Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 11:33:31 +0100 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@freebsd.org> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Report from EuroBSDCon 2002 Message-ID: <17971.1037702011@critter.freebsd.dk>
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I arrived in Shipol airport thursday evening, 4 minutes after the Hotel shuttle bus left, the next one was in an hour so I took a cab to the Hotel instead. I wonder if cabdrivers have their own representation in the UN ? They seem to always be aliens, no matter what country you are in. A bunch of the usual suspects hung out in the Hotel bar and after dumping my luggage I joined the effort. After about a quart or a pint of further hanging, we did the bistromatic thing and eventually a group of six of us too a cab to some place to eat which none of us, including the hotel concierge who recommended it, had never been at before. Mike Karels, displayed a level of good judgement which can only come from many years of conferencing: he went to bed instead. The taxi dropped us off in front of a packed corner/cafe/disco kind of place and we promptly went to the the small steakhouse down the road where the waitress almost had her picture on the front of todays paper. Good food and beer was had, politics dispensed with and we returned to the hotel in another cab, only dropping markm@ once or twice on the entire tour. At this point I went to my room and crashed after browsing my slides one final time. Rumours claim that some fraction of the party didn't quite make it in through the doors before they headed back out in succesful search of beer. Friday morning, breakfast, registering at the conference desk checking out the conference area and a 30% packet loss retro experience in the terminal room. The conference package contained a specially crafted mini parleur, containing gems like: English: "I know Kirk" Dutch: "Ik rule man!" I didn't trust it enough to actually use it, and besides, having lived in Luxembourg, I think I got most of the jokes. The T-shirt will surely become a collectors item, although I do predict that one detail of the design will be critisized since it prevents the wearer to enjoy the artwork using a mirror. I was sort of psyching up for my GEOM tutorial so I just hung around the place talking to people I knew and got to know, waiting for it to be my turn after paul@ was done initiating innocent souls to the rites of newbus and device drivers in general. My GEOM tuturial was 3 hours with a half hour tea-break and I had no idea how long time it would take me to say my piece. I had 125 slides (will be uploaded later) with some long sequences of graphics so all bets were off. About 40 people attended I think, it's sort of amazing that you can stand in front of a room of people for three hours and still not get around to counting them. First half of the tutorial went well, running 10 minutes late by the time we made it to the tea-break, and 20 minutes late at the end. Consistent if nothing else. Some good questions were asked, and nobody fell asleep as far as I could tell, although some of the party animals did nod a bit here and there. A number of people asking questions in the corridor afterwards. The considerable danish contingent went for beer and pancakes and then more beer in the evening, afterwards we chatted in the Hotel lobby until about 2am or so. The hotel bar has the most tacky and hideous decor I've seen in a long time: Two fake masts and boom's try to make it look like a 3 meter horizontal slice of a schooner. It does not look like that. If you tap on the decor, it particularly does not sound like that. Saturday morning the "real" conference part began with guido@ giving a short introduction to the socioeconomics and asylum policies of the EuroBSDCon after which Mike Karrels gave a BSD past, present and future keynote. Mike was covering some of the same ground here as Kirk covered at the BSDcon in Berkeley. Mike was more analytical and drank from a glass. Otherwise they were in good agreement. After a coffe break, the talks started. The terminal room now up to 48% packet loss. Hubert Feyrer explained how you produce personalized videos for 5500 participants in the Regensburg Marathon showing the the four seconds before and two seconds after they crossed the finishline. A crowd of NetBSD servers put to good use. Luigi@ had sent a part of his crew from Torino to talk about VPN and other cool networking stuff in FreeBSD. Later I went to heard Brad Knowles talk about mailer performance measurements and benchmarking. The fact that Brad is not a spammer is a good argument for som benevolent god still holding his hand over the Internet. Brad had kind words for softupdates, showed that we really need to get b+tree directories and otherwise were doing a respectable job. He's still convinded that sendmail should be faster than postfix but his numbers don't say so. One can tell that Brad is a benchmarking pro: his slides showed standard deviations on the graphs. Unfortunately, listening to Brad meant that I missed out on the most interesting talk so far: A late entry about a virtualized network stack in FreeBSD. Fortunately a number of people alerted me and I was given a private demonstration afterwards: You can run fully virtualized network stacks on the same machine. And fully virtualized means that each stack has its own interfaces, its own routing table, sockets, ipfw rules etc etc etc. This brings us one step closer on having truly virtual machines and offers some truly astonishing abilities. I tell ya: this stuff is coming to -current RSN: http://www.tel.fer.hr/zec/BSD/vimage/ des@ finished the talks off with a good talk about PAM on FreeBSD. A number of people had asked me about the GBDE stuff so a small BoF were held on the subject ending when a man warned us that the last buf to the social event would leave in 10 minutes. Quite a bit more interest than I had expected. 40 minutes later we entered the bus and headed for the central rail-road station, next to which a "party-boat" took us for a tour of the canals while food, drink and general partying was experienced. I have no idea why they always serve indonesian food at events like this in .nl. Neither did Edwin when I asked him and he should know: he lives here. The novelty on this boat was the food elevator. A small informal committer gathering on deck uncovered a few interesting historical facts and that it's f**king cold at night in Amsterdam this time of the year. The lockpickers showed a their skills, lack thereoff and an assortment of pointy tools which I belive has not been brought here as carry-on luggage. Should have brought the spare dual-six cylinder lock I have back home but I doubt they could have done much, most of the locks they had were quite simple cylinders. Even the dance-floor got used, that's somewhat seldom for computer conferences. Guido@ tried to make a lump sum down payment on the beer-ware license, using his conference expense account I suspect. Pictures will undoubtedly be posted. Sunday morning was scheduled to start late, a sign og highly intelligent planning, and two tracks of decent talks filled the day. My own talk was in the last slot so over the day I got increasingly unattentive and tense. Packet loss up to 56% in the terminal room. Admired the vendors who had a table each. The FreeBSD crowd were there, and showed why any self-respecting committer should answer "boxers" in the future. There was a clothing company there called OpenBSD, later somebody told me they make an operating system as well. Apple showed an animated pictureframe, about 23 inches I guess, which in a fully automatic way could display images of staggering beauty while playing soothing music thoughout the entire conference. Some people claimed that it was a computer, but I saw now signs of that at any time, only the beautiful images and the soothing music. NetBSD were there, and they seem to have a bunch of technical "sales-material" which will certainly give them good mileage in the embedded world. They also had some dot(1) produced graphs related to the new RCng thing, it didn't quite come across to me as an argument for the "pro" side. My timecounter talk went ok, but I failed to come up with a good joke about people arriving 30 minutes early for a talk about timekeeping. Finally we got to the closing session, where Guido told us that we should have hacked his machine and complained about the DNS server to win prizes. Nobody did either it seems. He did use the occasion to give me a pair of wooden shoes ("cloggies") which totally ruined my carefully planned luggage design. The two capable organizers from ICONIX.NL got champagne and a box of chocholate for a job well done. Interestingly enough, the "BSDcon sweets curse" seems to be going strong and have left the organizers with three boxes of "red hot devils". Nik didn't quite seem to have been able to get rid of the remaining "Brighton rock". And then a bunch of tired danes sat around in the Lobby with a drink waiting for the cab to take us to the airport. The rest of the story is long and torturous, keywords are: luggage handling strike in CPH, canceled plane, stuck in hotel for the night, celebrating Kristens 40 year birthday, more canceled planes, 10 hours in a car and one hour by train, arrive totally wasted. A big thanks from here to the organizers. Next time seems to be 2003 in the US and then 2004 in Paris. See you there ! -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. 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