be picked up automatically. security-team could use additional members of a more diverse subject coverage who actually have time to dig through old issues, and to adopt new ones.
Amitai Schlair presented the report from the pkgsrc project management committee:
If pkgsrc did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Fortunately, it exists. Therefore we merely need to continually reinvent it. - We've made our usual efforts to update packages, address security issues, and maintain stable and useful quarterly branches. We'd particularly like to thank the people who do all the addressing and maintaining; you'll be hearing from them next. We've also managed to hoodwink a handful of new folks into becoming developers, which does wonders for our ability to make the usual efforts. - pkgsrc's infrastructure sets it apart from other package systems. Our team is relatively small, but that infrastructure multiplies our total work by a large factor -- and for a package system, whose job it is to reduce sysadmins' work by a large factor, it lets us tell a compelling story. Our teamwork makes it possible for anyone to manage thousands of third-party applications on a variety of Unix systems and in a variety of real-world scenarios. Like all pkgsrc developers, I'm also a pkgsrc user. At work I'm stuck with Linux and no root access, but so what? I get to keep my package-management habits, I get to easily install the tools I need, and I get to do my work much more productively as a result. pkgsrc doesn't judge, it just works. - Modernizing the infrastructure that makes this possible is a difficult and ongoing task. Some steps that are being taken: - * The wrapper scripts aren't far from being replaced with more readable and performant C implementations. - * Packages will soon be required to support DESTDIR-style staged installation, conferring a number of practical advantages. - pkgsrcCon usually falls in the spring, and those of us who attend find that it reenergizes our thinking about where pkgsrc needs to go. We seem to have missed the chance for this year, so let's please start making plans for next. Any volunteers to host? - This completes pkgsrc-pmc's presentation. Now for the presentations from the pkgsrc groups that actually do important work. Back to you, moderator.
Matthias Scheler presented the report from the pkgsrc releng team:
Greetings, programs! at the end of every quarter the pkgsrc developers create a new stable branch within "pkgsrc". This process was started a few years ago to provide a reasonably stable platform for using the NetBSD package collection on production systems. The maintenance of these branches is handled by the Pkgsrc Release Engineering Team. Based on tickets submitted by pkgsrc developers the team integrates changes from the HEAD branch or applies patches to fix critical bugs, close security vulnerabilities or address build and packaging problems. The current team members are: * Fredrik Pettai <pettai> * Tyler R. Retzlaff <rtr> * Lubomir Sedlacik <salo> * Steven Drake <sbd> * Eric Schnoebelen <schnoebe> * S.P. Zeidler <spz> * Matthias Scheler <tron> During the last year Geert Hendrickx left the team after many years of service. The team would like to thank him for all his hard work in the past. Fortunately Fredrik Pettai, Steven Drake and Eric Schnoebelen joined the team which now has more active members than in the past few years. The development of a new script ("pkgsrc-pullup.py" available in "localsrc") also helped to speed up the handling of pullup requests. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the admin team the NetBSD project's own pkgsrc build infrastructure now covers NetBSD/amd64 and NetBSD/i386 for two releases (NetBSD 4.0.* and 5.0.*). One problem however remains: a lot of pkgsrc developers forget to submit pullup requests. Without pullup requests important bug fixes especially for security vulnerabilities are often missing from the stable branch. The team's list of wishes for the future is: - A few more active volunteers for the team - A stronger commitment by the pkgsrc developers to keep the stable branches in a working and secure state. - Better (faster, more releases) build infrastructure for binary packages We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the developers who make the effort and submit pullup requests, especially Takahiro Kambe. We couldn't do our job without your support. Finally some statistics: - 64 tickets were pulled up into the pkgsrc-2010Q1 branch. - 53 tickets were pulled up into the pkgsrc-2010Q2 branch. - 68 tickets were pulled up into the pkgsrc-2010Q4 branch. - 37 tickets were pulled up into the pkgsrc-2011Q1 branch so far. The list of packages for which the most pullup requests were submitted: - net/wireshark (11 pullups) - devel/xulrunner, lang/php53 (8 pullups each) - www/firefox (7 pullups) - www/typo3, databases/mysql51-server (6 pullups each) End of File
Tim Zingelman presented the report from the pkgsrc security team:
The mission of the pkgsrc Security Team is to ensure that the ever-growing ecosystem of third party software is either safe to use or at least be sure people are aware of the known vulnerabilities. Our members monitor publicly available vulnerability feeds such as Secunia, CVE and bugtraq. We aggregate received advisories believed to impact pkgsrc into the pkgsrc vulnerability list and notify individual package MAINTAINERs. When time allows we locate and commit patches to fix the vulnerabilities. What follows is a brief summary of last years' activities. - Our ticket handling crew is down to four and could use a few more folks to handle the one week rotations. Currently handling tickets are: - OBATA Akio - Guillaume Lasmayous - Fredrik Pettai - Tim Zingelman The other current members of the team are: Mihai Chelaru, Alistair G. Crooks, Ulrich Habel, Thomas Klausner, Tonnerre Lombard, Tobias Nygren, Adrian Portelli, and Joerg Sonnenberger. - The year in numbers: Since the last meeting, the vulnerability list grew by 697 entries, for a total of 5253 known vulnerabilities. The ticket queue received 4394 new tickets of which over 99% have been acted upon. The current count of vulnerable packages in pkgsrc-current is 218. See the periodic email to packages@NetBSD.org for the list. We can always use help locating and committing security patches, in particular for the many (127) of these that are maintained by pkgsrc-users. - That's all from us, but before I hand off I'd like to encourage all developers to help us keep the vulnerability list up-to-date. If you become aware of a security issue or perform a security update in pkgsrc, do note it in the list. Developers don't need any special privilege for this. The team periodically signs off and uploads new revisions to ftp.NetBSD.org. (If you are more comfortable asking us to make the edits, just provide the info.) - Thanks for listening! Over to the moderator.
Jan Schaumann presented the report from the www team:
www apparently did not put together a presentation for this year's meeting, so I hastily made up this summary while the meeting was in progress. It reminded me of school, somehow. Anyway, this is (a) not particularly troublesome and (b) somewhat indicative of the current status of the www team and our website. (a) - because you can just look at the archives from last year and read that report. Nothing much has changed. I'm willing to bet that even the support lineup is the same. We still just handle queries coming in to www@ and mirrors@ and perform the various minor updates to the website. It's not very difficult or demanding work, but it still needs to be done and I thank all participants in the rotation. (b) - well... our website is... not all that good. Our documentation is, in general, not kept up to date very well. News announcements are now made mostly via the Blog (to which I'm afraid I can't speak -- schmonz@ may be able to add a quick summary at the end), which unfortunately has the side effect of leaving our "news" page look rather stale. Our framework continues to be the somewhat fragile and cumbersome translation of XML documents into HTML. So far nobody has undertaken the herculean effort required to completely restructure all of htdocs. For internal docs, though, we now have a Wiki, which is used to some degree, I believe. mirrors@ finally is another orphan child. We have a long list of mirrors worldwide, and we have a script that checks them regularly and attempts to ensure they're up to date. The majority are not. Unfortunately we do not seem to have the manpower to follow up on this. So while this sounds all very negative, I'd like to look at it this way: we have so much room to improve that things are only going to get better if we find volunteers with time to help; if we don't, well, then the website will still chug along as it did throughout 2010, which isn't the end of the world either. I would like to encourage all developers, however, to consider updating htdocs (or requesting updates from provided plain text documentation) whenever they add new features and to contribute to the blog / news section. My apologies for such a cynical take on the matter and the hastily slapped together report. I was depressed not to have gotten raptured and have a broken thumb to boot. Back to the moderator...
David Holland presented the report from Gnats:
This year has been fairly routine for bug handling. We've again managed to hold the line and avoid going over 5000 open PRs. Here's the summary report since the last AGM: GNATS statistics for Apr 22 2010 to May 21 2011: New PRs this year: 1792, of which 769 are still open. Closed PRs this year: 1745. Net change: +47. Total PRs touched this year: 2714. Oldest PR touched this year: 1722. Oldest open PR: 698; PR ignored for the longest: 3019. Total number open: 4887 (In case anyone is wondering, PR 698 wants umount to support running external per-fs umount programs (mount has since ~forever) and PR 3019 is a complaint about NFS export attributes being per-volume instead of per-directory.) Here's a graph showing the last year in GNATS in more detail: Open PR count, April 2010 through May 2011, by week: * 4950 * ********** * ****** ******************** ** ** ***************************************** ******* * ****************************************** ********************************************************** 4770 The big drop last summer reflects a lot of work put in; much of that was done by mrg and obache, so a big thank you to them. The increase afterwards was (I believe) largely prompted by the 5.1 release; it's good that we got past that without a large net uptick in PRs. Even though this graph looks like it shows an upward trend, it's actually quite close to flat overall. And while we're up by 47 from last year, that isn't a lot. If we look at the last six years, it shows that recently we've done a pretty good job at stemming the usual long term upward trend. Open PR count, May 2005 through May 2011, by month: **** 5000 *********** ** *** ****** ****************************** * ******************************** ** ************************************ *** ** ************************************* ***** **** **************************************** ******* * ************************************************* ******** **************************************************** ******************************************************************** *********************************************************************** ************************************************************************* 3800 Now we just need to increase speed a little to establish a sustained downward trend. :-) Just for fun, here are not the top five PR closers (since that's gnats administrivia) but the top five people who've committed to PRs over the past year: 50 christos@NetBSD.org 59 drochner@NetBSD.org 91 dholland@NetBSD.org 114 wiz@NetBSD.org 169 obache@NetBSD.org And last but not in any way least, here are the top five people who've processed PR-related pullups for releng: 12 spz@NetBSD.org 17 snj@NetBSD.org 27 tron@NetBSD.org 28 bouyer@NetBSD.org 46 riz@NetBSD.org (These figures count commit messages that make it to gnats, which is most but not always all of them, so the numbers aren't absolutely perfect.) Thanks to everyone for helping out.
S.P.Zeidler presented the report from admins:
good $TZ all - 162 Tickets resolved since 2010-04-24 (the last meeting) - 'lots' package and some security updates - 15 new developers, 16 accounts observered, 4 accounts reanimated, 19 closed - Many acts of small-scale system administration Changes to servers since the last meeting: - homeworld is now an ex-build-box with 2GB RAM and SSD disk. It has no swap, so its /tmp is a bit limited; please be mindful of that (and use /var/tmp for larger temporary files). - babylon5 has been reanimated and is being prepared to run anita tests it was used to build the stable pkgsrc branch on 5.1 amd64 and i386; these builds currently have no server to run on. - b6 is back in business - cole.NetBSD.de replaced babylon4.NetBSD.org as off-site backup server Thanks to tls and riz for their time and blood sacrifices. :} We have a new service: - homeworld now runs spamassassin to add to the despamming rules, tagging only Todo: - a new USB-to-serial for the ISC rack needs yet to be bought - mollari should take over the rest of the duties of narn. - narn and a bunch of special-purpose hosts are still on NetBSD 4 and should update or be retired before we retire the branch Known issues (most to least annoying): - morden suffers from tstile hangs roughly every 10-15 days - morden panics (less often since rmind cornered a bug, thanks) - blog occasionally suffers from tomcat indisposition Other events: - power and network outages and maintenances at ISC and NYC some statistics for the public servers: mail.NetBSD.org: up 34 days last reboot for reinstall www.NetBSD.org: up 168 days last reboot for a kernel security update mollari.NetBSD.org: up 114 days last reboot for a kernel security update ftp.NetBSD.org: up 12 days last reboot for tstiles anoncvs.NetBSD.org: up 170 days last reboot for a kernel security update nyftp.NetBSD.org: up 112 days last reboot for a kernel security update and some non-public ones: cvs.NetBSD.org: up 170 days last reboot for a kernel security update build.NetBSD.org: up 112 days last reboot for a kernel security update pkgbuild.NetBSD.org: up 112 days last reboot for a kernel security update Back to the moderator.
Darren Reed presented the report from the marketing committee:
A quick summary for communications (marketing/www). (Thank you to jschauma who gave more details on www earlier.) - The marketing list is: david, dsieger, gls, haad, imil, mishka, reed, rmind, sarah, uebayasi, and weinem. - The weekly www rotation members are: darcy, jschauma, reed, and weinem. (david and zafer also helped during the past year.) - Remember if you don't want to hassle with htdocs, just send an email to the www team and we can do the docbook work. - NetBSD was represented at some conferences. TNF members gave lectures related to NetBSD at events: mbalmer at FOSDEM, jmmv at BSDCan and NYCBSDCon, ahoka at AsiaBSDCon, and agc at EuroBSDCon. I gave a presentation about NetBSD at NYCBSDCon (and sold a few NetBSD System Manager's Manual books). kml and david had a NetBSD booth at SCALE. NetBSD was a sponsor for MeetBSD and NYCBSDCon (who also shared back their earnings). (Sorry if I missed some. Please let marketing team know.) - Lots of work and articles on new Wiki by schmonz and others. - Several NetBSD blog articles. Thank you! - Consolidated two (of three) Facebook groups. - Helped on literature about features in upcoming 6.0. - As for upcoming needs: - + Help with ready-to-use maintained brochures / print literature. (Update what we have.) - + Represent NetBSD with booths or lectures; marketing may coordinate funding of this. - + Updated website (dsieger has design). - + One place for news so blog and wiki feeds are on main page (or main site replaced with wiki). - + Maybe use wiki for blog too? (any good reason to have multiple infrastructures?) - + Continue to write Blog articles. - + Continue to advocate NetBSD publicly and internally at your companies and organizations. - TNF members are encouraged to promote NetBSD by running booths, giving NetBSD-related presentations at conferences and events, or simply by attending and representing NetBSD in other ways. - If you'd like monetary assistance to help attend events as a NetBSD representative, please send your request explaining your plan and amount needed to marketing for consideration. - If you have time to help promote NetBSD, please join marketing. - That's all for my short marketing update. ...
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