GSoCIdeas2015

Google Summer of Code 2015

https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/images/gsoc2015-300x270.jpg

The Ninux community is applying to become Mentoring Organization for the Google Summer of Code 2015.

Ninux participated in the GSoC several times:

Recently one of our community members also wrote a guest blog post on Google Open Source Blog: Orgs Get Ready: Preparing for GSoC 2015 with Freifunk.

What is Ninux?

Ninux is a Community Network, that means we are a community of volounteers that are using the open source approach in building and interconnecting wireless and wired networks in the Italian peninsula.

Our networks, according to the Picopeering Agreement, are free to join, everybody is welcome!

We invest quite a lot of time and energy in teaching new people how to use, build and extend the network.

Our key aim is freedom of communication through electronic means.

We are not an internet service provider, we don't provide free internet connection, although some community network members might share their internet connection with anyone or a few other friends through the network.

If you're curious to see where our networks are located, check out our community map or our experimental new map.

What is the Google Summer of Code?

The Google Summer of Code is an international program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source and free software projects.The program offer funds for several open source, free software, and technology-related projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Find more info about the GSoC in the Frequently Asked Questions page.

Why do we want to participate in the GSoC?

There are several good reasons for which we participate in the GSoC:

Moreover, Google also gives additional Travel Funding to attend to events and conferences which are related with the task the student will be working on, which is a great way to meet ninux contributors!

General Guidelines for students

General guidelines for students that want to apply with us.

Get in touch & introduce yourself

These ideas were contributed by ninux developers and constributors. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers on the mailing list or on our jabber chat ninux.org@chat.jabber.ninux.org and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.

Being accepted as a Google Summer of Code student is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

When writing your proposal or asking for help from the ninux community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. The Ninux people are all volounteers and keep up with the activity of the community at their own pace.

Introducing yourself to the general ninux-development mailing list is a very good idea!

Coming often on our jabber chat ninux.org@chat.jabber.ninux.org is another very good idea.

Read the GSoC student manual

Participating in the GSoC is not a joke! It requires effort and motivation.

To be aware of what you are doing, please read the amazing GSoC Student Guide.

Student application template

Hints

Submit your proposal early: early submissions get more attention from developers for the simple fact that they have more time to dedicate to reading them. The more people see it, the more it'll get known.

Do not leave it all to the last minute: while it is Google that is operating the webserver, it would be wise to expect a last-minute overload on the server. So, make sure you send your application before the final rush. Also, note that the applications submitted very late will get the least attention from mentors, so you may get a low vote because of that.

Know what you are talking about: the last thing we need is for students to submit ideas that cannot be accomplished realistically or ideas that aren't even remotely related to Ninux. If your idea is unusual, be sure to explain why you have chosen Ninux to be your mentoring organisation.

Aim wide: you can and should submit more than one proposal

The PostgreSQL project has also released a list of hints that you can take a look.

General Guidelines for mentors

General guidelines for mentors that want to propose a project idea.

Read the GSoC mentor manual

Mentoring a student for the GSoC is an amazing thing but it requires quite some deal of effort.

To be aware of what you are doing, please read the amazing GSoC Mentors Guide.

Adding a proposal

/!\ Follow the template of other proposals!

Title

Difficulty

Required skills

Brief explaination

Expected result

Mentor

When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:

/!\ If you are not a developer but have a good idea for a proposal, get in contact with relevant developers first.

Subscribing as mentor

To subscribe as mentor, you need to complete a few easy steps.

Ideas

Here is a list of our project ideas.

Enhanced crawling for the Ninuxoo search engine

ninuxoo.png

Difficulty: Beginner developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

Ninuxoo is a search engine for SMB/CIFS and FTP shared folders. It is a popular service inside the ninux.org community network and its source code can be found on github: https://github.com/ninuxorg/ninuxoo.

Currently, the crawling of FTP shared folder is broken and we are aiming at adding new features to the crawler.

Expected result:

A new version of ninuxoo with:

Mentors:

Claudio Pisa, active ninux contributor and creator of ninuxoo.

Claudio Mignanti, ninux developer.

Social profiles:

Claudio Pisa:

Claudio Mignanti:

Netdiff: add support for NetJSON

Difficulty: Beginner/Intermediate developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

Netdiff is an experimental pure python library that we are developing to parse network topologies from routing protocols like OLSRd 1 and batman-advanced and detect changes in network topology.

We want to be able to parse more routing protocols and convert their output to NetJSON, a draft standard JSON format we are working on with other community networks, more information here: https://github.com/interop-dev/json-for-networks and we also want to be able to easily calculate changes in the network topology (new links, dropped links).

Expected result:

The goals of this project are the following (ordered by priority):

Each one of the main features will need to be unit tested and documented in the README. The library needs to maintain compatibility with python 2.7 and python 3.

At least 4 tasks out of 6 will need to be done in order to consider the project successful.

Mentor:

Federico Capoano active ninux contributor.

Social profiles:

Proxoo: distributed SMB/CIFS to HTTP proxy for ninuxoo

ninuxoo.png

Difficulty: Intermediate developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

Ninuxoo is a search engine for SMB/CIFS and FTP shared folders. It is a popular service inside the ninux.org community network and its source code can be found here: https://github.com/ninuxorg/ninuxoo.

Web browsers do not support the SMB/CIFS protocol natively, thus the files provided in the search results of ninuxoo cannot be accessed directly. Users must instead copy and paste the smb:// URLs provided by the ninuxoo search results into other programs (typically file managers) on their systems.

To circunvent this problem we would like to develop Proxoo: an SMB/CIFS to HTTP proxy to be deployed in several locations inside the community network. We imagine Proxoo as a CGI application that takes an smb:// URL as parameter (e.g. through an HTTP GET request) and returns the content of the file pointed by the smb:// URL through an HTTP response. We would like Proxoo to be deployed on many different web servers (apache, nginx and possibly uhttpd), thus with different implementations (e.g. Python-WSGI, Bash-CGI).

Moreover, to avoid loading a single point on the network (and following a decentralization philosophy) we would like ninuxoo to point users to their nearest Proxoo instance.

To achieve this goal:

Expected result:

Mentor:

Claudio Pisa, active ninux contributor and creator of ninuxoo.

Social profiles:

Nodeshot: debian package generator

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ninuxorg/nodeshot/master/docs/topics/images/nodeshot-logo.png

Difficulty: Intermediate developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

Nodeshot is a crowdsourcing platform for geographic data with some features that are specific for community networks.

You can see the development version in action in our experimental network map.

Performing the manual development install described in the documentation is time consuming and often seen as serious barrier for new potential contributors.

The goal of this project idea is to simplify the basic installation of Nodeshot in order to lower the barrier for new users, potential contributors and mobile app developers. We don't want a mobile developer to give up developing a simple mobile app just because he cannot setup a nodeshot development instance in the first place.

Expected result:

We want to reach a point in which one can perform a basic installation of nodeshot on debian based systems by simply doing:

wget <deb-package-url>
sudo dpkg -i <deb-package.deb>

That command should replicate a result similar to what one would achieve by performing the following steps of the manual install procedure:

In addition a daemon script to start/stop/restart the django development server also needs to be written.

The package generation must be automated, ideally using the fabric python library, a good example can be seen on the fabric debian package generator script of the LXC-web-panel project. This kind of automation is crucial because core devs will have to release new packages at each new nodeshot release.

The debian package will also be automatically tested by a jenkins instance, the student will be helped in setting up this last task.

Mentors:

Federico Capoano, nodeshot core developer and active ninux contributor.

Claudio Mignanti, ninux developer.

Social profiles:

Federico Capoano

Claudio Mignanti:

Libre Mesh: OLSRd1 plugin

http://libre-mesh.org/attachments/download/27/libremesh.png

Difficulty: Intermediate developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

The student will have to learn the Libre Mesh modular structure and implement a lime-proto-olsrd module in order to configure OLSRd routing daemon and setup networking interfaces to keep packets flowing without breaking other protocols, the module will be written in Lua, will have to be documented and be ready to be used in production before the end of the GSoC 2015.

Expected result:

At the end of the GSoC, Libre-Mesh firmware should be capable of autoconfiguring OLSR mesh networks and interoperate seamlessy with already existent ninux OLSR network.

Mentor:

Gioacchino Mazzurco, Libre Mesh core developer, ninux and guifi contributor.

Social profiles:

Libre Mesh: OLSRd2 plugin

http://libre-mesh.org/attachments/download/27/libremesh.png

Difficulty: Intermediate developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

The student will have to learn the Libre Mesh modular structure and implement a lime-proto-olsrd module in order to configure OLSRd routing daemon and setup networking interfaces to keep packets flowing without breaking other protocols, the module will be written in Lua, will have to be documented and be ready to be used in production before the end of the GSoC 2015.

Expected result:

At the end of the GSoC, Libre-Mesh firmware should be capable of autoconfiguring OLSRv2 mesh networks and permit to explore the capabilities of the new protocol.

Mentor:

Gioacchino Mazzurco, Libre-Mesh core developer, ninux and guifi contributor.

Social profiles:

Nodeshot: Ansible playbook

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ninuxorg/nodeshot/master/docs/topics/images/nodeshot-logo.png

Difficulty: Advanced developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

Nodeshot is a crowdsourcing platform for geographic data with some features that are specific for community networks.

You can see the development version in action in our experimental network map.

The current automated install script for nodeshot is implemented with the Fabric python library and has several limitations.

We want to overcome the current limitations by porting the fabric script to a Ansible, the popular configuration management tool written in Python.

The deploy procedure is fully described in the "Production Instructions" section of the Nodeshot Manual Install guide.

This project idea can potentially give a huge contribution toward the realization of a distributed architecture of one of Ninux's core services, the visual map of our network.

With the tools we currently have today, setting up a distributed cluster of nodeshot instances would be very hard to manage. If we had an ansible playbook though, things would become easier and also more interesting to potential volounteer sys admins.

Expected result:

We expect the following fabfile: https://github.com/ninuxorg/nodeshot-fabfile to be converted in an ansible playbook (we expect to publish it in a new repository in ninux Github organization).

The ansible playbook must support the configurable options supported in the fabfile and should mantain compatibility with (at least) Debian 7 and Ubuntu 14 LTS.

The usage of the playbook will have to be documented in the README file.

The ansible playbook will need to be automatically tested by a jenkins instance, the student will be helped in setting up this last task.

Mentor:

Federico Capoano, nodeshot core developer and active ninux contributor.

Claudio Mignanti, ninux developer

Social profiles:

Federico Capoano

Claudio Mignanti

Nodeshot: performance improvements

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ninuxorg/nodeshot/master/docs/topics/images/nodeshot-logo.png

Difficulty: Advanced developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

Nodeshot is a crowdsourcing platform for geographic data with some features that are specific for community networks.

You can see the development version in action in our experimental network map.

The current development version is not yet optimized for fast loading and there are several optimizations that can be done.

This project idea is about establishing a base line for measuring basic performance measueres and then optimize the bottlenecks.

Expected result:

The student has to come up with a solution to solve the following issues:

Mentors:

Claudio Mignanti, ninux developer.

Federico Capoano, nodeshot core developer and active ninux contributor.

Social profiles:

Claudio Mignanti:

Federico Capoano:

Nodeshot: websockets

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ninuxorg/nodeshot/master/docs/topics/images/nodeshot-logo.png

Difficulty: Advanced developer

Required skills:

Brief explaination:

The current websocket implementation in nodeshot is far from being production ready and has been infact disabled.

WebSocket will enable us to do very useful things like bidirectional communication between browsers and servers for real time notifications, analytics, events and so on.

Expected result:

The student has to come up with a solution to solve the following issues:

All the new implementations will need to be properly unit tested.

Mentors:

Federico Capoano, nodeshot core developer and active ninux contributor.

Claudio Mignanti, ninux developer.

Social profiles:

Federico Capoano:

Claudio Mignanti:

l'ultima modifica รจ del 2015-02-20 21:35:51, fatta da Nemesis