The FreeBSD Diary

By all accounts, Pat, Nicole, and April did an outstanding job.  The feedback I received was that the conference either met or exceeded people's expectations.  Of course, there are always people who will grumble that the food wasn't good (apart from the pizza on one day, it was all great food).  Or that they couldn't get to the sessions they wanted because they were too popular.  Well, my reply to that is food is one area which is very subjective and personal tastes vary.  The food was all of very high quality (pizza excepted) and there was always a choice.  From what I hear, it's a far cry from other conventions I've heard of where all you get is a boxed lunch (if you get that all all).

As I alluded above, planned social events are an important part of any convention.   It is the contacts and friendships which are developed at conferences which often prove to be the most valuable part of the trip.  Other conference organizers should not underestimate the value and popularity of such things.

Everyone who attended the conference was given a bumper sticker, a button, stickers, the convention t-shirt, and a small lapel pin.  Everyone who handed in the convention survey was given a beanie baby.   In addition to the above, I bought a coffee mug, a black cap, and a CD-case.  It seems the mousepads were the thing to have.  These ain't your normal mousepad.  They have a very sticky backing on them so they won't move around on your desk.  They are thinner than most mouse pads and have a suede-like surface to them.  I've been using it since I my return and I won't be going back to my old mouse pads.  If you can get hold of one, I highly recommend them.

Another item which was in high demand was Kirk McKusick's book .  I bought my copy and, like everyone else there, had it autographed by Kirk and Mike Karels.

Although not required for the course, the notes provided within the tutorial have many references to The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System.

This course was popular.  In fact, it was so popular that after the first session sold out, the organizers added a second session which also sold out.  For the next conference, perhaps more sessions will be needed.  I heard that the second session had quite a few core team members in it.  The attendees I spoke with liked this idea because of the interaction between Kirk and the core team members.

I also attended Mark Murray's talks on Security.  Mark is a great speaker and the content of his paper is delivered with a great wit and humorous dialogue.  Mark's first talk about about securing your individual machine.  It was easy to follow and to the point.  His main point was that a good security person needs to be paranoid.   I agree.  The second talk about about creating a firewall using ipfw as an example.  The rules provided were a good base upon which anyone can build their firewall.  The main thing to keep in mind is that you first need to create a policy and then implement that policy with your firewall rules.  For example, you should first decide who can access what and from where.  Only then should you start using your firewall to enforce this policy.  A good thing to remember is that it is easier to deny everything and then allow only what you want.  It is more difficult to allow everything and then specify what you don't want.

Warner Losh talked about how to distribute and maintain configuration files in a large complex environment.  Although the content of this talk was not directly applicable to needs, I found it quite interesting to hear about the tools they used and the methods they employed.

Greg Lehey spoke about the Vinum Volume Manager.  This disk abstraction program can greatly improve disk performance by striping data across two or more disks.  The initial setup can be confusing, but as was demonstrated in the talk, the resulting increases in performance and/or reliability can be impressive.  If you are interested, I've written up what I did to use vinum which may help you.

The session I most wanted to attend was the talk by Jonathon Bresler about stopping spam at FreeBSD.org.  It was unfortunately scheduled against my talk on advocacy.

I also think that more and more people will discover Samba and how easily and cheaply it can provide a alternative to NT server.  Not to mention that running Samba gives you more stability.