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Verisign Announces vBSDcon 2015
Verisign has recently announced the dates for a second vBSDcon to occur September 11 – 13, 2015 in Reston, VA. vBSDcon is technical, BSD-based conference for users, developers, engineers, and innovators working with BSD-based operating systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and more…
The program is being expanded in 2015 to colocate a FreeBSD Developer’s Summit the day preceding main conference activities. Additionally, space will be allotted for use of Hacker Lounges and Doc Sprints. These self-moderated sessions are open time during the off hours of the conference for use by members of all the BSD communities to collaborate and work on varying projects.
The inaugural vBSDcon was a resounding success and included speakers from the FreeBSD and OpenBSD communities. It also featured prestigious sponsors including The FreeBSD Foundation, who is returning as a Developer Summit sponsor in 2015, RootBSD, Daemon Security, iXsystems, HP, Juniper, and CDW.
BSDCan 2014 Travel Woes
Originally scheduled to fly out on Wednesday via United, I arrived at the airport, parked my vehicle, removed my bags, and proceeded to walk to the main terminal. My phone vibrated while walking to United’s check-in counters…I just received a flight cancellation notice citing “severe weather conditions in our route network” despite there being little weather in the areas of Dulles and Ottawa that day. A United representative rescheduled the flight the following morning which was subsequently cancelled for the same reason…still no real weather to be seen, but there was certainly weather on the way for Thursday evening into Friday.
I contacted the travel agent following the 2nd cancellation and discussed two options; A connecting flight with a 4 hour layover that day which ended up being cancelled or a non-stop flight Friday morning. Seeing as how the total time on the former flight would have been 8 – 10 hours, I opted for the latter, shorter, 1.5 hour flight Friday morning, just in time to attend most of BSDCan’s main conference activities.
I awoke Friday morning to a deluge of rain thinking the flight would certainly be cancelled, but the flight status, according to United, was “on schedule”. I got up and continued my daily morning routine intending to make the drive to the airport while checking the phone periodically for flight status updates. The phone vibrated as I was preparing to leave home with an email update that the flight was cancelled. It was the cancellation I had been expecting so, instead of driving to the airport, I continued into the office.
Shortly after arriving at the office, I received an email from United with the revised itinerary:
The irony in the revised itinerary is two-fold in that I depart Dulles to Ottawa on the same plane I was originally scheduled to return to Dulles from Ottawa on and that United thinks it’s ok for me to fly from Dulles to Ottawa, stay on the plane, and fly back to Dulles approximately 30 minutes later.
vBSDcon Wrap-Ups
vBSDcon Wrap-Ups!
Verisign’s first-ever vBSDcon was a very successful event which was held October 25 – 27, 2013 at the Dulles Hyatt in Herndon, VA. Speakers and attendees from all over the US and Europe convened at vBSDcon for exclusive networking opportunities, plenary talks, birds of a feathers, and speed geeking.
In the weeks following the conference, several organizations posted follow-ups of the event. We’d like to encourage you to take a few minutes to read through them at the links below.
- iXsystems, a vBSDcon Gold sponsor, posted this write-up
- RootBSD, the vBSDcon Tote sponsor, posted this write-up
- BSDNow, a weekly BSD news podcast, has a podcast review of vBSDcon here
- Undeadly.org published a small article based on Henning Brauer and Reyk Floeter’s experiences here.
- Check out the million+ impression tweets here
- John-Mark Gurney provided a trip report here
- Verisign’s own wrap-up, by CTO Burt Kaliski, is here
OpenBSD at vBSDcon October 25 – 27, 2013 in Virginia
OpenBSD at vBSDcon October 25 – 27, 2013 in Virginia
For only USD$75 you can register for vBSDcon hosted by Verisign on October 25 – 27, 2013 in Herndon, VA. That is less than 3 weeks away! If you have not registered yet, it is definitely recommended as vBSDcon will feature a series of roundtable discussions, educational sessions, best practice conversations, and exclusive networking opportunities. Registrations for vBSDcon will be open until October 23, 2013 at http://www.vbsdcon.com/.
vBSDcon will feature developers, Henning Brauer and Reyk Floeter, from the OpenBSD project. Henning and Reyk will be tag teaming a presentation on packet inspection with pf in OpenBSD. pf was introduced in 2001 as an alternative to ipf. Over the years, pf has become a mature, secure, and powerful, yet easy to use high performance packet filter. In this presentation, Henning Brauer will describe some of the features of pf and Reyk Floeter will describe utilizing relayd in conjunction with pf. You can expect to hear about using hooks for transparent proxies, deep packet inspection, socket splicing, NATs, load balancing and more.
Read more about our speakers and their topics, the conference agenda, other activities, and registrations at http://www.vbsdcon.com/. This is an event you will not want to miss. Register now before it’s too late!
Follow @VERISIGN and @hostileaddmin on Twitter for more news and updates on #vBSDcon
vBSDcon Registrations Only Open For 30 More Days!
vBSDcon Registrations Only Open For 30 More Days!
There are only 30 more days left to register for Verisign’s vBSDcon. Online registrations will become unavailable October 23, 2013. For those planning to attend, we encourage you to register soon at http://www.vbsdcon.com/. You will not want to miss this event. There will presentations by several well seasoned technologists such as Baptiste Darroussin on the subject of “PkgNG“, a new packaging system for FreeBSD based system such as FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and Dragonfly BSD.
Baptiste has a background in UNIX Systems Engineering and is involved in multiple facets of the FreeBSD project including being a Ports committer for 3 years and a src committer for 2 years. His involvement also includes being a member of the Port management team. PkgNG, a new package management framework for FreeBSD, is one of Baptiste’s primary roles where he is a lead developer.
In addition to plenary speakers, vBSDcon will also feature after conference hours Hacker Lounges and Doc Sprints. These sessions will be available for the entire BSD communities to include NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and other BSD based distributions to have a collaborative space to work and communicate with one another. Complimentary wireless internet access will also be available.
vBSDcon Registrations Remain Open, Join Us In Celebrating 20 Years of FreeBSD!
vBSDcon Registrations Still Open!
As many of you are aware, the social aspect of BSD-related conferences is very important and offers opportunities to meet and socialize with one another. Maintaining that tradition, Verisign’s vBSDcon will feature a mid-conference social, brought to you exclusively by Juniper, and will be celebrating 20 years of FreeBSD. We encourage all attendees to join Verisign and Juniper to celebrate this milestone for the FreeBSD project.
Conference activities start on October 25, 2013 at 6:00PM Eastern with a reception dinner hosted by Verisign at the Dulles Hyatt. General conference activities start the following morning with a presentation by David Chisnall, FreeBSD Core Team member, on the migration from GCC to LLVM/Clang within FreeBSD. David Chisnall is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where he works on the interface between languages, operating systems, and hardware. He is also a member of the FreeBSD Core Team and an LLVM/Clang committer. He is the author of several books, including the Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor. He created the current GNUstep implementation of Objective-C and has maintained it for some years, and is now mostly responsible for the C++ stack in FreeBSD, having implemented the ABI library and ported the STL implementation.
We are in high gear planning for vBSDcon 2013 hosted by Verisign at the Dulles Hyatt in Herndon, VA and we are drawing closer by the week with 5 weeks left to register. Registrations are being accepted on the conference web site at http://www.vbsdcon.com/ through October 23, 2013 after which registrations will be taken in person at the event.
Reminder: vBSDcon Registrations Are Open!
vBSDcon Registrations Still Open!
Users and developers from across the BSD communities are encouraged to attend the event intended bring together members of the BSD community for a series of roundtable discussions, educational sessions, best practice conversations, and exclusive networking opportunities. Those interested in such an opportunity to learn, experience, and meet others involved in the BSD communities should plan to attend vBSDcon 2013.
vBSDcon is proud to bring such prolific speakers like:
- David Chisnall, a member of FreeBSD’s Core Team, speaking on the migration from GCC to LLVM/CLANG within the FreeBSD project.
- Luigi Rizzo, FreeBSD source committer and project developer for netmap, speaking on the Evolution of the Netmap Framework
- Baptiste Daroussin, FreeBSD source committer and project developer for PkgNG, speaking on the topic of PkgNG
- Henning Brauer & Reyk Floeter, OpenBSD developers, speaking on deep packet inspection with OpenBSD and PF
- Scott Long, FreeBSD source committer, speaking on “Disspelling the Stigma of the ‘Dot-oh’ Release”
- Devin Teske, FreeBSD source committer, with “A Comprehensive Look at bsdconfig”
- Kris Moore, PC-BSD Director of Development, speaking on automating deployment of FreeBSD and PC-BSD systems
- John Hixson, of iXsystems, speaking on the topic of FreeNAS plugins
vBSDcon is being hosted at the Dulles Hyatt in Herndon, VA making it extremely convenient for attendees who book their room at the venue. The venue is also just minutes from Dulles International Airport with regular shuttles to/from the hotel and airport terminal during the day. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided on-site by the hotel’s on premise restaurant.
The schedule includes a reception dinner at the Dulles Hyatt on the evening of October 25th provided by Verisign and a mid-conference social the following evening celebrating 20 years of FreeBSD. Space for off hours hacker lounges and doc sprints will be available in the conference facilities with complimentary wireless internet access. The BSD Certification Group will also be hosting a BSDA certification exam on Saturday evening following the completion of conference activities for the day.
All are invited to take part in this event and are encouraged to register at the vBSDcon web site at http://www.vbsdcon.com/. Simply click the “Register now” button to begin your registration! We look forward to meeting you all there!
vBSDcon 2013 Registrations Now Open!
vBSDcon Registrations Now Open!
In April 2013, Verisign announced vBSDcon 2013 to be held October 25 – 27, 2013 in Dulles, VA. The conference, formatted to resemble an unConference concept, will feature speakers such as David Chisnall, Luigi Rizzo, Baptiste Daroussin, Henning Brauer, Reyk Floeter, and others. vBSDcon will include events like hacker lounges, doc sprints, BSDA exams, and a mid-conference social*.
In these most recent months, they have been developing the vBSDcon conference website hosted at http://www.vbsdcon.com/. It includes full details surrounding the schedule, agenda, and speakers for vBSDcon. The most recent addition to the conference website is that registrations are now open!
* Schedule is subject to change without notice, The BSDA exams are hosted by the BSD Certification group and not an official part of vBSDcon.
vBSDcon Website Update…
vBSDcon Website Update…
In April 2013, Verisign announced vBSDcon, a BSD-related conference, in Dulles, VA to occur October 25 – 27, 2013. In the weeks following the announcement, the vBSDcon website was activated with preliminary details on the dates and location of the event. This past weekend, the next phase of development of the website was published. The updated website contains a detailed conference agenda, speaker biographies, and descriptions of speaker’s topics, and more. The website website can be viewed at http://www.vbsdcon.com/.
The next phase of development will include a map detailing conference facilities/location, social event location(s), and local points of interest, restaurants, and recreational activities. Also slated for the next phase is the addition of a sponsor page and attendee registrations. So, check the site often and look for registrations to open up in the coming weeks!
BSDCan 2013
I attended BSDCan as an attendee and conference organizer. I recently embarked on journey I never thought I would. I am a co-chair for a conference. vBSDcon is the first conference or large event that I’ve organized (apart from my wedding when I married the woman who continually encourages me to grow). Therefore, my perspective of the conference covered multiple facets.
Conference Format
I’ll add that all conferences have an additional track which may or may not be planned…the social track. The social track consists of time spent in the halls between presentations discussing projects with others. It includes time spent at restaurants after the day’s conference activities. It includes time spent at the “big social event” many BSD-related conferences have.
One drawback of multiple tracks is that often there are multiple presentations occurring simultaneously one may wish to attend. This certainly was the case with me a time or two.
Tutorials
BSDCan 2013 had four tutorials scheduled. Of the four, I attended two:
DNSSEC: Theory, Troubleshooting, and Deployment With BIND
Making FreeBSD Ports
Vendor Summit
It was made clear that vendors are interested in having a cohesive and functional Java implementation available. By doing so, it will enable forward progress on the implementation of many other userland applications.
Conference Day 1
Presentations
- Open Source Meets the Commercial World by Eric Allman
- An Overview of Security in the FreeBSD Kernel by Kirk McKusick (Hacking track)
- Benchmarking FreeBSD by Ivan Voras (Sys Admin track)
- Case study: Switching from Linux to FreeBSD by Paul Chvostek (Sys Admin track)
- Lightning Fast Networking In Your Virtual Machine by Luigi Rizzo (Hacking track)
Conference Day 2
Presentations
- Modern Package Management by Baptise Daroussin (Sys Admin track)
- Tales from the North by Dwayne Hart (Sys Admin track)
- The Closing Session: The Wrap Up by Dan Langille
Impressions
All speakers created well thought out presentations all the way from the tutorials through the closing session. The content was relevant and applicable to the track and current trends in the industry. Speakers sufficiently filled their allotted time slot w/ ample time for Q&A. I found several presentations very interesting and relevant to the work I perform.
Overall Experience
This conference was an excellent opportunity for me to gleam concepts and ideas for potential inclusion at vBSDcon hosted by Verisign in October 2013.
hostileadmin 