Ryan French FreeBSD Stuff

Real Life really doesnt like me working on this project. Thanks to exam time at university I was have to cover a few shifts for other students this past week, and ended up doing 6 days in a row. Thankfully I have some holiday time coming up starting this Thursday, and while I’ll be away for both weekends I’m on holiday I’ll have a full week to work on MPLS from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep, without any distractions.

Accomplished Last Week:

- Worked on my FreeBSD wiki pages.

- Went over OpenBSD/Ayame code again to try and get a bit more understanding on how it works.

Plans for Next Week:

- Port over the protocol description file mpls_proto.c, then begin working on porting over code for simple sending and receiving of MPLS packets.

- Once sending and receiving is working, look at implementing static label switching, then working towards dynamic label switching off a routing table.

Man these weeks are flying by. I managed to get a bit of work done on MPLS, but not much, before a suprise trip to visit friends up in Auckland dragged me away for the weekend.

Accomplished Last Week:

- Began looking over the OpenBSD implementation, looking through what has been submitted on their CVS, and just generally trying to get how the code does what it needs to do, and where it does it.

- Finally got a call back with an answer from IBM about my application. They have decided not to invite me to their interview day this time, but apparently if they hold another one then they will invite me to that. I’m not holding my breath. It appears as though it is very hard to get a job in New Zealand working with operating systems or networking stuff, unless you have experience. Unfortunately for me, my grades in my first 2 years of uni where anything but flash, and I seem to be suffering for it now. It’s almost making me wish I had some PHP or web programming under my belt, which is what all the NZ jobs seem to be looking for. Oh well, onwards and upwards with the job hunt hopefully.

Plans for Next Week:

- Once I have sorted out the licencing stuff with using OpenBSDs code (I havent had anything to do with Open Source licences befire, and I dont want to step on anyones toes by doing the wrong thing) then I will be porting over the code that I need to start working on.

- Figure out where exactly the code from OpenBSD has gotten to in terms of my plans, and then start working on improving it or moving on to new features I need.

Thats all for now. If anyone knows of any jobs in NZ for someone studing networking and operating systems, let me know

Yet again another week has gone by, and unfortunately I still havent accomplished much on MPLS. However, university has finished for me until mid July, so I will be working on it as much as I can between now and then.

Accomplished Last Week:

- Nothing, well, not completely nothing, just nothing MPLS related. I had my last test and report done by Thursday, and I’ve worked almost every day since, so I havent had much time to work on MPLS.

Plans for this Week:

- Begin browsing and porting over code from OpenBSDs under development version of MPLS, which I believe is based a lot on the Ayame MPLS patch for NetBSD. Aren’t we all just a big happy family of BSD’s after all?

- Will start by getting the protocol description file done, and then look at receiving MPLS packets, then maybe if I get time I will transfer over sending packets. I dont want to just coy and paste, compile, debug and hope I can get it to work, cause I really want to understand how it works right down to the basics, and I wont if I just rush through it all.

So I said I would try and write one of these every week, and its been two weeks since I wrote my first one, so I’m not going too well at the moment. Uni is over for me in a few days then I’m going to take a weekend off before I start working almost exclusively (I still have to work at my job at the liquor store) on MPLS for FreeBSD. I only have 4 weeks of holidays to work mostly on this unfortunately, its one of the main problems with trying to do GSoC, when its not actually summer where you live.

Accomplished last week:

- Finished my first ever research paper that I needed to do for one of my classes this semester, The paper is on Inferring Traffic Shaping via Port Number. Its not a very interesting topic, nor a very challenging paper, it was just something that I could do without taking up too much of my time. I may upload it later for anyone interested in reading it.

- Finished 1 of my 3 papers for the semester. This week I will be finishing the other two with 2 last assignments due as well as a final test on thursday. I’m very happy to know that unless I fail something, I wont have to go to classes anymore after the end of this year.

Plans for this week:

- Nothing really MPLS related. With uni finishing on thursday (well, technically my last assignment is due on friday but thanks to my job I have no way of getting up there to hand it in) and work on friday and sunday I wont be working on MPLS at all.

- Not related to GSoC or University in any way, but I’m going to kick up my search for a job for when I graduate at the end of the year. Still waiting to hear from IBM to see if I got through to the next stage of interviews, going to call them later today if I havent heard anything back from them.