AFS Hackathon

The last three days I spent in Virginia at the AFS Hackathon, which despite being perfect in almost every other way had rather bad network connectivity. That plus trying to focus on AFS is why I haven't been updating (or doing much of anything else other than working on AFS).

The hackathon was a great experience. It was about ten of us in a nice, large (and air-conditioned!) room with plenty to eat, a local network, lots of laptops, a white board, and flip charts, spending about twelve hours a day hacking on or talking about AFS. I got more done in three days than I'd gotten done on AFS in the past year, and I'm now feeling much better about fulfilling my obligations as an AFS gatekeeper. (I still need to do more work, but at least I have some concrete contributions to point to.)

A lot of the work I did over the past three days was cleaning out bits of the AFS source tree that are no longer relevant or that don't work, starting with eliminating AFS's separate pinstall program in favor of using the standard Autoconf-detected install (which required fairly substantial makefile changes). I did find the time to also add links back to the index page for the HTML generation of the command reference manuals, to design and do the first implementation of a libkopenafs library that provides just setpag, unlog, and pioctl for programs that need those functions as a self-contained library, and a new pam_aklog PAM module that will work with a Kerberos v5 PAM module to set up a PAG and then fork aklog to get AFS tokens. Not bad for three days and that doesn't count the other discussions and bug fixes.

Sunday and today were entirely devoted to travelling, since the flight is nearly six hours plus waiting and transport at either end. Tomorrow is going to be entirely devoted to catching up on work-related and planning-related things that I've been ignoring while working on this. Hopefully this weekend I can finish up a few other coding projects and keep reducing the outstanding items on my to-do list.

I was going to be good this evening and walk, but since I've been going to bed at around 10pm eastern time and it's now nearly midnight eastern, I've pretty much run out of energy. I expect I'll be waking up rather early for a few days.

I've finished Blood and Iron, Catch-22, and Dead Until Dark, have nearly finished another F&SF, and am a fair chunk of the way into Metropolitan, so there will be book reviews coming as soon as I catch up on other things.