Mail: psimerda AT redhat DOT com, pavlix AT pavlix DOT net
Jabber: pavlix AT pavlix DOT net
IRC Freenode: pavlix (#nm and a couple of other channels)
Phone: +420 775 996 256
Timezone: Europe/Prague (CET), sometimes available through later hours
About
After learning a bit of programming, I was attracted by the networking world. I got from petty Pascal/C++ projects through web development using ugly PHP and later Python, to a freelancing work with most of the projects in server administration, network equipment configuration and a bit of programming. Most people in the business know me from my conference talks and articles.
One of my conference talk brought me an offer from Red Hat, which I joined in May 2012 to work on NetworkManager. I was already a Fedora user and package maintainer at that time. Since August 2012 I'm no longer working as a regular NetworkManager developer (staying an upstream contributor, though). Even before that I tried to put my hands on a number of other projects via bug reports, tests and code. I'm also interested in various network-related standards and especially bugs and bad assumptions in IETF documents.
Wiki resources
- Networking – A starting point for information related to networking.
- Tools/NetworkManager – NetworkManager information page.
Contributions are welcome.
Packages
Maintainer
- aiccu (IPv6 tunneling client)
- connman
- racoon2
- radvd (taken over from Petr Písař)
- strongswan
Co-maintainer
- bind
- bind10
- NetworkManager-ssh
- rsync
- squid
Upstream contributions
- NetworkManager
- Building on any distribution
- Virtual device support (bridging/bonding, with others)
- Valgrind and code coverage support for tests
- Separate platform interaction module (nm-platform, with Dan Winship)
- Refactored NetworkManager's bridging/bonding/vlan configuration
- Refactored NetworkManager's IPv4/IPv6 configuration
- Userspace IPv6 autoconfiguration (nm-rdisc/libndp, with Jiří Pírko)
- Getting IPv6 autoconf features on par with IPv4
- Avoiding loads of kernel IPv6 bugs and design flaws
- Runtime (non-persistent) configuration support (with Dan Winship and Dan Williams)
- A lot of bug triaging
Bug tracking/reporting
- avahi
- glibc
- kernel
- libnl
Daily usage
Distributions
- Gentoo
- Fedora/CentOS
- Debian
- OpenWRT
Desktop
- Gnome 3 – Seeking something more mature and stable
- Gnome Terminal
- Evolution (for IMAP/SMTP mail) – Seeking something more mature and stable
- Empathy/Telepathy (for jabber and IRC) – Seeking something more mature and stable
- Evince
- Firefox
Development
- vim
- gcc
- make, autotools
- gdb
- valgrind
Presentation
- LaTeX/Beamer
Linux networking
I'm currently working on the following (may be outdated):
- New platform interaction framework
- NetworkManager upstream QA, bug triaging (component general) and bits of documentation
- Virtual device support (bridging, bonding, etc)
- Fixes and improvements for getaddrinfo() in glibc
- Configuration formats
- Building NetworkManager on any distribution without unnecessary hassle
- IPv4 and IPv6 automatic configuration improvements (NDP and DHCP)
- Various NetworkManager fixups and cleanups (like anyone else in the team)
- Various linux networking improvements
When working with linux networking, the following projects cause me headache:
- NetworkManager itself: I need to test NM in a virtual environment with bridges. These are not supported in the current release. I hope to make the next release mature enough to support its own development.
- Kernel: The kernel IPv6 networking layer is somewhat unmanagable. The rtnetlink interface doesn't provide enough funcionality to support IPv6 networking.
- GLIBC: The
getaddrinfo()function doesn't work properly and is not supported in nsswitch.conf. It breaks whenever my development machine happens to be on an IPv4-only network. - nss-mdns (Avahi nsswitch plugin): Can't implement link-local name resolution because of the above problem in GLIBC.
- IETF networking standards: For some reasons many IPv6-related standards have serious design flaws that prevent them from working properly.