A full first day at EuroBSDCon 2009

The first day of the conference was really a full one. I decided to follow all the "Stream A" talk sessions and I could say it's been the best for my research related to the EnterpriseBSD project — e.g. feedback on usage of FreeBSD in the enterprise/business environments.

Harrison Grundy brought up a nice insight on the oil & gas industry and their use of FreeBSD on staggering levels of storage and processing sizes. Then Konrad Heuer unveiled some details about what makes the gwdg.de network tick and the problems they encountered on their heterogeneous setup. And that brought up an interesting discussion about IBM TSM backup support issues on FreeBSD.

After a first tea & biscuit break Peter Losher entertained us about what ISC is doing (like, say, DNS root servers and mozilla.org/kernel.org/*BSD mirrors) and their help with testing the FreeBSD releases — you might be surprised to know that some root servers may be sometimes running a -BETA or similar snapshots (of course under the protection of anycast balancing and failback). Then came the lunch in the nice restaurant of the Robinson College.

Then almighty Kirk McKusick stepped up to speak about superpages in FreeBSD 8.0 under the close scrutiny of front-row phk@ (Poul-Henning Kamp) and John Baldwin. Hacker galore!

Afterwards, Zach Loafman unveiled some of the "secrets" under the hood of OneFS from Isilon — their clustered filesystem product. Hope they will succeed in releasing their mods to FreeBSD (especially Infiniband). And an amazing trip with Sam Leffler on the top of the Chile mountains where he helped installing a wireless link between two astronomical observatories found ~2,4km above the sea...

Then came Robert Watson with a short update session and then introduced one interesting security expert fellow (think prof. Dumbledore) who showed us what tricks the 'net gangsters are using nowadays. Quite a bit of laughs...

Then came the famous "Conference Dinner in the Great Hall at Clare College"; luckily I've been able to trade a place with someone else. Wouldn't have been surprised if Harry Potter shared the table with us... Lucky enough to get a place right next to George V. Neville-Neil, Poul-Henning Kamp (say "beerware license"!) and Brooks Davis. Robert Watson was just around, too. Quite a lively bunch they are...

Lots of pictures for today, unfortunately I forgot to bring an USB cable with me so it'll have to wait until I get back in Brussels. Until then... there is one more day. And possibly a surprise, if Robert W. will be kind enough to approve my WIP proposal on EnterpriseBSD.