MeetBSD report..

(Not so..) short summary related with meetBSD conference

I hope you don't mind seeing me explaining, why it's quite cool to visit Poland
next time we'll be hopefully having The MeetBSD conference here. What I find is
the biggest problem is a language of presented talks; thus I wish I could
propose some changes in a schedule of future confereces, so that papers
presented in English were to be grouped in one day.. My observation is quite
simple -- most of the people know English in listen/read-only manner very well,
large group of them are fluent in speaking also.  For now, let skip such
problems -- we've had three English talks this year. This edition of  the
conference was also really interesting.

Pawel was clever enough to put the most interesting (read: his) pieces first,
so that he could relax later and listen to every talk with a tea in hand, and
chat with a girl, who of course noone could even glance at, and really, noone
even could confirm her existance.

Presentation related to his work regarding data integrity in the context of
integration with GELI was interesting, especially for non-GEOM hackers, who
even if follow CVS logs, don't really get what provider-related magic is about.
He seems to use a trick of typing commands in the front of the audience, which
is the best proof that something is already working well and appears to work
in front of the people's eyes without saying "foo bar, I'm unhappy OS kernel".

Later there were several technical talks which I found interesting: Mariusz
Grad had almost interative presentation on which you were able to see how does
the typical extension like MMX on the 32-bit architecture can possitively
impact application performance (based on his benchmark) together with
explaining, why the physicians being obssesed with martix manipulation in his
departament like 64-bit processing so much. He likes going deep into the
computer architecture, and I had a longer talk with him after the conference.
He also included several historical aspects of computer architecture and
mentioned some really cool notes from Von Neumann's paper he was lucky enough
to read somewhere in Berlin.

Jakub Klausa has lead a talk about Voice over IP in the context of FreeBSD.
I'm not an expert in that field, and actually, I have never played with VoIP
seriously, but huge number of questions after the talk finally made me think,
that this has to be really, really interesting for an audience.  I use to work
on setting some basic setups with GNU Gatekeeper and H323 protocol, thus I woke
up when those names were mentioned. Otherwise, I can't explain to you what have
been touched, except of various terms like: SS7, VoiceXML, VoIP, Asterisk, and
many, many more.  Jakub was kind enough to borrow me a laptop for my
presentation, since as always when I need my own machine, in lies broken down
in a computer shop for several days before a conference, and the ugly
repleacement I've been given doesn't handle the external output with any kind
of resolution.

After Jakub, Paulo had his 45 minutes. Since I like strictly technical bits, I
liked it very much. Just like with others work -- I can't follow and understand
everything by myself, so his show was very usefull for me.  And I'm happy that
we're growing some nice neatures.

After Paulo's talk, Steven Jurczyk came onto the scene. Steven is a founder of
the home.pl -- the most famous and the biggest Polish hosting provider, which
is entirely powered by FreeBSD.  Just like anyone else, we were looking forward
to hear Steve's talk, since not everyone has enough chance to play with 200
FreeBSD boxes and solve problems in the farm of that size.  Steve honestly
talked about possitive and negative sides of being FreeBSD consument. The final
statement was that they are very happy with FreeBSD, which not only does what
they really want, but also seem to move to the right direction.  As a proof
several dedicated solutions have been written by home.pl and deployed in their
FreeBSD environment.  After the talk there were also several question related
with various sides of system administration.

Then was my talk. There is nothing special to talk about at this point -- I
don't really like a quality of my presentations. This time I decided to take a
brief look at my small impact on current state of FreeBSD/mips, together with
giving a credits to people like Oleksandr Tymoshenko and Olivier Houchard, who
is my mentor in The Project. I mentioned about why do I think the MIPS
architecture is interesting, and how '#if 0' can help a the first stages of
development.

Finally, what most of the people were looking forward used to happen -- first
day of the conference has been closed, and the Social Even was about to start.
After short travel, we landed in a place, that looked like a Star Trek board.
Music was a little bit too loud, but the fact of having everyone in the one
place worked well. Thus, I had no problem to chat with Paulo and Mark several
times :-) After whole day, they also had to keep up with several technical
questions asked by me. I hope they didn't mind.

I can't say how the event really looked like (yeah -- you have to come hear in
order to expirience it by yourself), but there were several suprises prepared
by the organizers; and I belive due to Polish tea and other customs, audience
also seemed to have a good time. 

The party for me was over at 2 A.M. I took a bus at 2:20, and around 3:00 I was
close to the destination place. After having a short walk with a wrong
direction taken, I reach the destination place at about 3:30 A.M.  This part
was over.

Second day meant carrying huge luggage caused by some shopping the day befire
the meetBSD started. Until most of people were in the conference room, first
talk was delayed by couple of minutes, but Pawel did some magic trick with
explaining, why ZFS is a kind of next-generation aspect of filesystems, and of
course, he showed everything by an example, while logging on a remote box and
presenting, that we already have ZFS working on FreeBSD.

Mark's talk was next.  Mark mentioned about social and technical aspects
related with ports collection, their maintainance, fixing, build breakages; he
also explained several bits of FreeBSD jorgon like "pointy hat" meaning; there
were also some number which I was not familiar with before, like for example
length of typical port build, and number of ports that build properly. Several
questions regarding his work and general point of view on ports collection have
been asked.

Mark talk was followed by Lukasz Bromirski presentation. I truly admire this
man, since he's walking networking encyclopedia, multiinstrumental artist and
real expert when it comes to network managment, network administration and
security. He's big FreeBSD fan, and this time he talked about network
monitoring with FreeBSD and tools available in our ports collection.
Professionally, Lukasz is related with Cisco Systems Inc., and I belive he
often has to prepare such presenations. Hence, the quality of a content and the
way it is served always makes me think that the right person is in the right
place. I'm not sure how he does this, but even with small delay and time
shortened, he seems to exactly fit given timeline.

Dinner meant a bit of general conversiation with Mark and Paulo which I
enjoyed, really. Actually, it was long enough to be a bit late on the next talk
from the schedule..

Pawel Rutkowski, who is collegue of mine and big FreeBSD fan and beliver,
presented BGP deployment in a corporation network. Everything was based on his
real-life expirience. I'm not sure what the earlier slides were about, but the
ones I've seen touched a topic of Quagga, and some performace measurement.
Professionaly Pawel was related with work on high availability servers powered
by FreeBSD for big hosting companies.  Several questions appeared, but I know
Pawel was quite busy for both of a days of conference, due to dozens of
questions regarding his earlier talks about a way of making backups on FreeBSD.

I actually was a bit affraid of the last presentation, since my train was
supposed to be at a station at 17:45, and the presentation started with small
delay, but everything went fine -- Paulo, speaking about the interrupt stuff
and the way he managed to solve interrupt lattency problem was what I've been
looking forward.  I appears to be quite nice mechanism, and hopefully we'll
have it commited soon.  I also had a talk with Paulo the day before, and he
explained me some bits of his research. The presentation visualised everything,
which I like, of course. I listened to Paulo stuff to the end, said "bye" to
the organizers and run away.

Additional comments:

Almost on every Polish conference organized lastly misterious man related more
or less with GNU propaganda had to appear. So an audience took several
questions like "why don't you have XYZ in the kernel instead of implementing it
in the user-space", and the notion of "Linux being better because..".  Just
like on every BSD-related conference, high level of professionalism was shown
and none of meritorical questions has been left unanswered.

Not sure why, but there is also a kind of a situation on Polish conferences,
where people are affraid of asking in the front of other people, and they
prefer to ask questions privately from some reasons. Thus, once you decide to
present something in Poland, don't feel wrong when no hand are raised after the
last slide -- this simply means you'll be more busy after the talk :-)

Things I forgotten about.. Sponsors and the organizers did a really, really
well job in the field of gadgets.  People were messing with meetBSDish T-shirts
and meetBSDish (poloar) sweatchirts or various sizes, meetBSDish mugs,
meetBSDish glasses. We've been given also a hip flask, which I'm not sure if is
properly translated by me, but maybe someone will take a photo of what I have
in mind :-) Not sure how this might look like after a conferece, but you should
try to get some of this things in order to confirm I'm not wrong :-)

Final result was that the second day was really, really daemon-powered. home.pl
was kind enough to buy mouse pads for every single person. The guys were very
friendy on their stall, and answered zillions of questions regarding huge
amount of traffic, extreme number of queries and keeping the staff going in the
company over and over again. They brought a box that is supposed to act as
their backup server.  Steven was kind enough to share some bits of his
knowledge with me, since they deployed their own, high-performance, WWW,
FreeBSD mechanisms-based server into practice. home.pl also has their site
available in English.

PAComp was a second sponsor of the meetBSD conference. Those guys were the
ones I talked with for a *long* period of time, since some serious hackery
happens behind their company's stage. They have presented their own hardware,
PowerPC-based platform destined to the cryptographic solutions and a working
port of FreeBSD for such processor, together with their
"ready-to-be-put-on-the-shelf" product. We talked about assemblers, PCB boards,
porting methodology, DSP processors, RISC architecture, opcodes, register
windows and dozen of different stuff. They also mentioned about drivers for
FreeBSD for their hardware (finally I'm not sure whether the RFID reader was
there, but I'm sure I've seen chip card reader working). I really missed their
lack presentation, but they promised to present their work after project will
reach it's destination phase.  

Hardly working people from Wheel.pl not only carried a huge ammount of
work on keeping everything going in the right way, but also presented
their authorization system called Cerb. It's major advantage is that
you're no longer forced to carry dozen of simple passwords in our
memory, but protect them with a know-something and have-something notion
(mobile phone in their case). We did sample test-case, and it worked
without a problem on my mobile phone.

Guys from hack.pl portal won an auction of Dru Lavigne's book signed by Pawel,
me, Paulo and Mark (the price reached a level of about 150 Euros..).  In order
to see why the FreeBSD community thinks the keyboard is universal way of
expressing yourself, take a look at:
	
	http://hack.pl/gfx/meetbsd2006/bsd1.jpg
	
Money will be spend entirely on supporting The FreeBSD Foundation.

Right now you might have a feeling why the meetBSD is rather cool event to take
part in.

Thanks,
-- 
Wojciech A. Koszek
wkoszek_at_FreeBSD.org
http://FreeBSD.czest.pl/dunstan/