BSDCan 2015 Trip Report: Kamil Czekirda

My trip to Ottawa, Canada was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation and took place in June 2015, where I attended FreeBSD devsummit and BSDCan 2015. I would like to thank FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip, Gavin Atkinson for an invitation to devsummit, and the mentor of my project, Warner Losh, for the meeting.

I arrived to Ottawa on Tuesday evening, I found the residence, checked in and dropped off my luggage. I had to look for a shop and do some shopping. It was too late for lounging about so I stayed for the rest of the day at the residence.

The first day of the Developer Summit / Tutorials for me started with “FreeBSD Storage for Sysadmin” tutorial by Michael W. Lucas. I experienced the jet lag, but it was stronger than I expected... During the brake I met Maciej Pasternacki from my country. Interestingly, Maciej was my neighbor on the plane from Montreal to Ottawa;) After the tutorial I joined the devsummit. My working group was “Designing Universal Configuration Files for FreeBSD” chaired by Allan Jude. There was a very interesting discussion about dividing system utilities for targets to USL­ify and not to ucl. I like the idea “show running config” for single compiled config for the entire system. In the end of the first devsummit / tutorial day we moved to the hacker lounge at the University residence, then during dinner I met Zbigniew Bodek, the third person from Poland at BSDCan.

On the second day of the Developer Summit / Tutorials for me started from the next tutorial about DNSSEC, unfortunately I missed Documentation and ARMv8 working groups, but I couldn’t be everywhere. After the Group Photo I joined the OpenZFS working group.

The main conference started on Friday. It was officially opened by Dan Langille, where Deb Goodkin told about the FreeBSD Foundation. The next step was an amazing keynote by Stephen Bourne about the history of Unix and /bin/sh. After the keynote we finished the devsummit track. Then I attended the Public track, where Kylie Lang explained why Microsoft loves FreeBSD and then Warren Block criticized the installers. The last subject was especially interesting for me, because I worked on installers last summer. During the break I was talking with Warren about profiles for installers. The next talk I've seen, was a legendary “A reimplementation of NetBSD using a MicroKernel” by Andy Tanenbaum, I heard very positive opinions about this talk on Sofia last year.

The lunch break was very productive, except the lunch itself, of course. I found Kris Moore and told him about my patch for freebsd­update. He directed me to Colin Percival and finally with Allan Jude and Nathan Whitehorn supported Xin Li who closed bug 194746 in FreeBSD Bugzilla.

Then there was George Neville-­Neil's talk about measuring network performance. After this talk people tried a cake brought by The FreeBSD Foundation, they were celebrating 15th birthday. Other talks I've seen were from the System Administration track, where Joseph Mingrone explained how scientist use FreeBSD in computation.

And the last one of that day ­ the Olivier Cochard­-Labbé’s talk entitled “Large­ Scale Plug & Play x86 Network Appliance Deployment Over Internet” ­ was one of the most interesting ones for me. There was another event of the day ­ after dinner in the hacker lounge I had a meeting with the mentor of my GSoC project – Warner Losh.

The last day of the conference for me started with the second George Neville-­Neil's presentation about teaching advanced operating systems. I’m a student and it was very interesting how they do it in Cambridge. The next talk was given by Randi Harper about fighting harassment with open source tools. We really need more non­-tech talks on conferences.

After lunch I attended the Daichi Goto’s talk: “FreeBSD for High Density Servers”. Daichi told how people from NEC install thousands of FreeBSD by PXE. The last two talks were about virtualization, the first given by Michael Dexter briefly described virtualization possibilities in FreeBSD, and the other presented by Maciej Pasternacki showed a lightweight virtualization technique based on FreeBSD jails and ZFS. During his talk we had a building evacuation, after which Maciej finished his talk about Jetpack.

I was really surprised by the charity auction that took place in the time of closing session, where Dan gave a great show. I had a great time during the closing party in a brewery in the Market, I’ve tried bacon in maple sauce for the first time.

The last point of the schedule was the Tourist Day, which we started at 10.00 AM, I’ve never seen Ottawa before, so I really enjoyed this short, but very interesting trip. We finished at about 2.00 PM and after dinner I came back and rented a bike for one more trip.

I think that attending the conferences like those is a huge motivation for work for new people. It was a great opportunity to meet people whom I had known only from the Internet. I hope I will be able to participate in devsummits and BSD conferences again in the future.

Kamil Czekirda