This year’s AsiaBSDCon was a historic event. Hiroki Sato, organizer of the conference, announced that there were 139 people, including 30 speakers in attendance, and the keynotes were standing room only. This was the largest AsiaBSDCon conference since he started hosting it back in 2007.
The Japanese version of the BSDA exam was launched at AsiaBSDCon. Two exam events were available, with examinees for both the English and the Japanese version of the exam. BSD Research, which has Hiroki listed as its President, will provide quarterly exam events in both English and Japanese. The FreeBSD Foundation table raised $350 in donations.
Matt Ahrens gave one of the keynotes about OpenZFS, which covered a bit of history and some of the new features coming to OpenZFS in the near future. Jim Brown’s talk about the BSD Professional certification was very enlightening. Kris said it was neat to see the slides showing PC-BSD as the basis for the on-disk exams. Several people came up to Kris and told him they attended the conference because of his (and iXsystems’) involvement in BSD Now.
On the second day, John decided to go see Kirk McKusick’s tutorial on the FreeBSD operating system. John reported that it was excellent. It used all the new information Kirk had collected and put into his new book coming out this summer (the revised edition ofThe Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System).
The three iXsystems talks were scheduled back to back with Kris, Dru, and John presenting in that order. The talks were all well-attended, and showed off a lot of variety in the iX sponsored projects. They went hand in hand and gave a good perspective of ZFS, PC-BSD and FreeNAS. ZFS was definitely well represented as this conference. Dru’s presentation can be found on her Slideshare account and the formal paper is here.
Afterwards someone asked Kris whether Life-Preserver could be ported (to OpenBSD in this case), and Kris was pleased to see a good response to the functionality it provides. There have already been requests via the web to port it to ZFS on Linux, and even to BTRFS.
Kris also spoke with 2 folks from “Xinuos”, who bought out some of the remnants of the SCO UNIX customer base (customers like McDonalds, Kroger, various hotels, etc). They were very interested in using PC-BSDs “Life-preserver” Utility to integrate into PC-BSD and Bhyve, allowing them to run legacy SCO Unix OpenServer/UnixWare OS’s while getting the benefits of ZFS underneath. They mentioned how unique it was that PC-BSD is one of the only OS’s they’ve looked at which has full backup and bare-metal restore support out of the box. They are evaluating using the desktop as the main OS, probably since the tools are easier for non-UNIX admins to work with. They also expressed that their primary concern was the lack of a Long Term Supported version of FreeBSD, ala RedHat LTS. They asked if we would ever have an LTS version of PC-BSD / TrueOS, since that would help them with the business decision side of switching to BSD.
Afterwards, everyone went to the conference banquet, which was so well attended that they had to move everyone to the much larger side of the restaurant. Overall, the team felt it was a successful show and they can’t wait to return next year.
