Conversation

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann

opening talk from the other side. It's really good to be back in person.

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infrastructure review talk, this time largely delegated to Basti Schubert (not on Mastodon). His first public talk!

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@fosdem closing talk about to start. We're letting the NASA talk run over schedule to a packed room

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@fosdem Maybe I'll remember to keep all the talks in in one thread? Let's see :)

2024 opening talk! We had 20-33% first timers!

As per usual, many, many people standing at the back and at the sides. (sorry for the blurry second photo, I hurried too much)

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@tofeo @RichiH go to the schedule, there should be chat links under them, that will redirect you to matrix rooms where you can also have video...

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@fosdem we forgot if he lost a bet or why we ended up here...

Anyway, if you need urgent Pokemon help, come to K Infodesk. All Pikachus are standing by.

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@fosdem It's a bit of a tradition by now.. in 2020, I put into an internal platform that I needed $something plus Gerry in a duck suit and he replied that if anything he'd only wear a moose suit.

Anyway, challenge me on those things at your own risk :)

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@fosdem Monitoring and Observability opening, Sunday morning are always slow; we had the room full and lines outside in no time

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@fosdem hack. We couldn't refill the hand towel dispensers in the toilets. So the people designed a key for us, people @3dprinting it for us, and the cleaning staff could refill everyone's hand towels.

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@fosdem infrastructure review; good crowd and many questions as per usual. I had to leave early to the FOSDEM highlights, but Basti covered the rest.

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@fosdem highlights. We tried something new, and it was a bit bumpy, but it was fun! I was volunteered to MC it, which meant I had three talks back to back. I like stress I guess.

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@fosdem closing talk. I promised not to blur the sides photos this time ;)

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@fosdem debugging... Part of K lost power. We traced it to one circuit breaker, and kept putting it back in while dividing and conquering towards finding the fault.

As @SwiftOnSecurity keeps saying, there's an advantage in being tall. Instead of going up and down the ladder all the time, I simply grabbed a broom and kept pushing the lever up again and again and again until we found it. A power strip had developed a short...

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@fosdem and finally, staff dinner. I've been looking forward to this weekend for weeks, and I am sooooo happy it's finally over.

People will unload the vans tomorrow, sort and count and account and repair and such over the next week or so. We'll do a mix of in-person and remote post mortem in two weeks. And then we don't want to think about FOSDEM until August...

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@RichiH @fosdem A big thank you to everyone who helped out :)

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@RichiH @fosdem congratulations to you all. My first having wanted to come for years! But as a regular attendee of linux.conf.au the timing never worked.

You have done an amazing job. Truly epic scale.

I hope after pack ups and reflections you all get much needed rest.

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@cymplecy @RichiH @fosdem
This is wonderful! However, all these unmasked crowds make me feel physically ill.
Who will be doing the post- @fosdem count?

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@fosdem random reminder:

If you have T-shirts from previous editions, do bring them.

We will have a group photo with 25 years of [F]OSDEM shirts

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@fosdem all & devroom acceptance emails have been sent out and all reconfirmations received. Subsequentially all rejections have been sent just now.

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@fosdem if you're a person and attending : we're planning to do a "25 years of FOSDEM" photo with as many people as we can get. If you can commit to coming to FOSDEM with a decent full frame digital camera, a tripod, and maybe some flash(es) we would hugely appreciate it.

Reply in thread or send me a DM with your email address or something to get in contact :)

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@fosdem I just announced our temporary PI space 151.216.128.0/17 for . If you want, you can follow it starting to become visible over the next hours and days on any , e.g. https://lg.de-cix.net/ has quite a few globally so you can see it spread.

As of this writing, https://lg.de-cix.net/search?q=151.216.128.0%2F17 has it in Frankfurt and Marseille, and nowhere else. Usually for new BGP announcements from EU, they show up in LATAM last, with a delay of up to three days.

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@fosdem ignore the route object errors for now; the databases for ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and IXPs (Internet Exchange Point) get updated every few hours to once per day.

If you want to see the route object I created for earlier, see
whois -h whois.ripe.net 151.216.128.0/17AS62392

Not a lot to it, but maybe it's interesting for someone?

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@fosdem I was asked privately for the "how", and figured a public reply makes sense

https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-801 is the policy.

Fun fact: The extra time around an event used to be 1-2 weeks, and this was distilled pain as I had to chase upstreams to update sessions, filters, etc and usually needed to escalate through to last level support

Before automation and the Cloud, a new announcement took days to weeks by default

So I got the policy changed and extended to a month :)

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@kfh @fosdem We have a lot of people with a _lot_ of devices. It's only temporary of course.

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@RichiH @fosdem damn, I've been part of organizing an annual 1-week 5k+ participants event for a while, and I think the biggest we ever saw was /19 or /20...

And I might be mistaken, but is the same range as ?

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@alexhaydock @kfh @fosdem Our default is IPv6-only to entice software engineers to improve support; it was the first major conference to do that. It worked quite well and cleaned up a _lot_ of bugs. But at the same time, people are free to choose our dual-stack and we'd rather not NAT them.

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@fosdem I should probably get started on writing the opening talk 🙃

Today was a very interrupty day, but everything's working, the network is up and reachable everywhere, and half of us are already looking forward to the event being over :p

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@fosdem I didn't get to start the slides until 23:30 and only finished at 09:08, but the opening slides were done and presented successfully. Only five more sessions to go :)

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@fosdem is running well enough that I was able to leave the NOC for something other than toilet breaks repeatedly today!

I got to see the sun!

This is good, as I was able to, you know, do stuff.

But it also meant that it took me ~1.5 hours to get from H to K because I met so. Many. People.

Several, I have not seen since before the pandemic and always missed them as I was stuck in the NOC.

To compensate, I will be doing five sessions tomorrow and still need to prepare four of them :)

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@fosdem only need to prepare three now :)

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@fosdem That's a wrap!

We're still tearing down & cleaning up, but I'll spend some minutes on updates backfill

A view into our new video boxes.

More details in https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6714-fosdem-infrastructure-review/ & https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6832-fosdem-videobox-2025/

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@fosdem Opening the & devroom on Sunday. It was empty in the morning but flipped to being full with lines outside soon enough.

Again, another videobox, showing the built-in display

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@fosdem Shortly after, i talked about 25 years of , sharing various anecdotes.

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6729-anecdotes-from-25-years-of-fosdem/

We had Raphael join us and also share a few stories. He started OSDEM 25 years ago!

There was also the dance.

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@fosdem Right afterwards, we had the 25 years of and open source t shirt photo. Maybe we will do that again in the future.

I'll share photos later when I have had some time.

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6728-group-photo-25-years-of-fosdem-shirts/

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@fosdem Then, Basti and myself did the infrastructure review.

It was rather empty, as the videobox talk was at the same time. Bad planning in hindsight, but I'm very happy the videobox talk had so many attendees

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6714-fosdem-infrastructure-review/

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@fosdem And then, I closed out with the closing keynote: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6713-closing-fosdem-2025/

Second time in a row that I couldn't do the closing dance for health reasons, hopefully 2026 is better.

But no matter if kidney stone, car accident, or whatever. I'd attend in a wheelchair if need be.

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@RichiH @fosdem A massive THANK YOU goes out to you and all the other people that make this conference happen!

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@fosdem we finished teardown, cleanup, and volunteer dinner at around 21:30, and went for staff dinner right afterwards. We got to sleep at around 0030.

Today, the trucks will be unloaded, stuff put away, sorted and repackaged.

Two weeks of no FOSDEM anything (hopefully) and then it's back to Brussels for the Post Mortem in two weeks.

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@fosdem if you want to , feel free to look through the corner at

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@fosdem ask: If you have any series phones you don't need any more or might be cycling out of use over the year, please get in contact with us / me.

We have had fixed phones at a few key locations this past weekend and want to expand the use of static phones. So an upper bound of maybe 50-60 phones would be very useful to us accounting for all devrooms and for a few spares.

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@fosdem yesterday, we had our post mortem meeting. Blown up to seven hours straight, and we only got through everything by aggressively skipping and timeboxing -- after(!) moving half of it to the kick-off... Almost twenty people on site in Brussels with half a dozen more calling in.

There's a LOT of details and discussions to running a successful

Afterwards, we had dinner together

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@RichiH @fosdem The postmortems were always terrible, probably the hardest meetings of the lot.

Still, I miss those days.

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@RichiH @fosdem well done! Thanks for the conference, it was great!

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It was a great conference, very well organised!
Enjoyed it a lot.

CC: @fosdem@fosstodon.org
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@RichiH @fosdem I'm guessing the amount of work and stuff to discuss has grown significantly in the past decade, and it was a lot even then...

My respect to you and all who are involved these days...

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@RichiH @fosdem But, I also know it's worth it and some parts at least are fun. (Although postmortems will never be my favourite part of conference organizing, not even with my much smaller local one.)

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@fosdem (belated) photo from the opening keynote yesterday

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@fosdem as is tradition: the photo from the closing talk of

Of note:
* Next year, the default network of will be only. At lot of things will break, and this is intentional
* FOSDEM will become political. If you are in policy, politics, a position of power: reach out to us at policy@fosdem.org

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@RichiH oh, you mean IPv6-only _without_ NAT64?
I failed to decrypt what was supposed to change, since the network already is IPv6-only isn't it?
@fosdem

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@fosdem and we're truly and really done.

In two weeks, most of us will be back for the post mortem.

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@fosdem @Oskar456 yes. V6-only, and break whatever is hit by that.

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@RichiH @fosdem @Oskar456 excellent, proper techy approach, fail forward and learn a lot for sure!

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