Xelerance was founded in 2003 and is the company behind Openswan, the Open Source software for Linux IPsec VPNs. We have created other opensource software such as xl2tpd, sshfp and dnssec-conf. Our employees maintain or develop for over a dozen packages related to DNS, cryptography, and privacy enhancing technologies. We are active in many communities such as IETF, RIPE, Fedora/Centos, Ubuntu, IPsec, DNS-OARC and others.

Personal Information

• name
• email
• IM (on your preferred protocol)
• IRC nick on freenode
• phone # (preferred), skype, or gtalk
• timezone

Background

• what are you studying? What year are you in, and at what school? What classes have you learned a lot from?
• do you have any relevant programming experience or sample code? (it's not the end of the world if you don't)
• are you familiar with how open source projects work together? if you've written code for any, tell us; if not, tell us how you've been otherwise involved (ex. helping newbies on mailing lists, etc)
• if you're not an experienced programmer, tell us about a major project of any kind you've worked on
• what platform (operating system, distro etc.) do you use to code?
• what programming languages are you comfortable writing in? Note which are your two favourites.  If you only have one favourite that's ok too.
• tell us a bit about your work experience; you can include a resume if you'd like, or just summarize the interesting parts

Project

• If you're interested in one of the projects on our ideas page, describe it in your own words.  If you have a different awesome idea that we didn't think of, tell us about it.  We're open to either.
• What do you hope to bring to the project?
• What do you hope to achieve? Write up:
  1. a draft schedule for the summer
  2. a description of the scope of what you want to take on (deliverables)
  3. some ideas on where you expect problems or can see things being time-consuming

Project-specific Assignments

The following parts of the application are specific to which of our three projects you're applying for.  Please only do the one which is relevant to the idea you are applying for.

Openswan

• compile and install the latest 2.6.x openswan userland on a Linux machine
• include the output of the "ipsec barf" command

DNSSEC

• what is the DNS signature for www.nist.gov?
• tell us what the deployment status or plans for DNSSEC are for your country's top level domain.  This should be easy to find on the Web.
• what do you think is the biggest challenge in automating DNS queries?

OTR

• how do two OTR-capable clients know that they can talk OTR to eachother?
• why does OTR not use digital signatures?

Commitment

These are the things we need you to agree to in order for your project to succeed:

• be willing to devote a minimum of 30 hours per week to this project
• send weekly progress updates (we will provide a template)
• tell us when you're struggling or stuck
• no really, tell us - we'll help
• check your code in often

In return, we promise to:

• answer your questions promptly and provide a supportive environment
• make sure our infrastructure works for you
• have a weekly phone or voice chat to talk about your progress and help make sure you're not stuck