Poul-Henning Kamp UNIX guru at large <phk@FreeBSD.org> PGP key $Id: index.html,v 1.9 2004/10/24 19:28:06 phk Exp $ Ahhh, homepages. "You've got to have one" people told me. So I wrote one. Now after only five and a half year they start whining about me not "updating" my homepage... This is my "official" home-page, and as such rather general and not updated too often (next scheduled update is summer 2009). If you are looking for stuff related to my current activities, check my other homepage. So, welcome to my 15 kilobytes of fame (Yeah, I think Andy Warhol got the unit wrong there.)

Seriously now,

I am self-employed, and do contract work related to stuff I know something about, which after 20 years in the business is quite a lot.

My main specialty is FreeBSD, but I have been working with anything from embedded Z80's via IBM S/34 to DSP recovery of satellite downlink. Chances are pretty good that I can help you out too.

My rates are very reasonable. Send me email if you're interested. My CV/Resume is available on request.

If you like FreeBSD, keeping me alive is one way to improve it.

FreeBSD - UNIX the way I like it.

I've been involved with FreeBSD from before it existed, I ran 386BSD-0.0 on a laptop where it replaced Minix. I was a member of the FreeBSD coreteam from early 1994 until I six years later managed to manipulate the project into democratically electing a new core team. I didn't make the mistake of standing for a seat myself.

I'm loosing track of all the stuff I've done in FreeBSD, fortunately the CVS logs do not forget. At one point I averaged one commit to the CVS tree every 18 hours.

Partial highlights:

• Wrote src/release/Makefile
• Release engineer for FreeBSD 2.X series
• Rewrote the VFS namecache
• Cleaned up vnode object model
• Usable sysctls
• MD5 based password scrambler
• Phkmalloc
• Jails
• Defined sbufs for safe string handling
• DEVFS and dynamic device support
• GEOM, modular disk transformations.
• GBDE , disk encryption you can actually use.
• Numerous more or less weird device drivers
• Tons of other stuff I've forgotten now

Despite what some people think, I am not paid by anybody to work full time on FreeBSD, but I agree that it would be a great idea!

If you want to support FreeBSD and want a tax-break you can donate money to the FreeBSD Foundation.

Other free stuff...

Here are some messages which might answer some of your questions about various bits and bytes I've been mixed up with in the past:

• HP48 I was quite active on the HP48 scene when it came out, now adays I hardly use it anymore. If you're doing something special and think I knew the answer, chances are pretty good that I didn't in the first place and even if I did, I have almost certainly forgot it by now, sorry. All the software I have released for the HP48 can be distributed which ever way you want.
• scsi-ping Has taken a life of its own, I don't administrate any Solaris hosts these days, so I can't help you figure out what to do about your disktab. The most recent version I know about is here: ftp://ftp.cdf.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/scsiping
• tcldb, tclcurses I have no idea if these are being actively used these days, or where to get recent copies if such exist.
• Tcl & SNMP Although we tried hard to come up with a sanctioned & standard API for SNMP in Tcl, this effort was never quite finished. The SNMPv2 mentioned in the book by Marshall Rose came close to completion, but never quite made it, and has not been released in any shape worth using. I suggest you check out Scotty http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~schoenw/scotty/ If you are interested in working on an SNMP based network discover tool, give me a hint, I have some code (sub-app of tkined of course); which does a decent job but I have no time to polish and finish it.
• MD5 based password scrambler Pick it up here if you want it: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libcrypt/crypt.c and before you ask: Yes, cisco did pick it up and what you see in the enable secret 5 $1$mumbo$jumbo line is the same thing. I have been promised a beer if I pop around their offices some day.
  I wrote an interesting little piece based on the history of this code.
• phkmalloc You can pick it up here: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/stdlib/malloc.c It should work on pretty much any OS, but you may want to set some of the parameters. Send me patches if you need to change it. I gave a presentation at the "Freenix" track of the USENIX conference in June 1998 in New Orleans about this piece of code.
  You can find my Paper here.

Precision timekeeping.

Like so many other things I have touched this started out innocently enough, but kept expanding and expanding...

I now have what is probably the best NTP lab this side of the Atlantic, I have access to three radios, DCF77, Loran-C and GPS and three OCXO frequency sources.

The outcome so far is that I have rewritten the Timecounter code in FreeBSD so it can use any current or future timestandard to the limit of what the hardware will allow, and I am currently trying to push that boundary as far back as I can.

Current status is that I can track my GPS receiver into a band less than 150 nsec wide around true UTC. This is an order of magnitude better than any other UNIX system I know of. My performance is probably even better than that, but I have not had much chance to validate it yet.

Various random stuff I'm playing with:

• Software Defined Radio: The last LORAN-C receiver in Europe ?
• Interrupt latency in FreeBSD
• An array of GPS receivers
• and where they think they are
• Cheap computing platform for timing purposes

Beerware, am I really serious ?

Yes.

(I have included the text of the beerware license below so you can see what this is about.)

I have had it with lawyers trying to interpret freedom. If I write software which I intend to give away, I don't want to have to stick several pages of legalese on it to make sure nobody exploits it or any such meta-bable. If I have decided that I'll give away some code I've written, I going to give it away, period, none of this "unless it is worth a million to somebody" rubbish.

I think the GNU license is a joke, it fights the capitalism it so much is against with their own tools, and no company is ever going to risk any kind of proximity to so many so vague statements assembled in a license.

I think the BSD-lite license, which most of the FreeBSD people use now is pretty much OK, but I'm going to stick to my beerware license anyway.

And quite frankly, I think I have gotten much more out of my beerware license than most people have from their GNU or BSD licenses. Cisco use my password scrambler and netscape used my malloc implementation, and I know of a couple of other companies that use it too, but which for reasons I can understand doesn't want to disclose this to the public.

I do like to hear what people is using my code for though, but I have deliberately not made that a requirement, if people don't want me to know, they shouldn't have to tell me.

/*
 * ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
 * <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
 * can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
 * this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
 * ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 */
  

Geography

I live in Denmark	... In a town called Slagelse

I have some more detailed maps you can get if you need to find your way here.

    -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
    Version: 3.1
    GAT/CS d- s+: a C++ UB++++++ P--- L- E- W++ N+ o K- w--- O- M V-- PS++
    PE- Y PGP++ t-- 5- X R tv-- b+++ DI++++ D--- G e h---- r+++ y+++
    ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
  

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