LinuxFest Northwest Trip Report

Linuxfest Northwest was once against hosted at the Bellingham Technical College in northern Washington on May 6th and 7th. iXsystems server solutions engineer Charles Martineau helped staff the FreeBSD/FreeNAS/TrueOS/Lumina booth, along with FreeBSD co-founder Rod Grimes, and FreeBSD Core team member Allan Jude. We were also joined by Google Summer of Code Student Kyle Kneitinger who will be working on FreeBSD over the summer.

The team arrived early Saturday morning and assembled a FreeNAS system and a laptop running TrueOS to demo the new FreeNAS 11 Beta UI. As the crowds came past the table, we answered a lot of questions about FreeBSD, and many people had heard of FreeNAS. Many attendees were already running FreeNAS and had advanced questions about ZFS, while many more were interested in getting started with FreeNAS. The demo laptop also sparked interest in TrueOS and Lumina. The blinking beastie horns were also a hit, especially with the children. Our booth was next to the Association for Women in Computing booth, which had a number of very kid friendly electronics kits that could be connected together to make various sounds, drawing many of the younger attendees. The first round of the “World Famous” raffle was held in the afternoon, including some FreeBSD-based high end WiFi routers donated by Candela Technologies. That evening there was a trivia contest with various prizes. Out of over 30 teams, the iXsystems/FreeBSD team came in 5th, only 4 points behind the winning team.

On Sunday, the crowd was a bit thinner, but this allowed people to take more time to stop and ask questions. Many people were interested in the FreeNAS Mini and Mini XL. The new UI for FreeNAS 11 got very good reviews from those familiar with the old UI. In the afternoon, Allan Jude gave a talk titled “Three Generations of FreeNAS: The World’s most popular storage OS turns 12” which gave an overview of the history of FreeNAS, and explained why ZFS is the only file system worth considering for your NAS.

Our warmest thanks to Bill Wright and all of the volunteers who make this event possible year after year. We look forward to attending Linuxfest Northwest once again in 2018!