Bsdcan 2004 by Bill Moran Bsdcan Conference Roundup This Is a Description of My Trip to Bsdcan 2004 in Ottawa, by Chris Coleman Canada

Daemon News: May 2004 http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/

Mirrors Issues April 2004

May 2004 Get BSD Contact Us Search BSD FAQ New to BSD? DN Print Magazine BSD News BSD Mall BSD Support Join Us

1 of 4 26.05.2004 08:14 Daemon News: May 2004 http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/

T H I S M O N T H ’ S F E A T U R E S From the Editor BSDCan 2004 by Bill Moran BSDCan Conference Roundup This is a description of my trip to BSDCan 2004 in Ottawa, by Chris Coleman Canada. If you’re interested in BSD or computers in general and Didn’t make it to BSDCan? did not go to BSDCan, then you made a huge mistake. The Here are all the things you conference was tremendiously educational, and the trip was a missed so you can start great opportunity to meet a number of great people, and visit a feeling guilty. beatiful city. The conference was also very affordable, and there were more than a few who attended on a shoestring budget (I tried to do this, but ended up drinking far too much beer). A Get BSD Stuff number of people also visited from tremendious distances ... attendees arrived from all over the world, so anyone who didn’t make it really has no excuse. Read More

Bosko’s Adventures at BSDCan 2004 by Bosko Milekic It’s Sunday, May 16, 2004. 5:30PM. BSDCan has come to a formal close late last night at around 2:00AM, when George, other NYCBUGers, myself, and a friend decided to finally give the poor waitresses tending on us a break, and leave the pub once and for all. But I’m still in Ottawa, and will only get to go home to Montreal tomorrow night. Search There are still a few conference attendees in town; some flying out early tomorrow. Christian S.J. Peron, a new FreeBSD Committer is still in town with his collegue and friend Yvan and Monthly Ezine they’re planning to drop by a little later, at which point we’ll Search probably go out somewhere for dinner and drinks. Read More

BSD News NYCBUG Goes to BSDCan by George Rosamond Daemon News ezine Issue for May ’04 is up. our of us left Brooklyn at 7:30 am on Thursday morning to avoid Stackghost on the traffic on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan. Well, there’s OpenBSD/sparc no way to totally avoid it; but there’s a better chance of getting NetBSD non-executable through Manhattan at that hour to the Holland Tunnel than 30 mappings update minutes later. Remember, we’re leaving from a city where you Upcoming BSD courses in can be stuck in traffic at 2 am early on a Tuesday on the Seattle, Washington Brooklyn Bridge. OS X Security Flaw Plagues Web Browsers We know that there will be two additional NYCBUG members in PearPC 0.1: Is It A Ottawa who arrive by plane. But since we only started up the Miracle? group in January, we are all basically strangers to each other, UKUUG Open Source especially in the context of a long drive to the Great White Award 2004 North. Read More FreeBSD 4.10 RC3 is out

Report of the pkgsrcCon 2004 BSD Support by Hubert Feyrer FreeBSD System Over the last couple of months, the infrastructure of pkgsrc, the Administration :: RE: How to NetBSD (and others :-) packages system underwent quite some allow ’User-A’ to burn CD changes. To not only communicate via email and chat, a call FreeBSD Ports Collection :: was made to all people interested in pkgsrc development to join RE: PearPC on FreeBSD-4.x in for a pkgsrcCon, where things were presentations on details FreeBSD Ports Collection :: were given and discussed face to face. PearPC on FreeBSD-4.x FreeBSD Installation Help :: The meeting happened at the weekend of May 1st (April 30th to RE: Problem on installation May 2nd) at the Institute for Discrete Mathematics and after probing disks Geometry at Vienna University of Technology in Vienna, FreeBSD Ports Collection :: Austria’s capital city. The place was choosen because many RE: vmware pkgsrc developers are located in Europe, and Vienna is fairly FreeBSD Ports Collection :: central to Europe and also has good medium and long distance RE: vmware infrastructure for travelers from abroad. Read More FreeBSD Installation Help ::

2 of 4 26.05.2004 08:14 Daemon News: May 2004 http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/

RE: Problem on installation Traffic shaping with trickle after probing disks by Armijn Hemel FreeBSD Installation Help :: RE: New Installation I share my Internet connection (ADSL with 1 MBit downstream) (Current) with several people. Sometimes it happens that we have some FreeBSD Installation Help :: conflicting interests. I do quite a few bulk transfers, mainly ISO RE: Problem on installation files to test new Linux and BSD releases inside VMWare. These after probing disks bulk transfers tend to clog the line, which the other users don’t FreeBSD Installation Help :: really appreciate (interactive sessions such as SSH and IRC RE: new Freebsd install become nearly unusable). So, recently I started looking at traffic missing /dev/dsp -- No sound shaping so I could be a bit nicer to the other users. or MAKEDEV FreeBSD System I usually do FTP transfers with the built in FTP client in Mozilla (I Administration :: RE: How to happen to like the clicketyclick interface). But, Mozilla lacks allow ’User-A’ to burn CD traffic shaping. So I started looking at other FTP clients and FreeBSD System ended up with gFTP, which can do traffic shaping. gFTP works Administration :: RE: Multiple nice but, of course, it does not help much if you use other FreeBSD instances on methods for bulk transfer, such as tar over SSH, CVS or rsync. sparc64 Since some of the machine where I have to get my data off FreeBSD Installation Help :: don’t run an FTP server I had to look at other ways of doing RE: new Freebsd install traffic shaping. Read More missing /dev/dsp -- No sound or MAKEDEV R E G U L A R C O L U M N S FreeBSD Installation Help :: new Freebsd install missing /dev/dsp -- No sound or This Month in BSD MAKEDEV by Sam Smith FreeBSD Ports Collection :: RE: Portupgrading Sam Smith rounds up the latest major happenings in BSD, including the release of OpenBSD 3.5, Developer Interviews, PF2K4 -- PF Developer’s hackathon, Security Announcements, FreeBSD mailing list summaries, Wikipedia Entries for *BSD, BSDMall and BSDCan Conference. Read More Office Applications for Mac OS X Panther Ver 2.0 $39.95 Daemon’s Advocate Unix Utilities for Mac OS X by Robert Watson Panther Ver 3.0 $39.95 Sipura SPA SIP Telephone The BSD phenomenon is quite remarkable: a community of Adapter Just $105 incredibly talented and experienced developers, administrators, Sayson Telephone PT-390 and users, joined by diverse technical interests and a common Now $95 desire to build and use the best operating systems in the world. Digium T1 Controllers $480 What’s interesting, though, is that despite the fact that advocacy OpenBSD 3.4 $37.50 is arguably not one of the strongest aspects of the BSD world, Need Reseller Pricing? Go BSD and BSD-derived systems seem to continue to be widely to Cylogistics! used, with growing developer and user communities. While BSD lacks flashy multi-million dollar advertising campaigns involving graffiti-ing San Francisco sidewalks, it seems to have grown a Miscellaneous firm base of committed fans who respect the technical accomplishments and maturity of the system. Which raises the question: what role should advocacy play for the BSD Credits community? Read More The hard-working crew Tarball Download a tar.gz version of this issue PDF Download a PDF version of this issue

3 of 4 26.05.2004 08:14 Daemon News: May 2004 http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/

4 of 4 26.05.2004 08:14 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"BSDCan Photos, Articles, and Web... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/editorial.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

BSDCan Photos, Articles, and WebLogs Search By Chris Coleman Monthly Ezine My Trip Search It was a dark and story night, when we packed up the car and headed off to Canada to attend BSDCan. Well actually it wasn’t dark or stormy then, but it is both tonight as I write this, so it almost fits. Get BSD Stuff We debated a lot about whether to go to BSDCan. Daemon News and BSDMall spend a lot of money each year attending various Unix conferences trying to promote and advocate BSD. There was no question this conference was focused on BSD, but were we wasting time and money by preaching to the choir? However I really wanted to go and show support for Dan Langille and all the work he put in to this, so I finally decided that I would just have to pack up the whole family and go no matter what the final outcome. The two day drive from Illinois through Michigan and Toronto was pretty uneventful. We called Michael Lucas on our way through Michigan to get his opinion on where to stop along the way since our journey took us almost past his front door step. He had been scheduled to speak at BSDCan, but had to bow out in favor of caring for his wife after surgery. I have always regarded Michael very highly and his decisions to keep his family his top priority only served to strengthen that opinion. As we crossed the border, I think we really confused the border guard when we tried to explain what we were doing. He kept asking the same question over and over apparently not understanding our answer each time. He finally waved us through with a look that conveyed exasperation and a need for aspirin. When we arrived at the conference and started setting up I felt a bit out of place at first as I was the only one being followed by three children. The large number of boxes I had also added to the difficulty until George and the NYCBUG group showed up and really helped me get setup. Several of the BSDCan attendees thoughtfully occupied my children for me while George, my wife Susannah, and myself finished setting up the booth and arranging the stuff we brought. Conferences are one of the best ways to meet people you already know. I finally got to put faces with the names and e-mail address I had known people by for several years in some cases. There were a few times I had to have people spell their name or see it in writing before I realized who they were. Its amazing how differently someones name is pronounced from the way you imagine it in your head. I managed to sneak into a few talks when I wasn’t on booth duty, but mostly spent my time talking with people about BSD and trying to get a feel for what was happening in the community. What surprised me the most was how quickly the conference went by. I feel like I blinked and it was time to start packing up. In the end I feel like it was really worth the trip. I got to meet a lot of really nice BSD people and share ideas. I also made everyone take as much free stuff and they could carry back home for advocacy purposes. I think we still ended up taking some of it back with us, as I really did bring that much stuff. With the BSDCan over, I took my family off to see the sights on the way home. This time we went down through Niagra falls and spent the day there to give my family a much needed break from work. I highly recommend BSDCan to everyone and if you are within a two day drive of it, its well worth going next year. I’ve collected everything I can find regarding BSDCan, including articles, photos, and weblogs. Many thanks to everyone who sent me stuff to publish in this ezine and if you didn’t make it to BSDCan this year, try to show up next year.

1 of 2 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"BSDCan Photos, Articles, and Web... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/editorial.html

BSDCan Photos

Diane Bruce http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan_2004 Jeremy Faulkner http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/BSDCan2004 Pete Wright http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan04 Tom Rhodes http://ezine.daemonnewws.org/200405/trhodes/

Movies

A quick movie of many of the BSD crowd eating at Patty Bowlands courtesy of Jeremy Faulkner.

BSDCan Articles

Bosko http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan2.html Bill Moran http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan1.html George Rosamond http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan3.html

BSDCan Weblogs

Wes Peters Dru Lavigne Richard Bejtlich Day 1 Day 2 -Chris Coleman

2 of 2 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"BSDCan 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan1.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

BSDCan 2004 Search reviewed by Bill Moran Monthly Ezine This is a description of my trip to BSDCan 2004 in Ottawa, Canada. If you’re interested in BSD or computers in general and did not go to Search BSDCan, then you made a huge mistake. The conference was tremendously educational, and the trip was a great opportunity to meet a number of great people, and visit a beatiful city. The conference was also very affordable, and there were more than a few who attended on a Get BSD Stuff shoestring budget (I tried to do this, but ended up drinking far too much beer). A number of people also visited from tremendious distances ... attendees arrived from all over the world, so anyone who didn’t make it really has no excuse. I met Tom Rhodes of the FreeBSD project recently, and he and I decided to car-pool to Ottawa from Pittsburgh, PA (about a 9 hour drive). If you don’t know Tom, he is a FreeBSD documentation and source comitter, part of the FreeBSD security team, heavily involved with the donations team at the FreeBSD Foundation, was supposed to be re-writing the FAT filesystem code, and I think he’ll be mowing lawns for many of the other comitters fairly soon. We left Pittsburgh close to 10:00 PM on May 12, with Tom’s girlfriend, Carla, in tow, and drove all night. We learned a few things along the way. For example, if you stop to whiz in the bushes along a deserted stretch of highway at 2:00 AM, Murphy’s Law dictates that that stretch of highway will suddenly cease to be deserted, and you’ll have to hurry up before you’re providing a show for a bunch of truckers. Also, when the border police ask, "Will you be bringing any firearms, tobacco, alchohol, or pepper spray into the country?" they’re really looking for a more specific answer than "Not really." (As a side note, the wording of the question made me wonder if I should have brought pepper spray. Having never been to Ottawa before, I suddenly didn’t know what to expect! As it turns out, you can leave the pepper spray at home, Ottawa is as safe a place as I’ve ever been.) Petrol is $0.25 more expensive in New York than in Pennsylvania. It’s a little harder to calculate the Canadian difference because there’s an exchange rate for the money, as well as Canada measuring petrol in liters instead of gallons. I think I’ve figured out the conversion ...

1 liter = .26 gallons and $1.00 US = $1.36 CA

Which means, the conversion from US$/gallon to CA$/liter is 1.3E-54 ... which would actually be useful if I remembered how many $CA I paid per liter ... We arrived in Ottawa far too early (around 7:00 AM) and decided to call Dan Langille (Dan’s last name was my first experience with Canadian culture. Like many things in Canada, it’s French and pronounced lan-gil-ee.) This was a good idea, as we found out later that Dan had set his alarm early so he could be up just in case Tom Rhodes called early in the moring to announce the he, Carla, and I had, indeed, arrived in Ottawa. We then stopped at Nates on Rideau St. for breakfast. (another French word, to pronounce it, you have to be able to simultaneously breathe in through your left nostral and out through the right and not pronounce the "u") At Nates, I learned that Canadian bacon is not the same as the bacon they eat in Canada, and that Canadian’s do not have "American bacon" and that "bacon" in Canada is almost the same as "bacon" in the U.S., except better somehow. At noon we met at The Royal Oak restaurant near campus. Dan Langille (remember, it’s French, pronounced lun-gwil) wisely chose this as the location for early registration. Here is where I first met some of the most intelligent, hardest

1 of 5 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"BSDCan 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan1.html

working people I’ve ever known: the waitresses. From slightly after noon, until the wee hours of the morning, a constant stream of computer nerds from all over the world filed in and out of this restaurant, ordering all manner of food and becoming more and more drunken and disorderly as time went on. The waitresses never failed to provide quick, accurate service despite the fact that the typical BSDCan patron adhered to the following pattern: Tom Rhodes, Carla and I were the first to arrive at The Royal Oak the 1. Arrive and order a beer. first day. We’re already eating when Dan Langille (pronounced lin-jeel) 2. Move to the registration desk arrived and register for the conference. 3. Sit down in a different seat than when you ordered the beer. 4. Somehow the waitress would locate you, deliver your beer and take your order for food. 5. This was the best time to realize that the conversation at another table was more interesting and move. 6. Again, the waitress would find you and deliver your food and another beer. 7. When you’d finished your food and ordered another beer, you’d have it explained that if you sat at a certain table, you could get just enough of an 802.11 signal to check your email. 8. While at the "wireless table", your waitress would somehow find you and deliver your beer. 9. About halfway through the beer, you’d realize that the person you were about to email had just arrived, so you’d move to yet another table to talk. 10. As different people arrived, this general pattern of table-hopping would continue. While this doesn’t seem terribly complicated, keep in mind that the waitresses were tracking a whole restaurant full of people who were all doing this. I have to say that I was very impressed. While socializing here, we learned that Theo de Raadt had been followed to the airport by Microsoft agents who wanted to find out the secret location of BSDCan so they could crash it. Theo cleverly threw them off by pretending to have forgotten which airline his ticket was for and running all over the airport like a madman ... Here you can see The Royal Oak starting to fill up with geeks. arriving at the proper gate in the nick of time, but too late for the Microsoft goons to get standby tickets! The next morning, I walked from the hotel, up Avenue King Edward (pronounced "King Edward Avenue" ... those crazy French) to the first presentation of the Con (Can?). I decided to listen to Bosko Milikic speak about buffer allocation in FreeBSD. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought this would be interesting, since the only place to sit was on the floor! Unfortunately, this trend repeated itself several times over the course of the Con, as many presentations were far more popular than anyone had planned. While all of the presentations were well done and extremely interesting, the most fun (for me) was finally meeting in person so many people that I’ve known through email for years. Dan Langille (pronounced lahn-gee) had wisely planned a location for conference members to meet for food and drinks.

2 of 5 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"BSDCan 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan1.html

Unfortunately, Dan’s best efforts to estimate how many attendees would be at the venue on Friday was far too low. As it turned out, The Black Thorn didn’t have enough tables for everyone, and had great difficulty accomodating everyone. They were friendly and helpful, but we were just too large of a group.

I stayed at The Black Thorn far too Allan Fields preparing for his presentation. long. When a number of FreeBSD folks decided to run off elsewhere, I tried to follow, but they managed to ditch me in the confusion of Ottawa’s market district. Not ready to quit, I returned to The Black Thorn to find many OpenBSD developers still there. I spent the next few hours mostly listening, and learned a lot. The next day consisted of another set of excellent presentations. I particularly enjoyed Poul-Henning Kamp’s explanation of GEOM. For lunch, I accompanied Dru Lavigne, Maxim Sobolev, and Jacques Vidrine to a local establishment to try out some "Canadian" food. It’s called Schwarma, and really hit the spot. After lunch, I was suitably impressed by the demonstration of OpenBSD’s pf capability, and Theo de Raadt’s explanation of the phk@, rwatson@, nectar@, trhodes@, and [email protected] bold moves that OpenBSD is making to become even more secure. Dan Langille then spoke briefly to everyone who had attended (which left the largest room with standing room only). It was an emotional farwell, as Dan described how much the convention’s success had exceeded his expectations, and reminded everyone to return in 2005! I want to make a comment about Dan here. Despite my inability to pronounce his name correctly, Dan did an outstanding job of organizing and running BSDCan. Having "hung out" at The Royal Oak while registration was going on, I can’t count how many OpenBSD developers at The Black Thorn. times Dan went out of his way to introduce people to others with similar interests. I have no idea how he kept track of so many people, but I think it made the trip more enjoyable for a everyone. A large number of people who had attended the conference then went to Patty Bolands for food and drinks. I had an additional opportunity to speak with the OpenBSD developers while I as there, as well as many of the FreeBSD developers. This is the first BSD convention

3 of 5 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"BSDCan 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan1.html

I’ve been able to attend. I have to say that, overall, the most exciting part for me was meeting people face-to-face that I’ve known, or known about for many years. It The OpenBSD folks stayed at The Black Thorn longer than anyone else was an interesting experience to put a face on many of the email addresses I’ve seen go through my mailbox over the years.

Dan Langille (pronounced Lean-guel) demonstrates Bacula.

Theo de Raadt explains OpenBSD security to a packed room.

OpenBSD developers at Patty Bolands. Dan Langille (pronounced Lin-gool) gets emotional as he closes the conference.

4 of 5 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"BSDCan 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan1.html

Later that evening, I got to see just how good some of the folks who work on the BSD teams are! After most everyone else had left, David Maxwell, Jacques Vidrine, Maxim Sobolev and myself decided to explore the city a bit. We had an elaborate plan on how we would accomplish our exploration while still getting everyone back to their respective hotels in time for their respective flights (respectively). Unfortunately, we forgot to take into account the prowess of a BSD security officer. The instant David was out of sight of the rest of us, he disappeared, like some sort of ninja wearing Predator camouflage. I suspect it was a reflex action, but without jump-jets on the rental car, we were unable to track him down. The moral being: keep a close eye on your security officers, they’re sneaky buggers! Sunday morning a breakfast was organized for everyone who had not yet left town. I convinced Tom and Carla to get up early to bid a final farewell to everyone before the 9-hour drive back to Pittsburgh. My greatest regret is that there was only one of me to attend. There were many time slots where I would have liked to attend more than one of the presentations that were scheduled. The socializing helped: on Thursday night I spent a considerable time The NetBSD and FreeBSD security teams confer under the cone of silence: listening to Jan Wieck talk David, "We need to keep this secure ..." about Slony at The Royal Jacques, "What?" Oak, and when the time came for his presentation, I was torn between all three talks scheduled. I decided to go to the presentation on IPv6 instead, in the hopes that my previous discussions with Jan would make up for missing his formal presentation. I can offer a few points of honest advice to anyone who is considering BSDCan 2005: 1. Arrive. Work it out somehow ... it’s really worth it. 2. You don’t need to rent a car. Tom and Carla both complained that they weren’t used to walking everywhere, yet Tom’s car stayed in the garage the entire time. Everything is relatively close by, so you can save some money on the trip if you need to. 3. If you want to sightsee, plan on arriving early or leaving late ... the entire time the conference is going on is pretty much filled up with activities and socializing. 4. Don’t miss BSDCan 2005, if it’s half as good as this years, it’s too good to miss. 5. Did I mention that you should come? A grumpy Tom Rhodes in stark contrast to his artistically presented bagel. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone next year.

My name is Bill Moran and I’ve been using FreeBSD and other open-source software for business and pleasure since 1998. Since 2001, my company, Potential Technologies has provided BSD-based solutions to companies around the Pittsburgh area, and around the world! I am also the author of phppdflib, a library for dynamically creating PDF files.

5 of 5 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Another BSDCan 2004 Report "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan2.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

Another BSDCan 2004 Report Search by Bosko Milekic Monthly Ezine It’s Sunday, May 16, 2004. 5:30PM. BSDCan has come to a formal close late last night at around 2:00AM, when George, other Search NYCBUGers, myself, and a friend decided to finally give the poor waitresses tending on us a break, and leave the pub once and for all. But I’m still in Ottawa, and will only get to go home to Montreal tomorrow night. Get BSD Stuff There are still a few conference attendees in town; some flying out early tomorrow. Christian S.J. Peron, a new FreeBSD Committer is still in town with his collegue and friend Yvan and they’re planning to drop by a little later, at which point we’ll probably go out somewhere for dinner and drinks. I’m here until tomorrow night because I have an engagement at work (the place where I work has offices here). I’m tired from all the lecturing and socializing so in many ways I wish I was home, sleeping. The first ever BSDCan was a success. The attendance numbers were solid, but even greater was the quality of the attendees: there were some genuinely cool people in Ottawa this weekend. Few can do justice to an event such as this with words, and I am certainly not one of those few. So I’ll make it brief. Thursday night was registration night. Dan cleverly took this to a roomey nearby pub, which for a conference of this size was a phenomenal idea. People socialize and get an opportunity to meet right from the very start, which seems to be a good way to foster good conversation throughout the rest of the conference. Although Robert Watson registered only the following morning, Poul-Henning made an appearence while I was still there, as did Tom Rhodus, Maxim Sobolev, Christian Peron, and many others, all of whom I was honoured to meet (many for the first time). Ironically, a sobering experience (despite its location). Friday morning, 10:00AM, was my talk on FreeBSD Network Buffer allocation. For those who know me, you’ll undoubtedly remark that this is unusually early for me, but I woke up and made it anyway. I think the talk went reasonably well and it felt good to finally explain, in words, some of what I’ve been doing (w.r.t. FreeBSD) in the past little while. The remaining talks were great and I attended a talk at each slot, also quite unusual for me. Poul-Henning’s talk on GEOM was great and finally gave me a good perspective on that part of our tree. Friday night was pub night. Dinner was OK, drinks were decent, location was nice, weather was good. Had quite a good time and finally ended up with Tom Rhodes, his girlfriend Carla, our security-officer Jacques Vidrine, Maxim Sobolev, and Daniel Harris (dannyboy@) back at my hotel room. We hung out for a while and laughed a great deal, eventually calling the infamous Alfred Perlstein to bug him for not having shown up. Alfred’s been busy with work, it seems. Yesterday featured another great talk lineup. I saw most of the pf talk, Robert’s talk on MAC et al. (a very good talk with a significantly different approach from previous talks he gave on the subject -- at least that I have seen... in a very good way). The day ended with Theo’s awesome speech on Exploit Mitigation techniques adopted in OpenBSD, which included a very good overview of the changes involved for accomodating OpenBSD’s W^X page-mapping policy. Dan’s speech at the end was emotional and great. Dan and co. did a really good job here and we all really had a blast. Last night was spent partying, notably with George and other NYCBUGers, a couple of dutch guys, a german, a frenchman, ... (the list goes on). I met so many incredible people here that it would be impossible to describe them all in a single article. Notably, David Rhodus from DragonFlyBSD showed up, and although he didn’t manage to convince Matt

1 of 2 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Another BSDCan 2004 Report "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan2.html

Dillon or Jeff Hsu to come up with him, he himself was an indispensable addition to the conference, often providing me with alternative outlooks on our little open-source projects, sharing words and good ideas. Next year’s BSDCan promises to be, yet again, a great open-source event. Everyone is welcome: database people, OS people, Linux people, BSD people, etc. I look forward to seeing you there.

2 of 2 26.05.2004 08:15 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"NYCBUG Goes To BSDCan "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan3.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

NYCBUG Goes To BSDCan Search George Rosamond Monthly Ezine Off We Go Search Four of us left Brooklyn at 7:30 am on Thursday morning to avoid the traffic on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan. Well, there’s no way to totally avoid it; but there’s a better chance of getting through Manhattan at that hour to the Holland Tunnel than 30 minutes later. Get BSD Stuff Remember, we’re leaving from a city where you can be stuck in traffic at 2 am early on a Tuesday on the Brooklyn Bridge. We know that there will be two additional NYCBUG members in Ottawa who arrive by plane. But since we only started up the group in January, we are all basically strangers to each other, especially in the context of a long drive to the Great White North. Our trip was hardly uneventful. Some where on Interstate 81 in Pennsylvania, the other NYCBUG attendees in the car, Ike, Michael and Bob, had an internal network up and running. Then by the time we hit Syracuse, they were using Michael’s GPRS-capable cell phone to surf the web, create SSH sessions and download mail. They even managed to post to the NYCBUG talk list. It was also interesting to scan the various wireless networks along the way. As we had KisMAC running with an Airport Extreme card on OS X, we were unable to crack any WEP-encrypted networks, but that wasn’t necessary in rural western New York state. But oddly enough, the entire city of Syracuse accessible from Interstate 81 had less wireless-coverage than a single block in Manhattan.

Border Crossing

When we arrived at the Ontario, Canada and New York, US border, we thought "no sweat". We had no drugs or identifiable weapons, and the Canadian government doesn’t seem to be controlled by Redmond. We handed our US passports to the young woman at Canadian customs and explained we were going to Ottawa for a UNIX conference. She took my attempted innocent grin and half-flirtatious eyelash batting and gave me a disproportionate smile in response. I said, "I know, we don’t look like geeks, but we are." We drove a few more feet to take tourist pictures of the "Welcome to Ontario" sign, when Bob revealed what he thinks she really thought I meant by "UNIX." "Oh, harmless boys, going off to a eunuchs conference. How cute." This joke continued through the weekend, with everyone quick to get it.

Arrival

Dan Langille told us to arrive at 5:30 pm. We arrived at exactly 5:30, with our throats thirsting for a malty beverage and our legs ready to get some activity, other than the earlier parking lot football game at "Thee Diner" (sic) outside of Syracuse. We refreshed ourselves and began meeting BSDCan attendees from around the world. Personally, I had my own mission. For years, I’ve worked with BSDMall and Daemon News. I needed to hook up with Chris Coleman. I knew him as a close collaborator in the digital world, but didn’t know if he had a hunch back,

1 of 5 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"NYCBUG Goes To BSDCan "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan3.html

Coke-bottle-thick glasses, or an extra leg. Dan told me he hadn’t arrived yet, so I meandered around BSDCan the night of our arrival, and the next morning I looked like the little duck searching for his mother: "Are you Chris Coleman?" "Have you seen Chris Coleman?" The quest was fruitless until lunch time on the first full day of the conference. This tall, lanky, Midwestern-type was attempting to balance a cart of boxes. On a hunch I called Dan Langille coyly admonishing a conference out "Chris" and was surprised to actually have it be him. attendee for arriving late. Our introductions were brief, and off to work we went. Other than the registration table, BSD Mall/Daemon News had the only table at BSDCan. There was a ton of software, shirts and books. We had to setup an extra table just to house the give-away items we brought. As the technical level of the conference was quite high, it was a pleasure not having to answer questions like "How many distros are there of BSD?" and "Why did BSD branch off from Linux?" That’s generally the type of queries we faced for years at LinuxWorld Expo and even MacWorld in New York City. The sessions NYCBUG attendees went to were amazing. I attended the sessions by Dan, Ryan McBride, Poul-Henning Kamp, Robert Watson and Theo de Raadt. It was great to meet a variety of BSDer’s from around Canada, the US and a small but good section of the rest of The BSDMall/Daemon News table. the world. It’s even better when the sessions cause ideas to flow and plans to brew, and to have so many others to discuss it with at the bar afterwards. The bar. Oh yeah, I mean the bars. Our NYCBUG meetings are monthly Poul-Henning Kamp’s session on GBDE. the first Wednesday of the month, usually at 6 pm or so, and we are in the habit of the meetings ending in the wee hours of the morning. I know the last "meeting" at BSDCan ended for me at 3:30 am or so, in some bar on Houston Street. So when you’re out with BSD hackers from all over, who attended the same brilliant meetings with you, what do you think will happen then? A hot topic among some of us was Dan’s Bacula meeting. It was great, and there are some interesting implementations to do with a consulting business, regardless of the clients’ server and desktop operating systems. Pete’s drinking arm, Ike, Jesse and Bob from More pressingly, we also proposed to some of our newly NYCBUG dream about New York pizza and acquired Canadian friends a unique idea for spreading their bagels. way of life south of the border. We asked a series of questions leading to our main point: "What is your healthcare system like?" "How big is your military?" and finally, "Have you considered invading the US, or at least New York state, to spread this universal healthcare thing?"

We Make Some Friends

Of course some of the NYCBUG attendees made some better "friends" than others. Those pictures will remain among NYCBUG-BSDCan participants to protect the innocent and the guilty. I met a number of people who I enjoyed discussions with. Wayne from London explained the draconian laws in Britain which allow any police officer above the rank of sergeant to ask for your password, electronic keys, etc., for access to the data you’re serving. Not immediately fulfilling this request means an automatic two years in jail. But how you perform logging isn’t detailed, as long as you have consistent

2 of 5 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"NYCBUG Goes To BSDCan "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan3.html

logging policies throughout your organization. Well, there’s no more resourceful response to this than having your /etc/newsyslog.conf file rotate your logs every ten minutes. I also spoke to Dru Lavigne for the first time face-to-face. Dru’s contribution to BSD documentation and advocacy, particularly on O’Reilly’s OnLamp.com, is equalled by few. We’ve discussed a number of things, including the impending release of her BSD Hacks book. There’s no question to me that the increase in BSD popularity is significant, and that this book could move beyond the expectations of the author, publisher and distributors. There are many, many other discussions I could mention, but I would just have to say I enjoyed each one. We were up for around 19 hours a day and talked non-stop, so this article could continue for days. Of honorable mention is Chris Coleman. Chris and his wife Susannah trucked out the entire contents of the BSDMall/DN table in their minivan from rural Illinois, along with their three young and remarkably well-behaved children. Chris’ contribution to the BSD family doesn’t get a fraction of the recognition it deserves. He is tirelessly thinking up new ways of building the BSD family, while he and his own family subsist on a meager salary. Without Chris making the two day drive each way to Ottawa, the conference wouldn’t have been quite the same. And then there’s Dan Langille, of course. Dan, who crashed Chris Coleman of BSDMall/Daemon News at my hopelessly searches the table for a book on apartment Visual Basic. during LinuxWorld Expo this past January, has contributed enormous amounts to the BSD community for years. How many FreeBSD users haven’t used FreeBSDDiary.org? How many people don’t quickly query FreshPorts.org when they are looking for a particular port? The effort Dan expended to create BSDCan is amazing. He took a pretty atomized BSD community in the east wing of Dan Langille’s Final speech. Canada and the US and provided it a tremendous outlet for its energy and focus.

Montreal for Sunday Night

But of course, as techs, our main quest in Montreal was for bandwidth. It was Monday now, and the work week had begun. The pictures in this article provide some insight into our fun. It was amazing how sparse wireless networks were in Montreal. We didn’t expect the concentrations of Manhattan, but we did expect to get decent connectivity here and there. We wandered down the cafe-lined street of Saint Denis, to the old port district of Montreal, through the office buildings of downtown Montreal, up through Chinatown. No strong signals, according to our wireless detection devices. Finally, we found a very strong signal next to a sidestreet bed and breakfast, just north of Chinatown.

3 of 5 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"NYCBUG Goes To BSDCan "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan3.html

Ike and Bob investigated a nearby window to find a D-Link router and cable modem sitting there clear in the window. As I took a picture of Bob next to the sign, the proprietor opened the door and asked if we need any assistance. Now in New York City this might have been a not-so-veiled threat, but we just responded with smiles, and "non, merci."

Bob gives the thumbs up to this Montreal bed and breakfast for providing free wireless access. To make the trip more vacation-like, we stopped in Montreal for Sunday evening. The bars, sights and restaurants were great. It was a big step up from Ottawa, which seemed as if it was administered a strong tranquilizer some years back.

We spent the good part of an hour sitting on the sidewalk next to our brilliant access point, while passers-by gawked at us.

Bob and Ike smuggly express their accomplishment at finding an open AP in Montreal, BSDCan finale +1.

We got our bandwidth, and some of us even managed to get some work done. We arrived back in Brooklyn at 11 pm Monday evening. We had spent the last few hours in the car arguing fervently about technology, from broad issues to the details of testing network protocols. For days after, we are still all exhausted physically, and our brains were clearly on overload from the trip. We are clear on one thing: even though our NYCBUG talk list was down for most of BSDCan, our excitement means that Dan will have more NYCBUG attendees next year, and that means more people demanding decent pizza, bagels, and a vodka other than Smirnoff. But we know they Sometimes you don’t need any electronic won’t--can’t--demand a better conference. wireless tools to find the best access points. . .

4 of 5 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"NYCBUG Goes To BSDCan "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdcan3.html

A quiet moment between sessions. Between sessions at BSDCan.

Late night in front of the dorms with Jesse, Ike, Hugo, Bob and Pete.

Between sessions again at BSDCan. End of the coWnfeorreknincge obnu sat lcer.ack for Twofish?

More end of the conference bustle.

5 of 5 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Report of the pkgsrcCon 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/pkgsrcCon2004.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

Report of the pkgsrcCon 2004 Search Hubert Feyrer Monthly Ezine The Event Search Over the last couple of months, the infrastructure of pkgsrc, the NetBSD (and others :-) packages system has undergone quite some changes. To augment communication via email and chat, a call was made to all people interested in pkgsrc development to join in for a Get BSD Stuff pkgsrcCon, where presentations on pkgsrc details were given and discussed face-to-face.

The Place

The meeting happened on the weekend of May 1st (April 30th to May 2nd) at the Institute for Discrete Mathematics and Geometry at Vienna University of Technology in Vienna, Austria’s capital city. The place was chosen because many pkgsrc developers are located in Europe; Vienna is fairly central to Europe and also has good medium and long-distance infrastructure for travelers from abroad.

The People

More than thirty people registered and participated in the Con. Many of them were developers working on NetBSD and pkgsrc, but we also had interested NetBSD users and visitors from other open source projects who wanted to know more about pkgsrc. All in all, people came in from many different countries, among them Finland, Sweden, England, France, Germany, Poland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and the United States. The conference was jointly planned by Johnny C. Lam and Thomas Klausner, who also did a lot of the preparation and talks. Great work, guys!

The Talks

So what was on the schedule? I’ll try to give a rough summary for each of the talks, see www.pkgsrcCon.org.

pkgsrc-wip:

To begin the Con, Thomas Klausner gave an overview on pkgsrc-wip, the "Work In Progress" repository located on SourceForge, that is intended to give non-NetBSD-developers a chance to work on packages with other people, getting comments and help and finalizing them so they can be moved into pkgsrc. For more information, check out the SourceForge pkgsrc-wip project.

Things I Think Are Broken And That I’d Like To Fix:

Johnny Lam gave a list of things that he thought are not optimal in the pkgsrc infrastructure, and that need work. Items included here were breaking up bsd.pkg.mk into smaller parts that are used for each stage (fetch, extract, ...) and making LOCALBASE=/usr work.

buildlink3, Part 1: Philosophy and Methodology:

Making more developers understand the concepts behind buildlink was one of the main objectives of the pkgsrcCon, and Johnny Lam started by giving an overview of how it evolved. The original idea of chroot builds proved too difficult, so instead a small shadow-tree with only the headers and libraries of packages really intended to be used as dependencies is built. There were several steps to the goal of buildlink3. The

1 of 3 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Report of the pkgsrcCon 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/pkgsrcCon2004.html

system as it is now supports these goals as well as abstraction of compilers, and pkgviews. Compiler abstraction allows pkgsrc to build with non-gcc like SunWorks on Solaris or the MIPS-Pro compiler on Iris; pkgviews had its own talks.

buildlink3, Part 2: Implementation:

After giving an overview of what buildlink3 is and does (and will do, eventually), there was an in-depth session that walked through many of the wrapper scripts involved and invoked by the buildlink setup and compile process, discussed the workarounds needed to make (and keep) libtool and pkg-config happy and integration of functionality provided by the operating system that doesn’t need to be pulled in as a package as well as important parts of the bsd.buildlink3.mk Makefile.

Using pkgsrc on Solaris, Linux and NetBSD:

This was an introduction to pkgsrc for users who didn’t know what pkgsrc is. As there were many pkgsrc developers listening, the goal was not so much telling them what they already knew, but presenting it to them so they were in a position to start advocaging pkgsrc themselves. Topics covered were reasons and scenarios in which pkgsrc is useful, how to get pkgsrc going on non-NetBSD platforms using Linux as an example, and an example of how to use pkgsrc without root privileges--a step building up confidence for users who want to try pkgsrc for the first time.

Cross-building packages:

Krister Waldfridsson started the third pkgsrcCon day with a presentation of his work on cross-building packages. The basis is to have an emulator that fully emulates a StrongARM CPU, and that runs NetBSD/shark (or some other port of NetBSD based on the StrongARM CPU). As this is very slow, a number of speed optimisations are made, for example, not running the NetBSD/shark compiler under emulation, but by running a crosscompiler built using NetBSD’s cross-toolchain natively. With all these optimisations, the emulator running NetBSD/shark in userland on a 500MHz PC compiled pkgsrc packages about at the same speed as the PC compiled native packages. This very nice approach is still a work-in-progress, but we can look forward for it to get to a state where it will be made public.

Introduction to Package Views:

Alistair Crooks gave the next presentation. First giving an overall run-down of the pkgsrc history, he then introduced the idea of "pkgviews" in pkgsrc. The concept is to not install packages directly into a target directory, but into some "depot" and then make links to the target directory. That way, two versions of the same package can be installed at the same time, allowing easier testing, up- and down(!)grading.

pkgviews:

After everyone was upto-date regarding the concept of pkgviews, Johnny Lam illustrated that pkgviews was one of the design goals of the buildlink3 framework, and what the interesting internals are. Starting by creating the symlink tree and issues involved, discussion went over to shared files and configuration files, design decisions that were possible and solutions that were chosen.

Roadmap For The Future:

Alistair Crooks rounded up the discussion by introducing various features of other packaging systems (RPM, FreeBSD, ...), then compared them to the ones in pkgsrc. Agreeing that number of packages is not everything ("size doesn’t matter" :-), he went into further steps that we will take in pkgsrc in the near, mediate and far future. Items included were maintaining of the stable pkgsrc branches, completion of buildlink3 and pkgviews migration, more robust binary pkg handling as well as better updating, and various smaller projects including finding someone to eat all the choccolate Al got. :)

The Rest & The Future

Between the talks, many small discussions arose around many problems and ongoing changes in pkgsrc and NetBSD. Saturday afternoon was used for PGP key-signing to further extend the web of trust of NetBSD developers. All in all, the event was a very good chance to discuss many issues face to face, and the general concensus is to repeat it next year. So be sure to book your plane tickets early! :-)

2 of 3 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Report of the pkgsrcCon 2004 "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/pkgsrcCon2004.html

3 of 3 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Traffic shaping with trickle "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/trickle.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

Traffic shaping with trickle Search Armijn Hemel Monthly Ezine I share my Internet connection (ADSL with 1 MBit downstream) with several people. Sometimes it happens that we have some conflicting Search interests. I do quite a few bulk transfers, mainly ISO files to test new Linux and BSD releases inside VMWare. These bulk transfers tend to clog the line, which the other users don’t really appreciate (interactive sessions such as SSH and IRC become nearly unusable). So, recently Get BSD Stuff I started looking at traffic shaping so I could be a bit nicer to the other users. I usually do FTP transfers with the built in FTP client in Mozilla (I happen to like the clicketyclick interface). But, Mozilla lacks traffic shaping. So I started looking at other FTP clients and ended up with gFTP, which can do traffic shaping. gFTP works nice but, of course, it does not help much if you use other methods for bulk transfer, such as tar over SSH, CVS or rsync. Since some of the machine where I have to get my data off don’t run an FTP server I had to look at other ways of doing traffic shaping. In my case traffic shaping in kernelspace is not an option. I use an ADSL "modem", for which I don’t have the kernelsource, and the "modem" itself doesn’t offer any mechanism for traffic shaping. Besides, I don’t want to shape all the time, just on a per-session basis (when others also have to make use of the connection) and I run different operating systems (*BSD, Linux) so I want to be able to do traffic shaping on all of my machines without too much effort. A friend said he had a similar problem and he gave me a URL for "trickle", a bandwidth shaper in userspace. He hadn’t had time to test it out, so I thought I’d give it a try. It turned out to be exactly what I needed. "trickle" is everything I had hoped for. It’s small, it’s easy to configure, it’s easy to use and it does what it needs to do and just that. But the thing I like best: the applications I use don’t have to be recompiled to use bandwidth shaping and I can use traffic shaping on a per-need basis. This is where user space traffic shaping is more convenient than kernel space traffic shaping. At night, I can completely saturate the line and I don’t want to use traffic shaping, but during the day I do want to use it. "trickle" lets me do that.

Using "trickle"

Using "trickle" is really simple as the following example shows: $ trickle -s -d 100 ftp

This is all you need to set the download limit for the ftp program at 100 KB/s for a single instance of ftp. The "-s" parameter here means "standalone". Normally, "trickle" checks if there is a "trickled" running. This daemon can shape traffic for a set of programs. Some parameters can be specified such as the time-smoothing and length-smoothing (see the manpages for "trickle" for the exact explanations) for programs. For example, you can set different parameters for SSH and FTP. When a client connects to "trickled" the configuration for that program (if any) is read and applied. But, "trickle" works just fine in stand-alone mode. Integrating trickle in a desktop environment is very easy. For example, in GNOME you can just adapt some of the launchers to use trickle, which I did for Mozilla (see picture). You could also just make some wrapper scripts.

How trickle works

1 of 2 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Traffic shaping with trickle "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/trickle.html

So, how does "trickle" do it? It uses one of the oldest tricks in the UNIX book since shared libraries were invented: preloading. What in fact happens is that "trickle" redefines functions that read and write data to sockets. The name of the functions are the same as in the C library, but the functions in "trickle" add some extra functionality: the shaping. When a program is started via "trickle" and it calls the functions to send to or recieve from a socket the functions from "trickle" are used and not the functions in the C library.

Caveats

Even though trickle will work for most things, there are a few exceptions. Because trickle uses prelinking it won’t work for statically linked binaries. Also, users could circumvent the whole shaping mechanism by preloading other libraries, like trickle does. However, in my opinion these are just minor inconveniences. During my tests I found that some programs didn’t always want to play along. For example, Mozilla didn’t like the parameters I set initially for "trickled" (low settings for "time-smoothing" and "length-smoothing"). So if you want to use trickled you’ll probably have to experiment a bit with the options for it. Another program that I still haven’t fully working the way I want to with "trickle" is bittorrent (for spreading those Linux ISOs). When I decrease the upload limit, the download speed also drops severely, even though I’ve not touched the download limit at all. Of course, there is room for improvement. Currently the limits are inflexible. If you set the download limit to 20 KB/s there is no way you can increase or decrease that limit. It would be nice to be able to dynamically adjust the limits. Another thing that would be handy is to be able to specify the limits themselves in the configuration for trickled. Right now you can only specify some parameters. All in all I can say that "trickle" is a quite nifty tool and probably your best choice if you’re looking for an easy to use flexible bandwidth shaper.

2 of 2 26.05.2004 08:16 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"This Month in BSD. "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdthismonth.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

This Month in BSD. Search Sam Smith Monthly Ezine OpenBSD Search OpenBSD 3.5 Released (Ever-improving security, 3 new hardware platforms, many pf improvements and more) Get BSD Stuff Kerneltrap article Undeadly article What’s new 3.4 to 3.5 changelog Developer Interviews OnLAMP OpenBSD PF Developers Interview Kerneltrap interview with Ryan McBride Installing on HPPA Its much the same as anywhere else CARP your way to High Availability Article on using CARP from NewsForge Firewall Failover with pfsync and CARP http://www.countersiege.com/doc/pfsync-carp/ OpenBSD Journal moves from deadly.org to undeadly.org (now run by Daniel Hartmeier) http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20040409000001 Building a PennKey (Kerberos) Authenticated Access Point with OpenBSD Documentation on using OpenBSD as a kerberos authenticating wireless access point. New Platform: luna88k (added post 3.5) http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20040421214944&mode=expanded MultiPath routing (added post 3.5) Allows for multiple default routes

PF2K4 -- PF Developer’s hackathon Undeadly article Photos

NetBSD

1 of 3 26.05.2004 08:17 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"This Month in BSD. "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdthismonth.html

NetBSD™ NetBSD now a trademark US Trademark Office entry Quarterly Status Report http://www.netbsd.org/Foundation/reports/2004Q1.html Security Announcements TCP

FreeBSD

Poul-Henning Kamp requests funding for FreeBSD development (and gets it)

http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html FreeBSD mailing list summaries http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/

DragonFlyBSD

Big Picture Status update

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/status/diary.cgi Libcaps complete (interprocess communication) http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/archives/000365.html New Installer Screenshot Other NFS now caching failed lookups. GCC3 has ProPolice enabled. More NameCache plans All of April’s DragonFly BSD Digest entries

Apple

Reading

Vulnerabilities database for FreeBSD and OpenBSD

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2004-April/001859.html http://www.vuxml.org/freebsd/ http://www.vuxml.org/openbsd/ From O’Reilly’s OnLAMP.com Diskless, Low-Form-Factor OpenBSD Systems Profiling LAMP Applications with Apache’s Blackbox Logs Planning for Disaster Recovery on LAMP Systems Mail Server Filtering Wikipedia Entries for *BSD DragonFly OpenBSD NetBSD FreeBSD

BSDCan Conference Schedule

2 of 3 26.05.2004 08:17 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"This Month in BSD. "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/bsdthismonth.html

http://www.bsdcan.org/2004/schedule.php

3 of 3 26.05.2004 08:17 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Daemon’s Advocate: How to be an... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/dadvocate.html

May 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

Daemon’s Advocate: How to be an Search Advocate for BSD

Robert Watson Monthly Ezine Search The BSD phenomenon is quite remarkable: a community of incredibly talented and experienced developers, administrators, and users, joined by diverse technical interests and a common desire to build and use the best operating systems in the world. What’s interesting, though, is Get BSD Stuff that despite the fact that advocacy is arguably not one of the strongest aspects of the BSD world, BSD and BSD-derived systems seem to continue to be widely used, with growing developer and user communities. While BSD lacks flashy multi-million dollar advertising campaigns involving graffiti-ing San Francisco sidewalks, it seems to have grown a firm base of committed fans who respect the technical accomplishments and maturity of the system. Which raises the question: what role should advocacy play for the BSD community?

An Operating System, Not A Religion

It’s with some chagrin that I recall first arriving at Carnegie Mellon University in mid-1995 and looking for other BSD users there. As somewhat of a casual and inexperienced user at the time, I sent a message to the local FreeBSD message board, asking about whether there were any regular meetings and suggesting we should do some advocacy on campus. I received a firm admonition: FreeBSD is about operating systems, not about advocacy--advocacy is for Linux users. Which, if you think about it, is a somewhat refreshing perspective. BSD is, after all, about a commitment to technical excellence, and not about making an operating system platform into a religion. As with many predecessors in the world of computer software, there was a time when Linux was frequently promoted purely as a result of it being Linux, not because of its technical merits (many of which followed that time period rather than preceding it). It seems that an important part of the BSD identity is not being a zealot: this isn’t about true belief. We want to use a good system for the right reasons.

The Importance of Community, Not to Mention Resources

That said, there are some limits to this perspective, however refreshing it may be. The success of any large group endeavor inevitably relies on a commitment by the members to do things that need to be done, not just what they enjoy. So while we might eschew the fervor that seems only too frequently to mark all areas of the computer industry, it’s also important that we not be invisible to the world. For BSD to remain the success it is, not to mention grow, it requires a continued investment of time by the members of the BSD community to make it happen. Operating systems, however strong, require constant tending and feeding: new hardware, new capabilities, new requirements. Community plays an important role in this: each BSD project is characterized by strong relationships between developers and consumers, as the quality of a system involves not just the pure source code, but broad deployment, a focus on what users need and want, and a source of new participants. And from a purely pragmatic view as a kernel hacker, the end-user today may, after all, be the kernel hacker of tomorrow.

The Importance of Perception

So, despite our apparent firm lack of interest in being the popular kid on the block, it’s also important to make sure that we can be at the table when it comes to things that are important. Things like participating in the standards process, running on new consumer hardware, and avoiding the perception of staleness that will be an obstacle for those with interested in BSD getting to use it in their places of work or products. All of these require BSD to have a public presence that holds credibility -- BSD won’t be invited to the table or supported by vendors if it’s not seen to be important in the bigger picture. More and more hardware vendors are recognizing the importance of supporting BSD for this very reason: the operating system world has changed a great deal in the last few years, and OS consumers expect more support for a diversity of

1 of 2 26.05.2004 08:17 Daemon News ’200405’ : ’"Daemon’s Advocate: How to be an... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200405/dadvocate.html

systems, and aren’t afraid to ask their vendors to provide it.

Little Acts of Advocacy

Here are four small things you can do today to help improve the visibility and use of BSD: A book is a powerful thing--books lend credibility to any subject, not to mention making both a good source of technical support and a great way to prop up your monitor. Go to your local book store. Notice that some books have their spines out, and some their covers. Observe that there are more Windows and Linux books with their covers out, but some FreeBSD and *BSD books nearby. Quietly rearrange things, just a little, to level the playing field. While you’re at it, make sure that your favorite edition of Knuth or Stevens has its cover showing too. Don’t forget to buy copies too! Attend your local Linux Users Group meeting and be a presence: you’d be surprised how many such institutions have a firm BSD contingent, and in some cases, even a BSD majority that maintains the LUG name so as to avoid redoing the web pages and printing new t-shirts. I hesitate to use the word "poach", but the reality is that Linux users frequently make ideal future BSD users. Linux is an easier next step coming from the world of Windows, and it’s all the rage. You’d probably be surprised to learn just how many BSD developers and users started out with Linux and then found BSD met their needs so much better. Ask if you can get it for BSD: if you’re anything like me, you occasionally want to run a program on a BSD system and discover you can’t because it simply isn’t available. The usual answer is "So find another solution", or perhaps boot your Windows partition. I won’t tell you not to do that, but I will ask you to drop an e-mail or make a phone call first: make sure the vendor knows that you would prefer it ran on BSD. Your call will be blown off, I’m sure. But after a few thousand calls, they’ll have to try a little harder to ignore the reality of a market. Pick something that runs on BSD, and tell the vendor you appreciate it. Many vendors do sell products for BSD -- in fact, as time goes by, more and more do. Make sure they know that you appreciate it. Drop their tech support and sales people an e-mail or a phone call about how their supporting BSD helped you pick their product. Chances are, the first line of technical support doesn’t get too many thank you e-mails anyway, so it may have more impact than you think. Each of these takes only a few minutes, but each will make a difference in making sure that BSD is seen as the vibrant community that it is.

A Sea of Glowing Horns

Through all of this, it’s important not to forget that BSD is, in fact, more than just a piece of software. The communities that build, maintain, and support the software are real things too, and the success of those communities is vital to the future of BSD. Advocacy is important to that community, because advocacy is an important way for the community to grow. You don’t have to be a zealot to help a friend install BSD on their file server, suggest BSD for the new firewall at work, or tell your parents to buy a Mac with Mac OS X. Especially if you do it out of a firm conviction that you are recommending BSD based on the fact that it really is excellent software. You don’t have to be a C programmer to contribute to BSD either: helping to build the community of BSD is a great way to help the future of BSD too.

2 of 2 26.05.2004 08:17