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Beaver BarCamp 17: New Horizons

April 8 started out like any other Saturday in Spring in Corvallis: rainy, then sunny, then windy, windy-rainy sleet, hail, and then of course, sunny again. Despite the crazy weather, people from all walks of life still convened at the Kelley Engineering Center on the Oregon State Campus for the Open Source Lab’s annual Beaver BarCamp. For several years now, the OSL has hosted one of Oregon State’s only unconferences to great success. Just as a refresher, or for any newbies out there, an unconference is an event in which the attendees decide the topics of presentation and discussion the day of, rather than determining these topics ahead of time. This year, we tried a few new things.

New Project: libpng Now Mirrored on ftp.osuosl.org

The OSL took on a new project and delivers a new mirroring site libpng source for libpng tarball distributions that is 20+ times as fast as the old site. It also now responds to http and https requests as well as ftp requests. For more information and links, see the original announcement.

Network Outage 2016-12-17 Post-mortem

• #Outages

Issue Summary At approximately 8:28 AM PST (1628 UTC) we lost all our network connectivity in our Corvallis data center affecting all of our customers hosted in the data center. Network connectivity was restored at approximately 11:15 AM PST (1915 UTC). The root cause was due to our ISP losing power to their switches which provide our Internet connectivity due to a problem with the generator. Timeline Time Description 8:20AM PST (approx) OSU electricians start a planned power outage affecting the building our systems are housed in. 8:28AM PST OSL received a page regarding several networks being off-line. 9:12AM PST “OSL arrives on-site and confirms our primary data center is powered on and that none of the systems had been rebooted.” 9:30AM PST| “OSL confirms the root cause is a UPS problem in the basement data center which houses our ISP network equipment.” 11:07AM PST| Power restored in basement data center. 11:15AM PST| OSL Network was restored.

OSL Summer 2016 Internship

In a new program, the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSL) partnered with Intel to give community college students an opportunity to get hands-on experience with open-source projects. This summer, four students interned for 10 weeks at the OSL, working on a variety of projects, including web development and systems engineering, to advance their skills and knowledge with open-source work and communities.

The OSL at PyCon

The month of June opened with the annual PyCon event at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, the largest annual gathering for the Python community. This year, the OSL had the opportunity to send one of its own. Matthew Johnson presented a poster on Pymesync, a tool of Python. But first, what exactly do all these Py- words mean?

Congratulations 2016 Graduates!

As exciting as the end of the school year is for everyone, and with it the promise of sun, no classes, shorts, extended vacations, and no classes, it also brings an inevitable goodbye to those leaving to enter the real world. I’m talking about our graduating seniors. Those who have earned their stripes and are ready to move on. The superstars stepping up to take the stage. The brave few willing to begin paying off their student loans. Many of our graduates have spent multiple years working for the OSL, some starting not long after high school. And we’re losing too many good ones this year, including:

RTEMS

Within the last several years, the OSL has provided a home for the Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor System, or RTEMS. RTEMS is an open Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) that supports both open application programming interfaces (API) and interfacing standards such as Berkeley sockets. Basically, RTEMS supports the embedded systems in programs, or the combinations of software and hardware designed to do very specific tasks. RTEMS works in spaceflight, medical devices, and more. For a while, RTEMS was developed and hosted by a corporation named OAR where it was continuously developed by its programmers, however the project was lacking a certain amount of IT expertise. Enter the fateful meeting between RTEMS developers and our very own Lance Albertson at a Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit.

CASS and the AllSeen Alliance

Oregon State University has joined the world’s technology leaders — including LG, Microsoft, and Qualcomm — to advance the collaborative development of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a network of devices that exchange information — anything from smaller devices like watches to full-scale “smart cities.” IoT devices are almost too numerous to count, including light bulbs, air vents, watches, speakers, parking monitors and mirrors. The number of connected devices is predicted to increase by another 30 percent in 2016, according to Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company.

DevOps DayCamp 2015

In early October, we hosted our second annual DevOps DayCamp to over eighty students, faculty, and community members, acting as a feeder workshop into the year long DevOps BootCamp series. Beyond its promotional function, our DayCamp provided an interactive workshop for those in attendance. We offered seminars and interactive programs for both beginners and more advanced participants. For the beginners, the sessions focused on fundamentals and introductions. We began with an explanation of DevOps and its functions and moved into the basics of operating the system, including working with Unix, executing programs and flagging potential problems. Participants also learned collaborative techniques featuring IRC and git.

OSL GSOC 2015 - Oregon's Catch

This summer the Open Source Lab had three students from around the world working on open source software through Google Summer of Code. The OSL has participated in GSoC for nine years, and each year has had its own unique challenges and successes. I had an opportunity to work with a student, Chaitanya, on What’s Fresh, a project I originally developed last summer at the OSL for Oregon Sea Grant. With What’s Fresh (which Sea Grant is planning to brand as Oregon’s Catch), Sea Grant wanted to allow visitors to the Oregon coast to be able to find fresh fish available from fishermen, and had CASS, the new organization the OSL is a part of, develop the app and backend. Chaitanya worked on the backend, making data entry easier. It now has several important features, like easier location entry, search, and inline forms so users don’t need to leave the page to add related items. It is also now themeable, so other organizations can use easily set up a customized version for their area.