The show floor closed yesterday and after about an hour of tear down, our job was done. Of course, we kept on working till the very end, spending most of yesterday backing up config files and making little notes for documentation. Timmons was finally allowed to try and break our routers, which gave us some very interesting test results. This has been a great show and I think everybody on the team is going home with a lot of new knowledge and hoping we can do this again next year since there is tons of interest and so many things going on in the open source are.

Thanks to all who visited us in the booth, hopefully we will see you again next year!

I can not believe it is already the end of the second day and only one more day to go. These two days have really passed quickly and yes, we are most definitely having fun. Despite the fact that the ilabs booth is in the corner we seem to have a pretty constant, good flow in the oss area. It feels like I’ve been talking constantly for two days, which is probably pretty accurate, and so have most of our team members. And everybody I have talked to are really interested in what we are doing, asking lots of questions and spending a considerable amount of time here. It is really a lot of fun when people are so positive about what we’re doing. If anybody was every in doubt that open source was a hot topic, don’t be.

As is always the case at the end of the second day, we wish we had a few more days to work on this. But, today is the last day, and tomorrow at 3pm we’ll tear everything down. Before that, however, we will do some serious testing. I have promised Timmons that he will be allowed to attemt killing quagga, xorp and bird and simulate some attacks on our network with all his toys. We might wanna wait untill after lunch, though, before we start breaking our network, hopefully we’ll get a good crowd here tomorrow as well.

In about 10 hours the show floor opens and half the team is still here. I guess it’s a good idea to get some sleep soon, before the show begins. The booth has been cleaned up, the signage is all in place and Chris’ web pages for the different apps we’re showing are starting to look really good. The cerebrum workstation is ready to register users and the printer has paper and is ready to print out the user information.

Today everybody has worked really hard on finishing up the critical parts of the demo, and things are starting to look good. Of course we have had some instabilities as is expected on the last day before the show starts, but all in all we’re pretty excited about showing the stuff we’ve been working on to anybody who might find us tomorrow.

Of course we will continue testing interesting apps all through the week, and also make an attempt to do some serious work on documenting what we have tested, what is working, what is not working and whatever interesting bugs and workarounds we have found.

Well, I think it’s time to head out, hope to see a lot of people in the ilabs booth tomorrow!

Yesterday was quite a busy day which I guess is always the case as we get close to the showfloor opening. We pretty much finished up the last white papers and our signage. Not quite surprising did we not finish up all of our demos as we had hoped to do. Then again, we never really finish, we always find more interesting applications to implement. Of course the amount of open source applications out there is pretty much unlimited. Yesterday was one of those days that somebody had to physically cut off our network connection to get us out of the showfloor, hopefully that will not be necessary today.

Wej and Thomas, our GroundWork engineer are today constantly bugging everybody to find more things they can monitor with our nagios/groundwork software. It must be a good sign that we have time to really get our network managment set up properly. Our servers can really not cause much mischief before alarms start going off. We’re still desperately trying to get some flow data from the enet. Wej and TK have now lowered their expectations considerably and Wej claims that even one tiny little flow would make him very happy.

Jasmina now has cerebrum doing pretty much everything it is supposed to do and Chris is working on the web interface where visitors can register their own users to walk through our demo. Users are getting authenticated left and right, some of them even get a home directory and the really lucky ones get two.

Timmons has been hanging out here the last copule of days and is on a regular basis making me just a bit nervous by making random comments about wanting to break something. I think he realizes, however, that we need to actually get out stuff working before there is anything worth breaking

A group of us from the OSS initiative arrived early Thursday afternoon, expecting the usual chaos where we run around the show floor looking for our booth, racks, crates, power, etc, etc…,but to our great surprise all our bits and pieces where aleady sitting patiently in the iLabs booth waiting for us.

So, we got our racks powered up, got our desktops and laptops and phones out and got everything connected the way it was before we tore it down at the last day of hotstage. By the end of Thursday, we were pretty much ready to pick up where we left it at the end of hotstage and get some real work done again, although quite a bit of time was spent on Friday getting our DNS back in shape and getting our routing back.

A large amount of time yesterday and today has been spent working on our ID management infrastructure and our SIP PBXs and clients. We will continue working on this with more focus on the clients and the client apps once the backend is working. Calendaring is something we’ve decided to save for last since we know it will be kind of a challenge to get stuff talking to each other, to say the least. Audio and video services are up and running. We’re currently have a few people working on the last pieces of network management and also setting up a basic system for pushing out and backing up files.

Chris is working on the web pages for each of the desktop for our demos. We have a whole flow diagram for the demo walk-through and are really looking forward to getting some people in here that we can talk to about all this stuff that we least we think is pretty cool.
Our marketing department (Wej and myself) has been keeping busy today. We keep asking ourselves how it can be that it’s only Saturday and we’ve actually had time to put some of the signs up already.

All in all things are not looking too bad and we’re still having a lot of fun and learning new things every day. We have a bigger crowd than at hotstage, the team now counting 5 Cheeseheads, 6 Norwegians, Greg and 2 Norwegian hang-arounds. Timmons also wants to play and we count him as part Norwegian since he can say overbuljongterningpakkmesterassistentunderopplring. The Cheeseheads are despondent about loosing another count to the Norwegians.

We’ve powered down three out of our four racks and there’s somebody who wants to take away the connection to the world, so I guess that’s it for now. We’ve cleaned up the racks, got rid of or tied up the loose ends, now busy putting everything else in crashboxes.

We think we have a pretty good plan for vegas, and we can’t wait to get everything powered up and online again. Just a couple of more weeks, but a little bread inbetween probably doesn’t hurt. See you all in Vegas!

The warehouse is getting quiet and empty (by now we’ve learned to ignore the background noise from all the hardware, or quite possibly we’re going deaf), except from a few of us in the corner who seem to refuse to leave. The NAC guys are gone, the SIP team is gone, except from Jim who has joined us here in the corner, and the eNet crowd has at least gone home for today. But the OSS team is still here, frantically trying to finish up some last stuff before we pack up (which is pretty much a state we will be in unill they cut our power off in Vegas on the last day of the show) and head home for two weeks before going vegas.

Jasmina and Chris just reported that everything can now be pushed through cerebrum, which means the only thing we need for that half of our demos to work are the ties between the web interface and the backend. To celebrate this, OpenLDAP has suddenly decided to die, but we’re confident it only needs to be left alone untill tomorrow morning and have decided to give it some space.BPTel is making even more noise today, phones are ringing left and right and even on the mp3 player, he’s definitely back in business after the relocations

Everybody has backed up their work and Wej and I are now pulling configs from all the infrastucture boxes and applications so that no matter what happens we’ll be up and running again in no time. At least that’s the theory. We’ll back up the configs to two different continents, so we should be fairly safe. Ragnar has established an intimate relationship with the yellow box, and Margrete has decided she likes the SLUG so much he gets to come home to Norway with her

We’ll be in tomorrow morning to power down and pack up, but we’re pretty confident about what we have and that we can fit the last pieces together, finish up the demos and clean everything up nice and pretty the few days we have in vegas before the show starts. We need some fun stuff to do in vegas as well.

I guess the open house event is a sign that it’s getting close to the end of hotstage and we need to start thinking about wrapping things up. We willl have to do that tomorrow although we don’t really want to since there are so many interesting areas we can put unlimited amounts of time and work into, areas not many people have previously explored. And that’s really what we are trying to do, to demonstrate how some of the very common, non-trivial problems related to open source, and to integration between closed- and open source can be solved.

Our id management system is moving steadily forwards. Chris has the samba server up and running and it only needs a couple of lines of config to talk the openldap backend. The radius server is set up and is using openldap as it’s backend and is now doing .1x authentication for one part of our wireless network. We’re getting very close to having all authentication done against either openldap or ad with cerebrum as the single point of generating new user data and that’s where we are trying to get. Ragnar has Openxchange up and running and he and Jasmina are keeping pretty busy trying to make all the information travel correctly between cerebrum, openldap and openxchange. We already know it will be challenging to get all these pieces working with a windows client, but that makes it only more fun to try and figure out if it’s even possible.

The BGP peering between our four open source, or open source based, routing suites is finally stabilizing, though I will spend some time between now and the show investigating some interesting issues. Our management systems are mostly in place and and we’re getting as far as starting to look at how to efficiently push config files and updates to our servers. Wej thinks he is receiving netflow data, at least he is receiving a whole lot of numbers. Margrete has our audio and video services under control. There has been a lot of loud phone noises from BPTel today which I think is a good sign. There seems to be sip softphones out there that can make us of ldap, but we’re not exactly sure to what extent yet. Chris has openslug’ed our new NSLU2 and it should now be ready to run openradius. And Glenn is being completely amazing, it seems that no matter what kind of hardware we ask him for, he’s somehow able to find it.

I’m getting a bit worried about Margrete after she earlier today claimed that “sql is beautiful”, but I think we still might be able to blame the jetlag or possibly the fact that she has been buried deep in radius most of the day

One of the things we are trying to do here in the oss area is to show how open source software can be implemented and integrated and how it interoperates. We attempt to do this by simulating a company with an HQ and three other divisions where one is a newly acquired branch office. Three sites are predominantly linux environments, the new one mainly has windows both on the server and the client side and needs to be integrated with the rest of the company. This integration is certainly a challenge and one that many companies struggle with. We also try to show how everything you need for your company’s infrastructure can be done with open source sofware, from routing, firewall, ids, and all kinds of applications on the server and client side.

Today we got to the point where we started feeling that most of these pieces actually started looking like they might fit together. In particular the whole authentication/id management/collaboration side of our infrastructure is not trivial and consists of many, many different pieces both in the open source and windows world that need to work together. Wej says he feels a mix of confidence and nervousness, and I guess that pretty much describes today although we agree, as I type this, that things are looking promising, we are definitely having fun and we are having problems leaving the warehouse cause we just wanna fix one more little thing …

We now have one linux and one windows client up, both authenticating against ldap and mounting their home directories, and Jasmina has cerebrum generating user data for both openldap and ad. Email is starting to flow as well, but we still need to get the appropriate data from cerebrum to exchange and openexchange.

A lot of our stuff has started coming together today. We now have most of the hardware we need, although you never know if we might find more fun stuff we can use for something interesting. Most of our vendors have been in today, of course doing open source we don’t have as many vendors, so we are really trying to look after the ones we have. We’ve spent a lot of the day generally cleaning up cabling, addressing and configs and getting something resembling a network managment plan in place. Although not all of this is rocket science, we’re pretty happy about how much we actually have working on our third full day here.

Greg arrived with his IDS and switch and tomorrow we’ll feed his IDS some data to keep it happy. We acquired a couple of APs and Margrete is now busy getting radius up and making our little wireless world secure. Chris has promised to help set up the NSLU2 to run one of our radius servers, and probably has no idea what he’s about to get himself into, we just might keep him busy for a while Dan is working on the captivator, a captive portal, so that we can use it to make people authenticate when they access our wireless network before they’re allowed access to the rest of our network.Rumour has it that even openxchange is getting close to actually coming up and possibly doing something useful.

Our ID management is progressing, judging by the amount of ldap schemes I’ve been asked to push into openldap today, it must be getting pretty close to something we can use to create users and get the whole authentication thing going. Of course, pushing data into AD is as always a challenging task. Tomorrow our desktop monitors should arrive which will make it a bit easier to communicate with the desktops and allow us to actually start testing some of this from the client side.

BPTel now has phones and a switch with power over ethernet and has neither relocated nor had any downtime today as far as we know - of course in this startup-phase with no customers, it’s hard to tell. Fortunately there is also very little competition at this point. We need to work on our T1 tomorrow as BP is getting tired of talking to himself.