Nmap Development mailing list archives
Nmap SoC 2007 Wrap Up
From: Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 02:47:18 -0700
Hi Everyone. The Google Summer of Code is now over and things are calming down a bit. So I finally have time to send a report on our results. For comparison, here are our previous summer wrap ups: 2005 Results: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183143&cid=15133184 2006 Results: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2007/q1/0235.html First, let me thank Google for accepting Nmap into this program for 3 years in a row! It really has made a huge difference in Nmap development. It is hard to imagine any Nmap users reading those previous reports (and this one) and not finding at least a few changes which have helped them personally. This year we tried a few things different. For one, we took on fewer students so that we would have more time to spend on each project. Instead of 10 students as in '05 and '06, we had 6. This worked out well in helping me keep up with all the changes. The project SVN server is now public (unlike last year), which helped a great deal. I didn't feel like such a bottleneck in manually tracking and applying patches. I started the summer by making an /nmap-exp/soc07 Nmap branch for SoC development. That was probably a mistake, as it lead to less testing because many people still used /nmap and it was also a major hassle to merge stuff back. So late in the program we moved back to /nmap and let people use their own special experimental changes, them merge directly to /nmap when ready. Another problem with our first approach, as we've seen this week, is that some people still don't realize that we've moved back to /nmap :). Perhaps this is the most exciting news for this summer: Two of last years' SoC students became SoC Mentors this year! Diman Todorov, who helped create NSE last year mentored two NSE-related projects this year. And Adriano Monteiro, who worked in '05 and '06 as an Nmap SoC student to create the new UMIT Nmap front end, was sponsored by Google as a separate SoC project with 7 students of his own! I'm also delighted that both Diman and Adriano are visiting the SF Bay Area right now for a Google SoC summit. I met Adriano for the first time in person yesterday, and will likely meet Diman for the first time in person today! In terms of success rates, we are improving. 7 out of the 10 Nmap students succeeded in '05 and 8 out of 10 in '06. For '07, we had 5 successes out of 6. The increasing success rates may be due to better selection and mentoring, but a big part of the increased success rate is that we have been inviting the best students back for the next year. If we are invited back next year, our biggest change will probably be more intense recruiting. We have received fewer and fewer applicants each year, and I think part of the reason is that the number of projects participating in SoC is ballooning. So applicants have hundreds of projects to choose from rather than dozens. Therefore we will have to work harder to attract the best candidates, and I hope members of the Nmap community will help by recommending the program to talented college students (or by applying if you are such a student!) Now for the important part of this email: What those five successful Summer students accomplished! You can read more about any of these changes in the official Changelog at http://insecure.org/nmap/changelog.html . Stoiko Ivanov accomplished a whole lot of NSE work this summer. In addition to many smaller features and bug fixes, he added the NSE library (nselib) of useful functions, added garbage collection support, and added the --script-args system for passing arguments to scripts. He also made major improvements to the NSE documentation at http://insecure.org/nmap/nse/ . Diman deserves part of the credit for this due to his excellent mentorship! And he even took numerous matters into his own hands, such as testing and integrating Marek's raw IP packet NSE support patch. David Fifield had a busy summer, accomplishing an incredible amount of Nmap work. His contributions include substantial UMIT work, integrating huge numbers of your OS detection fingerprint submissions, adding the --servicedb and --versiondb command-line options, dramatically reducing build dependencies, the huge massping migration, and more. Whew! Meanwhile, Kris Katterjohn kept very busy completing a large number of small tasks rather than one huge project. He helped integrate UMIT into the Nmap build system, wrote several valuable NSE scripts, added the Snprintf() and Vsnprintf() wrappers which are safer than the normal lowercased calls, upgraded libpcre and libpcap, improved ICMP protocol unreachable response handling, added several features to the Nmap XML output format, and more. Doug Hoyte is our only three-time SoC student, and unfortunately (for us) he will probably graduate and become ineligible next year. But maybe he can come back as a mentor! He accomplished a lot this summer, including writing NSE scripts and integrating tons of your version detection signature submissions. Eddie Bell was our other repeat student, and he did a good job on a wide variety of tasks. He wrote five NSE scripts, improved UMIT's results searching, fixed numerous bugs bugs, upgraded Winpcap, and optimized the Nmap ./configure system. Also, we added his nifty --reason feature which fell through the cracks and didn't make it in last year. While Adriano was leading a separate UMIT GSoC project, he and his team accomplished some great things. After 3 summers of development, UMIT is finally ready for integration into Nmap and it is included in the latest SOC release. I believe that 6 of Adriano's 7 SoC students succeeded. Obviously we also had many great contributions from non-SoC developers over the summer, as demonstrated by the Changelog. Note that all of the changes discussed here have already been integrated into Nmap. We are up to version 4.22SOC6, and quickly approaching a big stable release. Well, that wraps up GSoC 2007 for the Nmap project. We're looking forward to Summer 2008, but certainly won't be sitting on our hands until then! I'm particularly pleased that many of the SoC students have continued contributing even though the summer has ended. Cheers, Fyodor _______________________________________________ Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev Archived at http://SecLists.Org
Current thread:
- Nmap SoC 2007 Wrap Up Fyodor (Oct 05)
- Re: Nmap SoC 2007 Wrap Up jah (Oct 05)
- Re: Nmap SoC 2007 Wrap Up Kris Katterjohn (Oct 05)
- Re: Nmap SoC 2007 Wrap Up Gaveen Prabhasara (Oct 08)