Subject: Bakeoff last week & next Connectathon

From: Brent Callaghan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 14:52:37 -0800 (PST)

Last week we had the third NFSv4 bakeoff at the Techmart in
Santa Clara, CA ( http://www.nfsv4.org/bakeoff3/bake.html ).

The NFSv4 bakeoffs are like mini-Connectathons.  Each of the
participants brings their computers, source code, test suites
and engineering talent.  Sun Microsystems provided a clean,
well-lit place, security guard and a continuous supply of 
food on a 24 hour basis.  Connectathon organizer, Audrey
Van Bellegham ran the logistics, and Randy Mayhew managed
the network.

We had four participating organizations: University of
Michigan CITI, Hummingbird, Network Appliance, Inc. and
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  CITI brought their Linux and
OpenBSD clients and servers,  Hummingbird their Windows
client and server. A server from Network Appliance and
a Solaris and Java client and server from Sun, along with
the nfsv4shell Tcl test client and a v4 capable snoop
sniffer with packet reassembly.

The biggest success of the event was the successful run
of the entire Connectathon test suite - including locking
tests - by several of the participants.  The Connectathon
tests were designed to exercise features of NFS v2 and v3.
So it was a significant milestone to have this suite run
successfully over v4.  The Connectathon test suite doesn't
exercise *all* of the features of the v4 protocol, but
it's a good step along the way.

During the testing we ran into a bunch of protocol issues
that were written up on a whiteboard.  We discussed the
issues and resolved to forward to the WG for further
participation.  Mostly they're clarifications that
we need in the protocol, but there were one or two
suggested changes to the protocol itself.  Dave Noveck
did a great job of collecting the whiteboard issues and
discussion.  He will be posting this to the WG mailing
list.

Next NFSv4 Bakeoff will be in 4 months time at Connectathon 2001:

	http://www.connectathon.org

As with previous Connectathon (this is the 14th) it will be
held in San Jose at the Parkside Hall downtown the first
week of March.  Registration closes February 7th.

At Connectathon, we'll be testing a lot more than NFSv4.
Included will be Kerberos v5, NFS 2 and 3, NIS/NIS+, CIFS,
Mobile IPv4/IPv6, SCTP, IPsec etc.

	BRent

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From: "Noveck, Dave" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:03:40 -0800

> it's a good step along the way.

To quote (as closely as I can remember it) Winston Churchill: 
It's not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is 
the end of the beginning.

Actually, there was an (arguably) bigger success that happened
Friday morning, after the wrap-up session.  Hummingbird, having 
run all the Connectathon tests against the Netapp server, decided
to get real aggressive.  They ran Microsoft Word over NFS-v4 and, 
after patching around a simple problem, it came up and they were
able to save a document.

I still can't quite believe it.