after i’ve spent half of last weeks vacation to set up a vpn between a few privates sites, i tried to add my own local subnet to it yesterday. for that purpose i bought a tiny little nslu2 at amazon and flashed it with debianslug to get a slow, but full featured debian server. :)
even though installing tinc went fine and all the control channels between the various sites were established, it wasn’t possible to sent data through the tunnel. so i checked the sources just to discover that my c skills need improvement. :o
on freenode i got in contact with a dev(s) of the tinc project and since this nslu2 device is powered by an arm process that handles address alignment differently than x86, it was soon pretty clear that tinc contains some sort of alignment bug in the routing code.
guus, he’s the main developer of tinc, asked me for an account on the nslu, cause he has no arm test machine by himself…

he spent yesterdays evening digging through the code/debugging on the 133mhz arm, and came up with a fix around midnight.
i think this qualifies as an example of the power of open source software. :)

p.s.: i’m planing on donating a nslu2 to the tinc project.