Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

The trains have been working too well for the last couple of weeks. It couldn't last. I am currently stuck in Mechelen for an "undetermined" amount of time while they fix the signalling. sigh

Eventually, I'll get to work, I guess...

Unless you've been living under a rock, or you don't run a DNS server, you must have noticed quite a lot of queries for "." over the last couple of days.

This NANOG thread sums it up nicely:

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg14553.html

If your nameserver is configured correctly (not responding to queries for zones you're not authoritative for), the only real problem with this attack is that syslog will be polluting your logfiles with "query denied" entries a couple of times every second.

This gets old quickly.

I happen to have a PF firewall sitting in front of my nameserver:

table <ddos_targets> {                                        \
      # list of hosts
}
block drop in quick proto udp from <ddos_targets> port != 53 to any port 53

Using pfctl -t ddos_targets -T add ... I can easy add more hosts to the table when they start filling my logfiles. Firewalls can make life so easy.

Is this really necessary? :-)

It appears that the organization of FOSDEM 2009 is firmly on track. The schedule has been posted and we're now sorting out logistics and other last minute details.

The good thing about organizing a conference of this size for the ninth (!) time is that many (dare I say most?) dragons likely to be encountered have already been dealt with in the past so we know how to handle them.

Nevertheless, there are always new surprises every year. It doesn't help that I'm feeling a little under the weather this week...

As usual, things will work out.

Last night I received a very nice email from the AsiaBSDCon programme committee to let me know the paper I submitted was accepted. Whoopie! I would have gone to Tokyo even if my paper was not accepted, but giving a talk makes the trip "useful" in addition to merely great fun, which is always good. :-)

Unfortunately, since I'm speaking at the UKUUG spring conference two weeks after AsiaBSDCon, I can't (easily) justify taking a nice long holiday in Japan again like I did last year. March would be a very short month otherwise!

Still. I managed to plan in a couple of days of culture and yummy food.

I'm leaving for Tokyo Friday 6 March (arriving there Saturday 7 March) and leaving for Brussels again on Monday 16 March. Like last year, I'm flying through Copenhagen with SAS.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Japan again. And to the food, of course. Did I mention the food?

Today I was pointed to this fascinating (delusional) "appeal" by a bunch of people who seem to have an axe to grind with Novell:

http://static.1407.org/20090105-fosdem-2009-appeal.html

The simple response is this: FOSDEM will not lend itself to anyone's political agenda either by accepting or refusing sponsorship or donations.

A more thorough answer follows. Some of the views I express may not be shared by the entire FOSDEM team, though it would not surprise me at all if some of them agree wholeheartedly.

FOSDEM is a technical conference for open source software developers. It is not a political conference for free software activists. Since a fair number of free software activists also happen to be open source software developers, there are a number of free software people and projects at FOSDEM too. There is even an FSF Europe stand every year and we even let Richard Stallman give a keynote a number of times.

Aside: few people remember that the "F" in FOSDEM is a token gesture to the free software movement -- in the beginning, there was OSDEM. I will not go into the details of that here.

At heart however, despite all the free software stuff going on, FOSDEM remains a technical conference, not a political one.

We honestly don't care about the politics of companies who give us money. If they are technically involved in the development of open source software, we are happy to relieve them of any excess cash they happen to have lying about. Our business is organizing one of the best and largest open source development conferences in Europe. Our business is software, not politics. We determine our budget based on what we need, not on who we want to take money from.

Having said that, please donate to FOSDEM. While corporate sponsorship provides the bulk of our budget, we do need individual donations too. There will be tshirts again! We have more varied sizes this year and the artwork is the nicest to date in my opinion. There will also be the usual donations return system with gadgets, books and magazine subscriptions to win.

Novell has been a valued sponsor of FOSDEM for a number of years and we are very grateful for their contributions. Their business model or politics is none of our business. What matters to us is that they are also in the open source software business and want to give us money.

While we could possibly conceivably organize FOSDEM without corporate sponsorship, it would not be the same. A conference just is not "complete' without corporate schwag and presence. We are very grateful to all our corporate sponsors.

If O'Reilly publishes a book from an author you don't like, will you have us refuse their sponsorship too? Or any of our other sponsors?

Will conspiracy theories run wild if I mention that we also have a non-zero number of sponsors who do not want to be listed publically? We would love to thank them profusely too. They know who they are.

For the first time in years, it's finally winter in Belgium! Proper winter, with temperatures dropping firmly below freezing and white stuff falling from the skies and staying on the ground for a bit. Of course, it's not quite as properly winter as in - say - Scandinavia or Canada, but it's a step in the right direction!

I love winter. Cycling on snow and ice is lots of fun. Provided you remember Rule Number One, as carefully noted by Our Hero (Sir Isaac): Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed. Applying the brakes in a low-friction environment in other words is asking for trouble.

After brief amnesia earlier this winter, the reflexes of obeying Sir Isaac's laws have come back. I cycled to the station this morning in a pile of snow and ice without episodes of uncontrolled effects of inertia.

Let it snow!

Because having an early night proved to be impossible owing to things being set on fire in a noisy way, I decided to watch my shiny new Funkwecker for the leap-second that was introduced just now.

It was unbelievably exciting!

A bit like watching paint dry. You should try it some time! Watch for the memo for the next leap second.

I understand however, that not everyone was interested in the leap-second tonight. Many people celebrated the completion of an imprecisely parametrized solar cycle (I still love that phrase, Elise!) instead. Some of those people got so sucked in to the celebrations that they decided to send me text messages.

Of course, a new year does not officially start until p2's annual Goa-text, so I'm definitely not complaining!

Some of the other texts I received were a bit strange (well, stranger) though. Particularly because they came from people I don't know! I feel a bit weird about getting messages encouraging to make my "naughtiest dreams" come true and such more from possibly random strangers.

I also wonder what I should text them in return? "Enjoy the leap-second" felt a bit too geeky. I decided that the best approach was probably to wish them a generic happy new year and not to ask them to identify themselves. That might have implied that I only feel people I know should be happy. Everyone should be happy of course. And not just on the 1st of January according to a given calendar.

Happy new year if you celebrate this particular calendrical phenomenon!