Driven-Monkey

So the announcements have been made, and I am happy to announce that I was accepted as a Google Summer of Code participant for 2008!! This is pretty awesome news for me, seeing as it’s great for my C.V, and its going to push me to develop something actually usable, for the first time. I will be working on implementing MPLS in FreeBSD, and yes, for those of you keeping track, that is the same project I am doing as part of my PostGrad Diploma in Computer Science at Waikato University this year.

There is an upside thou, cause now I have the support of the whole FreeBSD community to help me work on this project, as well as having a few extra dollars in the bank to help pay back some of those bills that we students often get. So, and I know I say this alot, but now I will be working on this project a lot, and that should hopefully result in a few extra posts that I can flood the net with. Good times ahead.

So this year I am enrolled in what will (hopefully) be my last year of university. I’m doing a postgrad diploma this year in computer science, after graduating with my BSc in computer science last year. As part of my postgrad diploma, I have to undertaken a 6 month dissertation paper. For my dissertation I am attempting to implement the MPLS networking protocol into the FreeBSD operating system. I have to admit, its pretty scary. I havent done anything like this before. The amount that this has taught me so far is pretty incredible though. Through my flat mates I have learnt about setting up and using svn repositories, using virtual machines, and all the stuff I’ve been having to learn about FreeBSD and how to use it and how it works.

So far I have managed to set up my work environment exactly how I want it now, and I have started working on the actual code. That in itself has been another huge learning curve, its been years since I wrote anything in C, and I have never hacked on a kernel before. I haven’t gotten very far in just yet. Right now I’m still working on getting the initialisation of the MPLS type working, then once thats done I’ll start working on the input and output functions, and hopefully get some label switching of packets done in the next couple of months.