It was my first BSD conference, and it was very interesting.
This conference permit to meet lot’s of people from the *BSD world:
– Pawel Jakub Dawidek (The GEOM guru) presented his actual work for porting ZFS under FreeBSD 7.0 and it was an incredible demonstration!!! (I never see ZFS in action before).
Pawel confirm me that ZFS and RAID-Z feature will simplifier a lot the FreeNAS disks management by adding a powerful Volume Management tools into FreeBSD.
=> As soon as FreeBSD 7.0 will be available, FreeNAS will migrate on it for using ZFS!
But Pawels work alone for this task, and he need other developers: Then if you know C programming, filesystem and optionally FreeBSD, please help him on this big task!
– Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler (the pfSense guys). Talking with them permit to learn a lot about their experience from pfSense. They have created a company for professional services on m0n0wall and pfSense too (this permit to reassure some company about using these open source firewalls).
I’ve learn that pfSense use only the WebGUI of m0n0wall, and all the base system is create using FreeSBIE. I understand now why there are so differences between the core of m0n0wall and pfSense.
– Marko Zec did an excellent demonstration of the Network stack virtualization with FreeBSD. He shows us how, from one FreeBSD server, create 10 routers (including routing between) in less than 5 seconds 😉
– George Neville-Neil gives an interesting lesson about security with IPv6.
Bad news, IPv6 seems to have the same security problem as IPv4: And he does a demonstration with NDP poisoning (same as ARP poisoning on IPv4).
Good news: There are peoples who are testing IPv6 a lot, and when it will be fully used, these problems should be resolved.
– Andrew Clunis permit me to play a little with a prototype of a One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). But I can’t participate to its presentation because I was giving the FreeNAS presentation at the same time.
And there were lot’s of other events that I can’t participate (there are 3 conferences in at the same times): The Varnish HTTP accelerator (Poul-Henning Kamp), PC-BSD (Matt Olander), Portsnap (Colin Percival), How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman), etc….