[Battlemesh] No results again

[Benjamin Henrion]

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 12:35 AM, Nemesis <nemesis at ninux.org> wrote:
> 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.

You still hit the same problems as we had 10 years ago, it takes too
much time to get a decent testbed running.

I have long time advocated for a permanent outdoor testbed somewhere,
where people could run their scenarios.

-- 
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-3500762
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