It is finally time for our own hackathon. If American corporations can hold them to recruit souls, let us hack together too and do something useful for ourselves.
The work will also benefit others who copy us and use the same technologies. All the better for everyone. This first session will focus mainly on networking. We need to simplify networking between nodes, ideally getting rid of bonding and OSPF. Neither technology is particularly transparent or easy to debug.
We would also like to load-balance and handle all network communication purely at L3, through routing. We need to prepare a reference configuration and test it thoroughly. Alongside the "own" fiber routes we plan to arrange for faster, better connectivity, we also need to benchmark what Mikrotik CloudCore routers can really handle and how much we can rely on them for these plans.
So there will be frantic traffic generation and a trial by fire for Tilera chips. Pavlix and Janko plan to hack on Brutus: integrated LAMP stack management done properly. There is a web interface, but it does not configure anything directly; it manages settings through configuration management, using Ansible.
We will probably also work on the new vpsAdmin web interface, and with Kuba Jirůtka we will explore using Alpine Linux as the basis for the vpsAdmin live distribution.
There is plenty to do, so we will work through the whole weekend. The likely location is Brmlab in Prague. We have a provisional agreement with them, but we could still move it to Brno if enough people are interested.
The likely weekend is 3 and 4 December, but it could also be the following one. You can vote on Doodle.
If you are genuinely interested in actively hacking, we will arrange accommodation. Come to IRC to work it out. Naturally, we plan a continuous supply of pizza and club-maté (or a similar source of caffeine).
Join in and help. Do not worry if you do not understand absolutely everything. Every bit of help is useful, and there will be plenty of work. You might also learn something from people who know a little more.
I am really looking forward to it!