On 24 December 2000, I invited some of the Adelaide
FreeBSD people to a barbecue. The main reason was because Kris Kennaway and Benno Rice, both
exiles, were back in Adelaide for Christmas. We had a great time,
so in 2001 I decided to invite more people,
including people from other free software projects. Unfortunately we didn't know any
OpenBSD people (Theo de Raadt confirms that not many Australian hackers live up to his
expectations), but we had one NetBSD person (Bernd
Wulf), two Linux people (Rusty Russell
and Chris Yeoh) and the same FreeBSD
people as last year. In the meantime Daniel O'Connor had got married, so he brought his wife
Fiona with him.
In 2000, we multiplexed four IRC sessions over one laptop. This year we had seven people and
six laptops, but we were a lot more active and didn't get much IRC done.
We set up a wireless network which was only partially successful. The FreeBSD boxes worked
fine, but we couldn't get the Linux boxes to connect. Bernd didn't bring a laptop, so we
didn't have a chance to confirm whether NetBSD would work, but based on previous experience
(Luke Mewburn in July), there should be no problem. There appears to be an issue with Linux
and ad-hoc mode which we haven't quite understood.
As a result, we tried routing a 10 Mb/s network through Daniel's laptop. Somehow we didn't
get much IRC done this year, though.
