[Battlemesh] No results again

[Nemesis]

Hi everyone,

I'm sorry to disappoint who's following this list and who was waiting
for results, but this year we have none.

We tried very hard, but a series of mistakes and technical issues
delayed the tests until it was too late.

I understand what we are doing is hard, but I really do not buy nor
endorse the argument that we did not have enough people involved or is
just too hard, because we had several people participating and 3-5
people constantly working on the testbed. I remember especially Guido
Ibarren and Alessandro Gnagni working tirelessly.

We have to realize and accept we have failed for precise reasons, the
approach we used is not effective. Please do not get aggressive or
hyper-defensive.

Having worked on the testbed actively, I also failed, so I also assume
responsibility for failure.

To sum up, I attribute the failure mostly to these reasons:

* slow iteration: for every iteration we had to wait wibed nodes to be
ready, but every time there was a different problem to debug because
nodes were not becoming ready
* lack of communication; I tried hard doing daily briefings and FAILED
miserably; it just won't happen if we don't schedule them in advance and
enforce them by taking the microphone and asking all the poeple involved
to stop doing what they are doing and go there to report what problem
they have and how other people can help
* configuration mess: complex configuration, too many changes

I really love the battlemesh: there has never been another event I
attended 5 years in a row. I love it also because of the test battle.
Without this peculiar feature the event would be just another conference
and I'm not sure I would be willing to come every frigging year: there
are so many conferences I want to attend but I can't got to all of them,
I have to choose and I allocate a slot to the battlemesh every year
because its unique mixture of technical talks and live hacking.

Therefore I don't want to give up the battle and I don't think getting
results is a mission impossible. That's why at the next battlemesh I
want to try a different approach.

After having worked with wibed I can say without doubts that I'm not
interested in fixing it. At work I manage thousands of OpenWRT devices
every day without any issue, configurations get updates in minutes.
I think other solutions to accomplish the same tasks exist, are simpler
to use, better maintained and more effective.

I also think we should not hold a monopoly on the testbed, especially if
the current approach has failed more than once. There are about a
hundred people coming to the battlemesh, I firmly believe we can afford
having 2 to (max) 3 testbeds taken care by different groups of people
who can then run the tests they are most interested in.

Last year (battlemesh v8 in Slovenia) the failure of the wibed testbed
was attributed to me and other people who worked on a manually run
testbed which according to them split the workforce.
This year we all worked on a single testbed, including all the routing
protocol developers that were present, and it didn't work.

Next year please do not attack or blame those who want to try a
different approach.

I'm really looking forward to the next battlemesh and I hope we'll all
be reasonable people, find solutions, compare approaches and use the
most effective ones that allows us to get results.

Federico

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