Mauritian living in the USA | Founding member of cyberstorm.mu | Creator of tunnelix.com | Devops Engineer | Hacker at IETF Hackathon | VCA & VCP | Love and Believe in OpenSource
For sure, I cannot miss out to share this blog post which is about the IETF 105 hackathon which took place in Montreal, Canada. It was carried out at The Kiosk, Coromandel at the quarters of cyberstorm.mu. If you have been following cyberstorm.mu team during the IETF hackathon, you would have noticed that we had a pool and several amenities. This time, due to some constraints, we have decided to shift to our brand new office at The Kiosk, Coromandel.
It was two days hackathon. Some decided to work remotely whilst others came at the office to discuss and proceed ahead with robust analysis and more codes. We also had new participants who agreed to attend the hackathon. Some visited us for a while whilst others came to visit us just out of curiosity.
The team also came to know that it could be my last days in Mauritius as I decided to move to the United States and also resigned from my current position as DevOps Engineer at Orange Business Services. Thanks to Nathan Sunil Mangar who provided us with several goodies. Some days back the SANS Internet Storm Center sent me some stickers which I shared with the team.
The team was working on TLS 1.3, SSH, SCE, DSCP-LE PHB, and the IETF Mobile App. On the next day, Loganaden Velvindron presented the work remotely from Mauritius. I was glad to be able to work on the Check-SMTP software by ZeroSpam which is a company in Canada. More and more applications are now TLS 1.3 compatible. The SSH RC4 deprecation is now becoming a reality. You can view the presentation here:
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Thanks to the TheKiosk who sponsored us the location and a brand new office. The team is looking forward to work further in the next IETF hackathon. Also, cyberstorm.mu is now giving support to several IETF hubs in Africa and bringing more free security patches to the world. More picture here:
When it comes to innovation in code contribution in the latest RFC’s and IETF drafts at the IETF hackathon, the cyberstorm.mu team is always here as a team hacking for the improvement of the Internet. For the IETF 104 hackathon which happened in Hilton, Prague, Czech Republic, we had pushed ourselves towards innovation: Joining more working groups at the same time championing other working groups. For those who are not aware of the IETF Hackathon, its a team collaborative event working towards the same goal: Securing the Internet and leveling up Open Source software in the world. The IETF 104 hackathon was a special one. Cyberstorm.mu contributed to the following working groups: TLS 1.3, SSH, HTTP 451, DSCP, Mobile APP, IPv6 & QUIC with more than 15 members remotely and 1(Muzaffar) onsite who was selected as an IETF fellow. We also had three newcomers for the IETF 104 hackathon and proud new members of cyberstorm.mu. Congratulations to Muzaffar Auhammud for making it onsite to Prague, Czech Republic representing cyberstorm.mu after being selected as an IETF Fellow. As a pioneer in Africa, cyberstorm.mu was also present in remote viewing hubs in Africa. Loganaden Velvindron, co-founder of cyberstorm.mu and Infrastructure and Security engineer at Afrinic demonstrated with great talent the implication of Africans in the IETF hackathon. I am proud of those leading the Viewing hub in the big Africa continent. This is where management and leadership skills play a great role here.
Day-0: It was a pretty tiring day with the assembly of the network and preparation of logistics as well as planning of the event. Food, medical kits, water, mosquitoes repellant, etc.. We also had to keep in touch with the weather information as there was a cyclone nearby. All precautions and planning were done. Once on the location of the hackathon which is at Mauritius Villa at Pointe aux Piments in the north west of Mauritius, the guys were almost ready. We ensure the new-comers feel at ease and integrating the group easily. As usual, an introduction to IETF was explained as well as the online video shown. We made the most to ensure professionalism and a good standard.
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Day-1:It was a pretty intense day but at the same time addictive and fun. The team was already in the mood and ready to hack. Slaying the RC4 monster was one of my tasks and also had to lead Jagveer Loky, Network Engineer at Orange Business Services who was also participating in the SSH working group. The other part of the team which includes, Jeremie Daniel, a student at University of Mauritius Rahul Golam and Avi Soomirthee Linux system administrator at Linkbynet Indian Ocean who focussed a lot on TLS 1.3. On the other side, Bruno Bernard, Full stack developer was constantly improving and testing the IETF mobile App. We also had Veegish Ramdani and Yashveer Jadoo (First comer at the IETF hackathon remotely with the cyberstorm.mu team), Students at the University of Mauritius were hacking into DSCP LE. And finally, one the youngest newcomer, Rahul Kumar Shivadan, 15 years old student at St-Esprit college made it to DSCP and hacked into NetPerf. We also had Codarren Velvindron who was working remotely on TLS 1.3. Other cyberstorm.mu members were also here supporting us and helping remotely. When it comes to Internet connectivity, we thanks Mauritius Telecom who sponsored our Internet connectivity up to 100 Mbit/s for the IETF Hackathon.
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Day-2:As usual, newcomers of cyberstorm.mu team are given their @cyberstorm.mu email address and all necessary procedures carried out. At cyberstorm.mu team, we lay emphasis on running code and a collaborating team. To focus on the goal is sometimes hard and in the beginning, it looks difficult to achieve, but with perseverance and motivation, we had been able to reach our goals. The testing part which includes the understanding of the IETF drafts, a pre-check methodology of the running code, testing and implementation prior before any modification carried out is considered to be the basic baseline before getting into it. Once this part has been grasped, it now comes to logic and mathematics. This is where helping each other in the team is important. And finally, code deployment, unit code testing and other incremental testing methodologies to make the code running and ready for use. On day-2, I still remembered Jagveer’s laptop encountered a crash which looks like an incompatible driver. The time factor was important, we decided to format everything and restart from scratch. At the cyberstorm.mu hackathon, it does not mean only hacking into codes, but also a moment of sharing and doing a round table, interviews, pool interviews and a moment where newcomers gave their feedback. We jumped into the pool, chill a little bit, whilst the others are enjoying a LAN gaming as well as eating nice food.
Pizza on progress at the IETF hackathon
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Day-3: It was such a rush, We made sure everyone has their patch commit and it was time to pack up and leave. Whilst others left, It was only me and Logan, Jeremie and Bruno who stayed till a little bit late. Whilst Jeremie was still preparing for his assignments, myself and Logan was preparing for our live presentation remotely at the IETF 104 hackathon. On the other hand, Bruno streamed the event live too on Facebook which was a pretty nice idea.
What newcomers said about the IETF 104 hackathon:
“I was very lucky to get an invitation to participate at the IETF 104 hackathon to learn more about networking and work in collaboration in a team of two on Lower Effort Per-Domain Behavior.”– Yashveer Jadoo
“I had no idea how to deal with networking by setting packets priority and then without any hesitation, I asked cyberstorm.mu team for help and everyone tried their best to help me.” – Rahul Kumar Shivadan
“These past few days the experience is great, the food is great, and everything is getting better ! With Laugh and codes, I’ve been working on the IETF Application championed by Chris Marrow and Warren Kumari on IETF 104 track.”– Bruno Bernard
My participation at Afrinic-29 in Hammamet, Tunisia was productive and unique in itself. The event took place between 26-30 November 2018 at Diar Lemdina hotel. These are the days that will always be remembered. Situated in the north of Tunisia, Yasmine Hammamet was the place selected and it was close to the beach. I still can’t believe I was on the Mediterranean beach discussing about Internet-related topics such as DNS, DNSSEC and Policies development in Africa region.
For some reasons, I had to travel to Hungary, then to Germany then to Tunisia. So I got the opportunity to spend a night in Munich on Transit. The hotel in Munich was pretty nice and cozy. On the next day, I flew to Tunisia. Once landed in Carthage in Tunisia, the atmosphere was pretty polluted, but as soon as I reached Yasmine Hammamet, things are different. It was a pretty beautiful and calm place.
My main objectives were to :
Focus on the DNSSEC hackathon carried out under the umbrella of cyberstorm.mu titled Operation KSK-ROLLOVER.
Sharing knowledge in the Africa region.
Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 in Africa region.
Presenting DNS and DNSSEC.
DNS Flag day.
Security incidents on DNS.
Policy discussion development in Africa.
During the event, I got the opportunity to speak with Afrinic29 fellow, Souad Abidi who shared pretty good experience about the event.
Also met with some guys from Chad republic and we shared some Linux and network techniques. Besides, I met with several guys from the ATI Tunisia telecom and we discussed a lot about the event especially about Policy development. I’m glad to receive media coverage from the cyberstorm.mu team who supported me a lot as well as ICT.IO who published an article about the event.
Overall, the event was very productive. I seized the opportunity to congratulate Afrinic staffs during the open mike session. Indeed, they did a good job which demands extreme planning. During my speech on DNSSEC as Devops engineer at Orange Business Services, several issues were raised such as hackathon carried out by the cyberstorm.mu team and even prospective future hackathon concerning other DNS applications. I also attended few sessions on IPv6, Cert Africa and others. Also got the opportunity to meet with people who are very busy with Policy development in Africa as well as the father of Africa Internet, Nii Quaynor.
During my free time especially at night, I went to the NA3NA3A Karaoke Tunisian songs. It was pretty nice and unique. Took some videos and made some audio recording for the car whilst i’m driving.
In case you missed Day-0 and Day-1 for the IETF 103 hackathon by the cyberstorm.mu team, feel free to have a look. I should admit that Day-2 was a more relaxed day for the SSH team compared to those working for the TLS 1.3 and HTTP 451 projects. Several PR’s sent for all the three tracks which are HTTP 451, SSH and TLS 1.3. It’s more about the testing.
It looks that we had enough time to discuss even more about our future move for the next IETF hackathon. All teams were ready with the patches and several Pull Requests sent. We seized the opportunity to discuss several aspects and experience during the hackathon. Overall, the IETF 103 hackathon went well for all the three tracks.
As regards for the NetSSH project which I worked there was a comment from Mzafekas on Github: “
@jmutkawoa thanks much for the PR. Since this is in some means a breaking change, this would be in the next major version.”
I’m glad that we will have the RC4 deprecated in the new version of NetSSH. We had our live presentation remotely from Mauritius during the IETF 103 hackathon live in Bangkok, Thailand. You can view the presentation here:
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IETF Hackathons encourage developers to collaborate and develop utilities, ideas, sample code and solutions that show practical implementations of IETF standards. More than 200 participants have gathered in Bangkok to make the Internet work better.
As usual, someone got an idea to do a mega splash in the pool with the slow-motion video which is pretty nice 🙂
I’m glad that TheRegister also published an interesting article about RC4 deprecation. At cyberstorm.mu, we are also looking forward to the next IETF 104 hackathon which has been scheduled remotely at Prague, Czech.
Today is the first day for the IETF 103 remote hackathon in Mauritius. The cyberstorm.mu team is ready to lead and participate in all the three tracks as champions for the event. We have the TLS 1.3, SSH and HTTP 451. All the three tracks are lead by cyberstorm.mu as champions.
Our first timers for the IETF 103 hackathon is Kheshav Sewnundun, creator of XpressLiteCoin.com and Devops Engineer at Linkbynet Indian Ocean. We also have Diresh Soomirtee, Junior system administrator at Linkbynet Indian Ocean.
Prior before the hackathon, we did some shopping for the basic amenities. We reached at the quarter at a Mauritius Villas, a bungalow in Pointe Aux Piments at around 13:00 hrs. The network was set up with two different ISPs in case of breakdown, we can still be live during the hackathon.
We also celebrated Kifah’s birthday during the hackathon.
At cyberstorm.mu, it’s always the pool that brings more relaxing time. We are also in the Halloween week and some guys even brought their Halloween costumes and went swimming inside the pool.
Most of us already started working on our projects and some pull requests already sent. More testing on progress as well as creating of several patches. We even need to have a discussion on open source licensing to make sure that there are incompatibility issues between different licenses. We made a plan for the three tracks we are championing and it looks to start pretty fine.
By this time, it’s already late here. I really need some sleep to start day 1 for the IETF 103 hackathon 🙂
