Introduce yourself to snabb-devel :-)

[Luke Gorrie]

Dear snabb-devel subscribers,

Who are we? Let's all reply to this email and find out :-)

We've been growing organically for the past year or so. Currently we have 70+ mailing list subscribers and 400+ people tracking the project on Github. I'm curious to get a sense of who we super-early-adopters are :-).

So if you're feeling sociable please reply with answers to the following questions!

Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

Q: What's your background?

(Programmer? network designer/operator/owner? freelancer? entrepreneur? general hobbyist? many/none of the above?)

Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

Q: Do you have a cool project you'd like to do with Snabb Switch one day?

Q: Do you have a potential professional interest in Snabb Switch?

(e.g. would you like to use it at work, or get paid to hack on it, or start your own company around it, or hire people who can do stuff with it?)

Q: Have you ever done a cool hack that you can tell us about (any topic)?

Q: Do you have a friendly message to share with the other fine readers of the list?

Q: What did I forget to ask?

Don't be shy!

Cheers :-)

-Luke

[rgbu...@gmail.com]

I'm Graeme Burnett. I'm a C programmer and have worked in high frequency trading since 2002 in a variety of banks and hedge funds.

I've written a bit about FPGA and have helped the tech get established in trading. I've worked with Xorp in the past and built a global trading system using this to talk to exchanges.

I'm building another system and I want to use snabb. A friend of mine did some unbelievable work in LuaJIT for pre-trade risk checks. I think we can combine the two into something special. I'd love to help and get involved.

I've written and presented a range of stuff - I hope you may find some of it interesting.

https://glasgow.academia.edu/GraemeBurnett

You can find me on github. Nothing majorly exciting - just commercial code written to tight deadlines with no resources.

Http://github.com/rgburnett

G

[Luke Gorrie]

I'll go first :-)

On 9 March 2014 17:03, Luke Gorrie <lu...@snabb.co> wrote:

Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

I'm Luke. I'm born and raised in Brisbane (Australia) but I've mostly been living in Europe since my 20s. I'm doing great: I'm expecting to become a father any week now :-) and spring is coming early here in Switzerland where I live now.

Q: What's your background?

I'm a programmer and I very often develop networking products. I've also spent a lot of time traveling around to deploy and support the first <n> customers these new products, especially in mobile phone networks. I've done a lot of open source and a lot of closed source over the years.

Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

I see the potential for Snabb Switch to do for network devices what Linux has done for servers. That is: to provide a basis for creative people to cooperate and solve all kinds of interesting problems without much distraction from commercial interests. The big winners would be the users. I think the time is right thanks to commodity hardware becoming so incredibly powerful and virtualization making custom hardware a headache.

Q: Do you have a cool project you'd like to do with Snabb Switch one day?

"One day" I would like to reduce latency on the web. In the future all websites should be equally snappy whether you browse them from Sydney or San Francisco. (I should probably read more about Content Centric Networking...)

Q: Do you have a potential professional interest in Snabb Switch?

I sell the service of creating and supporting open source solutions for specific networking problems using Snabb Switch. That is: you have a problem, you pay me to create a solution, and then you can use it however you like.

The potential market for this kind of work is at least a thousand network operators. I'm happy to work with only a very small number at a time. So I see a tremendous amount of opportunity for other people to have the same kind of business that I have. (I don't want to scale up my company -- I want to scale up our overall Snabb Switch industry.) If you want to do this then don't be shy to ask me for help.

Q: Have you ever done a cool hack that you can tell us about (any topic)?

I wrote the code that plays the power-on jingle on the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop (v1.5).

That was an Intel HDAudio driver written in Forth for Mitch Bradley's Openfirmware (a descendent of Sun OpenBoot). I learned a lot while helping Mitch with that: I'd say that he is the most direct inspiration for Snabb Switch's engineering style (own drivers, small binary, etc). More about his ideas: http://web.archive.org/web/20120103064826/http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2008/03/27/interview-with-mitch-bradley-firmware-olpc/

Q: Do you have a friendly message to share with the other fine readers of the list?

It's really lovely to have a friendly group of people to creatively brain dump back and forth with :-). I hope we can continue to do this for many years to come.

 

Q: What did I forget to ask?

The question list is actually too long when I sit down to answer it. Feel free to skip!

Cheers #2 :-)

-Luke

[Luke Gorrie]

Hi Graeme,

Pleased to meet you :-).

On 9 March 2014 20:24, <rgbu...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've written a bit about FPGA and have helped the tech get established in trading.

That's fantastic :-).

I'd like to get FPGA established in open source networking. Recently we added a convenient way to write assembler (JIT) code (https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/blob/app_update/src/apps/example/asm.dasc). I'd love to have a similar capability for writing a little Verilog/VHDL and linking it into a snabbswitch.

Can you suggest what the first steps towards this goal would be? It seems like something we can pursue in the background e.g. installing FPGA hardware and software on one of our development servers for everybody's use.

I'm building another system and I want to use snabb. A friend of mine did some unbelievable work in LuaJIT for pre-trade risk checks. I think we can combine the two into something special. I'd love to help and get involved.

Wonderful, welcome aboard :-). I have heard rumors that LuaJIT has become a secret weapon in high-frequency trading. I hope some exciting details leak out sooner or later ;-).

I'm guessing in the Snabb codebase you'll want to use the Ethernet driver directly and skip the "app network" framework because that's optimized for throughput over latency. That should be fine though because the driver has a simple API anyway.

Cheers!

-Luke

[Javier Guerra Giraldez]

On 9 March 2014 11:03, Luke Gorrie <lu...@snabb.co> wrote:
> Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

I'm Javier Guerra, from Lima, Perú. the timezone is UTC-5, so when
i'm hacking at night it's early morning in Europe, so the time-shift
sometimes works in our favor :-)

the last few months I've been deep in the VMDq feature of the Intel's
10G chip, and things are finally falling in place; so it's a good time
to say hi to everybody :-)

> Q: What's your background?
> (Programmer? network designer/operator/owner? freelancer? entrepreneur?
> general hobbyist? many/none of the above?)

I love many forms of programming. Since my Apple //e in 1983, I've
been hooked and no way out. These days, after learning more languages
than i remember, my two favorites are Lua and C, while Python and C++
are a distant second. Dart is getting more and more interesting, but
it's biggest merit is freeing me from Javascript, maybe in a few
months it could start replacing Python in my list of preferences... if
Go doesn't get there first.

> Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

It's a very different project from most of what I've been involved on,
and it mixes several ingredients to make it a joy to hack on: my
favorite language (Lua), the amazing LuaJIT optimizations, high-speed
networking, working on infrastructure instead of final apps, hard-core
down-to-the-metal, open source, etc


cheers,

--
Javier

[Kristian Kielhofner]

Hi Luke,

My name is Kristian Kielhofner. I currently live in Florida, USA.
I'm good and enjoying the weather! My background is in network design
and system architecture (layer 3-8), with a focus over the past 10
years or so on VoIP and real time communications. Snabb Switch is
interesting to me because I'm a network geek AND I'm interested in
high-scale real time communications systems, which have a
"problematic" traffic pattern - standard audio streams are a
bidirectional 50 (tiny) packets per second with the vast majority of
the data being headers from the various methods of encapsulation (RTP,
UDP, IP, Ethernet). Anyway, it's nowhere near the challenge it used to
be but I think we're still quite a ways away from saturating 10GB
Ethernet with VoIP traffic on commodity hardware, let's just say that
:).

A cool project for Snabb Switch would be rewriting RTP packets as is
often needed for network traversal (like this):

https://github.com/sipwise/mediaproxy-ng

Another one would be for performance testing which at this scale
currently requires something like this:

http://www.ixiacom.com/products/xcellon/xcellon_ultra_np_load_module/index.php

Luckily I have one of these :).

My company currently processes millions of VoIP calls everyday and
has significant server infrastructure. You could say that I have a
variety of interests in Snabb Switch for our various applications and
systems! I've also been wanting to learn Lua so it seemed like a great
opportunity to start heading down that road as well.

Most of my "cool" hacks over the years have been documented on my blog:

http://blog.krisk.org/

Since joining the list I've been very interested and excited in the
discussions so far (like learning more about the capabilities of the
82599)!

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--
Kristian Kielhofner

[Luke Gorrie]

Welcome Kristian!

I really enjoyed your Packets of Death
(http://blog.krisk.org/2013/02/packets-of-death.html) blog entry :-)
Simon Leinen sent me the link back when we were hacking 82574L support
into Snabb Switch.

[Alexander Altshuler]

On 18 March 2014 15:04, Luke Gorrie <lu...@snabb.co> wrote:

Welcome Kristian!

I really enjoyed your Packets of Death
(http://blog.krisk.org/2013/02/packets-of-death.html) blog entry :-)

Wow! I remember this story ;-)

I was really enjoyed.

[Simon Leinen]

On Sunday, March 9, 2014, Luke Gorrie <lu...@snabb.co> wrote:

Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

I'm Simon, I work for SWITCH, the "national research and education network" (NREN) for Switzerland.  At the moment I'm happy but exhausted from three days at the "Future Internet Assembly" conference in Athens.

Q: What's your background?

(Programmer? network designer/operator/owner? freelancer? entrepreneur? general hobbyist? many/none of the above?)

I have a CS background (studied at TU Berlin) and love coding, but have spent most of the past >15 years running networks, occasionally finding excuses to write software to support that.

Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

It's a fresh approach to making networks more programmable, and that is cool because it brings together two of my favorite disciplines.  Also, with all this SDN hype right now, it's a super exciting time to bring up this kind of thing, so I'm thrilled to see how it develops.

Q: Do you have a cool project you'd like to do with Snabb Switch one day?

I'll let my colleague Alex Gall talk about his cute project related to L2 VPNs.  Personally I hope that I'll be able to use Snabb Switch productively in the "cloud" activities that I'm involved with - we use OpenStack, and we already know that we want to make use of its SDN functions (Neutron), but we haven't really started with that yet.  So I'm very interested in (and impressed by - great progress, folks!) the efforts to integrate Snabb Switch with virtio and with OpenStack Neutron/Nova.

 

Q: Do you have a potential professional interest in Snabb Switch?

(e.g. would you like to use it at work, or get paid to hack on it, or start your own company around it, or hire people who can do stuff with it?)

It's possible that I could sponsor Snabb Switch-related work if I can make a credible case that it will make our OpenStack-based IaaS cloud work better.

Q: Have you ever done a cool hack that you can tell us about (any topic)?

A Netflow-based IP traffic accounting system that I wrote in Common Lisp and that has been processing data for more than ten years in our network, with very little downtime despite requiring some modifications through the years.  (Monkey-patching FTW! :-)

Q: Do you have a friendly message to share with the other fine readers of the list?

Keep up the good work! You're on to something great.

-- 

Simon.

[Alexander Gall]

On Sunday, March 9, 2014 5:03:22 PM UTC+1, Luke Gorrie wrote:!

Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

I'm Alex Gall, a colleague of Simon Leinen (who has already introduced himself) at SWITCH, the Swiss academic network provider.
 

Q: What's your background?

(Programmer? network designer/operator/owner? freelancer? entrepreneur? general hobbyist? many/none of the above?)

Originally, I'm a physicist but I became a network operator when I joined SWITCH almost 15 years ago. I'm in the team that designs and operates our national backbone based on dark fiber. My special fields of interest include IPv6, multicast and network performance tuning and debugging. I also managed our DNS infrastructure, including the master server for two top-level domains (ch and li) for a long time. I enjoy writing software occasionally, but mostly just small utilities for our own use.
 

Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

Today's networking devices have a "vertically integrated" design. They're hardware based and only run with the proprietary software from the same vendor. So we are forced to use whatever the vendor pleases to give to us. The Snabb Switch has the potential to build high-performance devices based on commodity hardware that can be programmed specifically to suite our needs. To me, this is the essence of what the buzz-acronym SDN is really about.
 

Q: Do you have a cool project you'd like to do with Snabb Switch one day?

My project is to build a device that serves as the endpoint for a L2 point-point (or even multipoint) tunnel. These tunels are quite popular among our clients (personally I hate them, but that's another story). Our current router platform provides this functionality only on top of MPLS, which we'd rather not use due to its complexity. The box I'm trying to build performs encapsulation in IPv6/GRE and would allow us to remove MPLS from our backbone. It's basically a simple encapsulator/decapsulator for Ethernet frames.

--
Alex

[kristoff...@gmail.com]

Hi everybody!

So if you're feeling sociable please reply with answers to the following questions!

Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

I'm Kristoffer Glembo. I'm a Snabb Switch lurker and I'm not (currently at least) doing any snabb switch development. I live in Gothenburg, Sweden. I reply mostly because I'm feeling sociable and would like to send some appreciation your way :)

 

Q: What's your background?

(Programmer? network designer/operator/owner? freelancer? entrepreneur? general hobbyist? many/none of the above?)

I'm a long time embedded developer. I have a background in FPGA/ASIC development and low level software (RTOS, device drivers, embedded Linux, etc). Most of my experience is on architectures not widely used in the industry (SPARC and proprietary many core stuff). I'm interested in getting more experience in Intel and ARM.

 

Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

I really like the philosophy of Snabb Switch, both design and culture wise and that is why I follow the project. The concept of simple, self contained software which you can understand in its entirety resonates with me. Also the use of a higher level language for low level software is something I'm very interested in. I'm not experienced in Lua and I'm not convinced about the benefits of dynamic typing, but I find LuaJIT fascinating and I'm interested in trying this out in some embedded project in the future.

 

Q: Do you have a cool project you'd like to do with Snabb Switch one day?

 

Not currently. I'm interested in all kinds of software defined X. I like replacing expensive custom hardware with cheaper generic hardware/software combinations and the rapid development features it can lead to. I currently work professionaly with a very large SDR LTE application for a leading base station vendor. I'm trying to wrap my head around virtualization/SDN/NFV/cloud architectures in a small part of my spare time as I find the field interesting and full of opportunities.

 

Q: Have you ever done a cool hack that you can tell us about (any topic)?

Hmm, I have designed parts of FPGA/ASICs now floating around in space :-). 

 

Q: Do you have a friendly message to share with the other fine readers of the list?

Just that I think your doing very interesting work! Keep it up.

 

Regards,

Kristoffer

[C...@24.io]

Hi All !

Great to to be here, this is kind of just what I was looking for and feels awesome to be here !

Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

I am Chaitanya Hazarey, a professional developer currently working for uber huge networking firm in San Jose (Silicon Valley, CA). At the present I am dabbling in X86 based, userspace network stacks and virtualization. Have been involved in Cloud computing, Networking, Virtualization, Linux and related areas since past 6 years. 

Q: What's your background?

(Programmer? network designer/operator/owner? freelancer? entrepreneur? general hobbyist? many/none of the above?)

Programmer as well as network designer/operator/owner. 

Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

I just love the fact that Snabb is working on high-performance X86 packet processing and the integration with Lua is a sweet cherry on the top. 

Q: Do you have a cool project you'd like to do with Snabb Switch one day?

I do, but currently its in its infancy, I do plan to post some of my work on my github - https://github.com/C24IO sometime soon.

Q: Do you have a potential professional interest in Snabb Switch?

(e.g. would you like to use it at work, or get paid to hack on it, or start your own company around it, or hire people who can do stuff with it?)

I would definitely love to hack on it and contribute towards it as an OpenSource project.

Q: Have you ever done a cool hack that you can tell us about (any topic)?

In today's world, your voice (via VOIP) must have travelled atleast once through my code :-).

Q: Do you have a friendly message to share with the other fine readers of the list?

Keep hacking and sharing, keeping the true spirit of Internet alive :-).

Best, 

Chaitanya

[Fischetti Antonio]

On Sunday, March 9, 2014 at 4:03:22 PM UTC, Luke Gorrie wrote:

Dear snabb-devel subscribers,

Who are we? Let's all reply to this email and find out :-)

We've been growing organically for the past year or so. Currently we have 70+ mailing list subscribers and 400+ people tracking the project on Github. I'm curious to get a sense of who we super-early-adopters are :-).

So if you're feeling sociable please reply with answers to the following questions!

Q: Who are you, where are you from, and how are you doing? :-)

 

Hi All, I'm Antonio Fischetti, from Italy.

 

Q: What's your background?

(Programmer? network designer/operator/owner? freelancer? entrepreneur? general hobbyist? many/none of the above?)

I'm a C/C++ programmer, I worked on Embedded and Windows/Linux PC platforms.

I've also had a bit of experience with VHDL on FPGA. 

Q: Why is Snabb Switch interesting to you?

I worked on Telco Control-plane protocols and now I stumbled upon Snabb. 

It looks really attractive and I'm curious to experiment/play with it.  

Q: Do you have a cool project you'd like to do with Snabb Switch one day?

Don't know yet.

 

Q: Do you have a potential professional interest in Snabb Switch?

(e.g. would you like to use it at work, or get paid to hack on it, or start your own company around it, or hire people who can do stuff with it?)

Maybe it could be used at work, so far I don't have a clear idea of what Snabb can do.

 

Q: Have you ever done a cool hack that you can tell us about (any topic)?

I wrote XorTime, it's a Time-Management tool for Windows (http://www.xoring.com). 

It's based on the PomodoroTechnique (www.pomodorotechnique.com) to help you focus on your tasks and avoid procastinations.

Q: Do you have a friendly message to share with the other fine readers of the list?

I'm glad to join this group, it looks like a mixture of technical and creative people.

[Mazdak Rajabi Nasab]

Hi Snabb Switch developers,

I'm Mazdak Rajabi Nasab, living in Sweden. I am a network and system engineer, and have worked for different companies in telecom and network industry. During last couple of years I've been working mostly with NFV and SDN. Recently I heard about Snabb Switch in topics around accelerated software switches, and after spending some times I found it really interesting. Basically its flexibility, and elegant design makes it special. At this point I am just learning it, but in near future I'll use it both for my hobby projects, and also for my profession. I believe Snabb Switch has potential for freelancing, consulting, and starting a company, so I definitely consider it. Finally It's great to be part of a cool community, and I hope to contribute to it.

Cheers,

Mazdak 

[Max Rottenkolber]

Hi Mazdak,

Welcome to the Snabb community! We can use every helping hand and person who
takes the code base for a test run, so your interest is very much appreciated.
:-) At the moment there is just so much that can be done, both in terms of
Snabb applications as well as regarding the Snabb core framework.

Let us know if you need help with anything specific. Our documentation is still
rough at some edges. ;-)

Cheers,
Max

[vsm...@nyu.edu]

Hello All,
Im Vish, a student at NYU. 
SnabbSwitch was recommended to me from a friendly Redditor, and I'm just starting out with Networking.
My cool project, is setting up VPNs between two remote hosts having IP connectivity. Is this possible with SnabbSwitch? Am I at the right place?
Sorry if my questions are out of place, I'm still relatively new to all of this. 

[Luke Gorrie]

Hoi,

On 14 July 2016 at 16:40, <vsm...@nyu.edu> wrote:

My cool project, is setting up VPNs between two remote hosts having IP connectivity. Is this possible with SnabbSwitch? Am I at the right place?
Sorry if my questions are out of place, I'm still relatively new to all of this. 

You should take a look at ALX:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/snabb-devel/TCUqKQqV-XI

That is a Snabb-based VPN application. May be more ISP-oriented than what you need but take a look :).

[kri...@incubaid.com]

hi I am the founder of an incubator see www.incubaid.com, I really like this approach and would like to explore how some of our startups can use it.

anyone interested to help?

we are willing to fund, provide resources, ...

regards

Kristof