On June 7th, 2001, a BSD BoF was held as one of the night sessions at
NetWorld+Interop Tokyo. What follows is a short summary of the discussion,
based on a netbsd-advocacy
mailing list post by Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino.
Many of the URLs referenced are in Japanese.
BSD BoF at NetWorld+Interop TokyoAbout the event itself
The event was subtitled "BSD, Life with Revolution Evolution DEVOlution"
(the title was taken from a song title by a Japanese cult rock band).
We have done this kind of event a couple of times.
NetWorld+Interop provided us with the meeting room as a courtesy.
We would like to thank them here.
300+ people attended in person (there were fewer chairs than the number
of people - so some of them had to sit on the floor).
50-100 people attended over irc (volunteers typed the discussions to
a couple of irc channels), and 828 clients watched the discussion over
RealVideo transmission.
To summarize the event in 4 words, it was A LOT OF FUN.
http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/event/N+I2001_BOF/http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/event/N+I2001_BOF/program.html
(pictures appears by courtesy of Ms Shoko Araki)
Mr. Mano of root-hq.com, on wireless internet devices
This company, ROOT Inc.,
manufactures an embedded NetBSD device, with 802.11 and
ethernet device built in. The specification of the device is as
follows:
He also started a company very recently, called "mobile internet
solutions". The company aims to deliver internet reachability
everywhere by the wireless technologies, and promote a (non-PC)
ubiquitous internet environment.
http://www.root-hq.com/pressrelease/01.6.5.html
The answer to "why NetBSD?" was "pure luck". Someone recommended
NetBSD by chance (if the recommendation was different, he could have
picked Linux or other *BSD). Luckily for us NetBSDers, he is happy
with his choice.
He also announced a scholarship possibility, for those presenting their
ideas for the usage of root-hq.com wireless devices.
ToDo: IPv6, mobile-ipv4/6, OSPF, PDA/cellphone-like handset device
(rather than an infrastructure device).
http://www.root-hq.com/Shigeru Yamamoto of IIJ, on SEIL-T1
SEIL-T1 is a small router device for small offices and such.
IIJ is actually an ISP, and it's rare for an ISP to manufacture routers.
IIJ has router-integrated services, like router maintenance outsourcing
and such. Also, it should be noted that IIJ is highly active in the IPv6
arena. This is the first ISP to launch official IPv6 connectivity
service in Japan.
Specs: SH3, NetBSD 1.4 + KAME (next version of the firmware will be
1.5.1), T1 and 10Base-T. 32M RAM, 4M flash memory.
web and telnet config interface (next version of the firmware comes
with Secure Shell logins, and all config interfaces are IPv6
accessible). IPv6, IPsec including IKE, traffic shaping, monitoring
(MRTG-ish stat tool inside).
Good things about using NetBSD: the availability of source code,
multi architecture (and the cleanness required to be such), UNIX
programming environment for user interface portion.
Troubles: compiler bugs (-O2 sometimes emits non-working code),
alignment pickiness of SH3, debugging environment (DDB sometimes does
not work right).
The development team pays a very large amount of effort on user interface.
Web interface is for novice admins, and telnet/ssh interface is for
advanced admins. Even for telnet/ssh interface, SEIL-T1 does not
use normal /bin/sh or /bin/csh - it has home-brew command line user
interface (with cisco-ish ondemand help). It is critical to present
a consistent user interface to the admins.
An attendee suggested to use Hitachi-made commercial compiler,
which should be more stable than gcc.
http://www.seil-t1.com/http://www.iij.ad.jp/Jun Ebihara on Hitachi GR2k router
With a hidden command he demonstrated that it runs BSD/OS 3.1 :)
Mr. Etoh on gcc mod for buffer overrun attack detection/protectionhttp://www.trl.ibm.com/projects/security/ssp/
With his mods, binaries compiled with gcc -stack-protection become
safer against buffer overrun attacks. The technique includes
reordering of auto variables, checks against signature variable after
function call, and some other items. The modification is made against
gcc intermediate code, so it should be easier to be architecture
independent.
His notebook PC runs FreeBSD compiled with the modified gcc. It
requires modification to gcc (of course), 6-line changes to the kernel,
and 16-line changes to shared library. The compilation was very
simple - just a matter of "make world".
He has tested his mod on i386, sparc and powerpc. He solicited
for more testers. Also, he suggested to compile FreeBSD packages
(precompiled third-party application binary) with safer compiler like
this, to protect many users.
Mr. Shiroyama on Mac OS X
He presented the internals of Mac OS X, and demonstrated its GUI.
To quote Steve Jobs, "Mac OS X will be the most popular UNIX
distribution". From the market statistics it seems true.
Also, Mac OS X/Darwin seems to include the KAME IPv6 stack (which is one
of the contributions from Japan to the BSD community), but its not
enabled yet.
Apple is taking a very aggressive approach in switching their
operating system from a legacy non-protected one to a modern one
(compare it with Microsoft, which is having very hard time switching
from Win95/98 to Win2K/XP). This may be because this is very critical
for Apple to transition (if they fail to switch, the company may vanish).
The audience laughed very hard when Mr. Shiroyama demonstrated
"port scan" menu on the network management dialog :)
Ms. Kurata from WindRiver
She clarified the goals/plans of WindRiver on BSD,
after the BSDi merger.
Mr. Imai on XCASTXCAST is short for
"explicit multicast", an experimental multicast-ish
protocol discussed in IETF. It is designed for multicast
groups with small number of people/group (like a mahjong net
game with 4 participants each). With normal internet multicast,
the multicast routing table management on routers would be cumbersome,
There are patches against NetBSD 1.5, FreeBSD (2.2.8+KAME, 3.5+KAME
and 4.3), and he called for more geeks to play with it.
He presented this over IPv6 video chat application (of course with
XCAST), from UC Irvine!
Mr. Takeoka on "Shikigami" avator
Shikigami is an user interaction avator for the "shikigami" PDA user
interface suite (or, to describe it literally, cute girl AI on X11
screen). Backend AI/controller is implemented with scheme (a
popular dialect of Lisp), and the graphical frontend is implemented
with Xlib.
Functionalities include (still growing): wink, clock/alarm, fork
external command, URL passing to netscape, biff (checks # of queued
email over pop3). ToDos include: real AI, scheduler, voice i/f.
He solicited for more illustrators (to draw cute "skins") and voice
actressess.
http://www.sikigami.com/Mr. Kahei Suzuki of ASCII, on meeting room usage
ASCII is a major computer publisher in Japan, and is known to be an
advocator of BSDs and UNIXes. He announced that the company can let
people use ASCII meeting rooms for free software activities
(like this BoF). ASCII is located in Shibuya-ku, near Shinjuku and
Hatsudai station (central Tokyo). Detailed descriptions were given,
like no commercial activity (selling T-shirts for non profit purpose
would be okay), the equipment in the meeting rooms, network
availability, that one ASCII employee must attend, how guards would
audit attendees, and such. Contact kahei-s@ascii.co.jp.
Random announcements
June 9, 2001 - Open Source Convention at Nagoya U
http://www.nu-net.or.jp/tosc/2001/
June 25-30, 2001 - Usenix/Freenix 2001
June 30, 2001 - Japan NetBSD Users' Group meeting at ASCII meeting room