2008-Oct-12
Went to the NetBSD Developer Summit -- at least the second half on Friday , October 10th. My first time in New York. A few NetBSD developers were there and I was very glad to meet them. It was mostly a social time with various random discussions. Later that night met with many NYCBSDCon attendees at a restaurant. Great to meet many BSD people.
Attended the NYCBSDCon conference on Saturday. I took many notes as I attended all the sessions. Adrian Chadd discussed POSIX AIO, mmap, sendfile, and squid IO issues. Jason Wright discussed many issues where hardware manufacturers make stupid decisions make it hard for developers and even actually shipping hardware that is limited or broken. Matt Dillon discussed his DragonFly HAMMER file system -- designed for terabyte disks and constant snapshots for a forever history of a disk. Anders Magnusson talked about his PCC work and then Mickey Shalayeff talked about porting PCC. Ike (the MC) handed out my Peter Salus The Daemon, The Gnu, and the Penguin book. Julio M. Merino Vidal introduces his ATF -- Automated Testing Framework; it was good he showed some examples; now I need to add some tests. Then I gave a lecture introducing DNSSEC. Many questions and discussion and went overtime. Then Jason Dixon gave his comical presentation about BSD versus GPL. That night we had dinner at same restaurant, Havana Central.
Sunday morning's first lecture was by Theo Schlossnagle about Reconnoiter; I have used Nagios a lot for two years to monitor hundreds of devices and services -- I need to try the alternative: Reconnoiter. Pawel Jakub Dawidek gave two lectures: a short fun intro to ZFS and then a more detailed, look at ZFS. Kurt Miller introduced Position Independent Executables (PIE) and his OpenBSD work on that. I had to leave after lunch. So I missed the last two lectures.
NYCBSDCon was a great opportunity. I met a CERT coordinator; met Dru Lavigne and Jim Brown (my co-board members) in person for the first time; had two BSD Certificate group meetings: board and infrastructure; and met many others. It was great to meet in person many that I have had much online work and discussions with, like perry, jmmv, ragge, and others. Also took some photos with all the NetBSD developers who were there on Sunday. George and Ike and the rest of the NYCBSDCon team did a great job. George and Ike constantly introduced people to each other -- this made the event a lot better as they build and encouraged relationships. (Because of this, NYCBSDCon 2008 was many times better than BSDCon 2000.) I took some photos. I will upload them later.