BSDcan

"I'm not going to make any self-deprecating jokes... because I'm not any good at 'em"

-- dvl

Thursday:

Morning Is Evil. Dad escorted me... on the bus. Damn UofO for stealing my truck

VoIP and FreeBSD tutorial from Max was a general intro to Asterisk on fBSD... I think I finally grok how to setup a server... maybe I'll do that when I have some spare time. Right. I had to NAT my copper interface out to WiFi so Max could get online with his laptop, silly thing: OSX shares on 192.168.2.1/24... which was the same subnet that the WiFi network was. Doh. Turns out if you just alias another IP/subnet to the interface, OSX will still NAT and answer DNS for it. Phew. You'd think they'd've written something to check for that.
Afterwards, I reclaimed the Element. when I told the guy in the booth about how I wanted my car and couldn't get it, he tells me I could've just kicked the door in the right place and it'd've opened for me... Right. Useful. Apparently I also could've called a protection officer too, but I pointed out there was no sign indicating that, and I didn't have their number. He assures me he'd bring it up at their next staff meeting... in 10 minutes. Heh.

Later, in the evening, I rejoined the geeks at Royal Oak on Laurier. Watched the Sens win. Met up with D'Arcy (of Vex), Ghoti (knows niveous), afields, some poor economics student, Jay (an oBSD guy from The 'peg) and lots of other people that I'm just not remembering right now. Chris called at one point, turns out I'd blackholed him from SVRNi/mWare... Whups.

Friday

Bio and Sensors in OpenBSD: Interesting framework for storin and acessing hardware information, from probes to diskand RAID states. Having all this integrated with a unified interface would work wonders for my monitoring and alerts.
MouSSH: der Mouse is just a cool guy from Montreal, NetBSD exclusive user and just has some cool ideas. Writing your own SSH client? That's fun. But not my kind of fun.
Lunch at ZamPub... huge line-ups, no service and the manager yelled at us to go back to our tables when we were trying to pay and jet... Uncool. Sat with DaveG, Grog took a huge interest in my MySQL problems at one of my clients', talked with Linimon about ports vs. AMD64, and der Mouse doesn't trust anything written by de Raadt... yeah - you read that correctly - der Mouse vs. de Raadt. Back to the conference!
Towards a BSD Certification - This wasn't really what I was expecting, Dru ended up talking mostly about how to deliver certification tests... I expected her to talk more about how to design the tests.
Filesystem Performance on FreeBSD: Cool improvements in FreeBSD 6.x, Kris has access to some pretty cool machines.
Work In Progress - Neat idea: a presenter is given 5-10 minutes to give a very brief talk. We heard about FUSE, Google's SoC (... twice) and PHK presented Varnish, an interesting caching-reverse-proxy server which we're very interested in using for UF.
MySQL on BSD - a BoF (Birds Of a Feather) (which is a moreso an interactive talk) Grog talked about the build process, which didn't seem to interest anyone, moving on to the threading crashes I perked up and had a lot to comment on there. We discussed other things, but I forget what now. Then Grog gave me a MySQL watch... must be trying to win me over or something
Dinner at Patty Bollands in the Market... Dave and I pretty much monoplized conversation at our table... Sorry guys!

Saturday

Network Protocol and Kernel Development in a Virtual Environment - GNN playing with VMware and discussing other virtual machines... didn't really capture me.
Keeping an eye on weird stuff with FreeBSD - PHK had to monitor some airport equipment... actually very similar to some hacks I've had to do for monitoring things. But he gets to do it with cooler, more expensive toys.
Lunch at ZamPub, much quicker and organized. Talked with Dave, an American guy (sorry, forgot your name) with a really cool backback (I've since ordered one for myself)...
The FreeBSD Ports Monitoring System, Mark has a lot of work making ports not suck. Probably a big part of why ports doesn't suck
BSD firewalling, pfSense and m0n0wall, wasn't expecting to learn much here, but I wanted to show support and hear what CMB and sullrich had to present. I have deployed many pfSense and m0n0wall boxxes at my client's sites. It's good stuff!
All Conference Assembly - DAN DIDN'T CRY! I tried! Robert Watson made a call to have more presentations about people who are using BSDs in interesting setups. My chair was then kicked and my IRC client lit up with people telling me to do something... "You do cool stuff with BSD and you like to talk a lot." Doh. Guess I'll submit a paper for next year.

And that was it! I'll post more follow-up later. I'm still very tired and recovering.

Quote is from an evening of geeking out and a zsh'er responding to the fact that I use bash. I've been promised a corresponding T-shirt.

It's BSDcan 2006 time! Dan Langille organized the first BSDcan 3 years ago, obsentively, I believe, to provide an affordable, North American alternative to BSDcon. It's at Ottawa University.

Today was the start of the tutorials, the conference proper begins on Friday. I attended the Firewalling with PF tutorial this afternoon; it wasn't as advanced as I'd hoped it to be, but it was a good presentation - I learned about the antispoof function.

Afterwards, Peter and I went to the Royal Oak to chill, and shortly thereafter, Marius, Diane (Dee-Anne), Jonathan & Matt materialized - and so began an evening of geeking. Incidentally, Deanna has the Shure E2c headphones... I certainly checked those out.

Oh and Marius a vegan. Who knew? They do exist. And I thought nightshade was deprived...

Then Jonathan showed me what can be done with Photo Booth...

Marius and Jon. Jon is not normal. He has three big teeth. And a symmetrical face. We forgot to give him colour. I may be a little blue. But am I not dazzling?

And Ottawa U's parking lot stole my Element. Their parking garage closes at 6PM. WTF? And there's no contact info posted anywhere either, so I didn't even know if I could call security to get my car back. Dad actuallyw as kind enough to come pick me up! Thanks Dad!