1 post tagged “bsdcan 2007”

BSDcan 2007 has ended. I've managed to attend three of the four, my day job interfered once, but that should no longer happen. This is the first one where I attended the tutorials and I have to say they were informative and useful.

I should clarify that a little. I learned BSD Unix in 1982 on a Vax 11/780 running 4.1 BSD. The machine was upgraded to 4.2 along the way, and that was as far as I got with BSD. Over the intervening years, I've been using AIX, HP-UX, Xenix '286 (long story), SunOS & Solaris, and Linux in most of it's incarnations. My current day job involves Solaris and Linux, so not a lot of BSD exposure. I'm in the process of changing that, but I think it will take a few months.

A short list of the sessions I attended may be good here. Anyone who wishes to get more info on what was offered can visit the official website at BSDcan.org. The tagline for 2007 was "Low cost, high value - something for everyone!"

Day 1 - Two tutorial sessions

• VoIP tutorial
• Network Diagnosis with Netflow

Day 2 - Two tutorial sessions

• Bacula
• Packet filtering for fun and profit

Day 3 - First day of conference

• Opening session
• Scan after one year - coverity scan project
• Open source security lessons
• Home security/monitoring with FreeBSD
• The silent network
• The varnish HTTP accelerator

Day 4 - Second (and final) day of the conference

• The FreeBSD security officer function
• OpenCVS/OpenRCS
• One laptop per child project
• PC-BSD: How BSD will dominate the open source desktop

• UTORvpn: A Cross-Platform OpenSource SSL VPN Implementation

• Closing session
  

There were many more sessions, but these were the ones that caught my attention. I believe that the kernel hackers had a session running during the first two days as well.

All things said and done, I had a great time and recommend it to anyone who can go. As conferences go, it is very inexpensive and carries a lot of useful information. Two thumbs up, 5 stars, whatever the top rating scheme you use, I consider it to be top rated. I have more details on my main site at ovSAGE.org, but you need to be signed in to see them. They are not yet completed, as I haven't had time to finish my thoughts but I expect to finish up over the next couple of days.

For the interested, I have posted about 125 photos as a separate post. Feel free to search for yourself if you attended. Look carefully, you might even find Waldo.