User:Pavlix

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 2013 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

Help with specific features or integration issues welcome.

Co-maintainer

• bind
• bind10
• NetworkManager-ssh
• rsync
• squid

(I haven't touched any of them, yet, as of August 2013.)

Upstream contributions

• netresolve (author)
• glibc (name resolution patches)
• 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

• glibc
  • The getaddrinfo() support is very complicated while not giving correct results in many cases.
• kernel
  • Network configuration is a real pain.
  • Kernel IPv6 autoconfiguration is only designed for trivial use cases and is very buggy.
• libnl
  • Most of the advanced stuff is very buggy.
• avahi
  • Missing for IPv6 link-local addresses.
  • IPv6 disabled by default.
  • Problems with duplicates in discovery.

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

Idea pages

• Networking/Ideas/NetworkManagerMethods
• Networking/Ideas/NetworkManagerRuntimeConfiguration
• Networking/Ideas/ConfigurationService
• Networking/Ideas/AutomaticConfiguration
• Networking/Ideas/NetworkNameResolution
• Networking/Ideas/NetworkManagerBugReporting
• Networking/Ideas/NetworkManagerOnServers

Fedora notes

Bump a rawhide package to a newer version

In the package git directory:

fedpkg switch-branch master
vim *.spec  # change package version, set release to 0
rpmdev-bumpspec -c "bump to ..."
spectool -g *.spec
fedpkg new-sources ...
fedpkg commit -c
fedpkg push
fedpkg build