This past weekend, Dru Lavigne and Ken Moore attended the OLF conference hosted in Columbus, Ohio where they both presented talks and staffed a FreeBSD booth.
The two talks were scheduled for Saturday. Ken’s talk came first and was called PC-BSD – Ports, Packages, and PBI’s. His talk drew about 50-75 people and covered a variety of topics including PC-BSD update frequency, PBI library sharing and conflict resolution, and the coexistence of different formats. He also fielded a variety of general PC-BSD questions regarding driver support and desktop environments.
Dru’s talk, ZFS 101, was held later in the afternoon. The entire room was nearly filled, as 75-100 people packed in to hear her speak. There was a lot of excitement over PC-BSD boot environment support. Dru covered topics ranging from dataset clarification to RAM requirements and repairing non-optimal system setup. “There wasn’t much time leftover for questions, but everyone seemed really impressed by the new Life Preserver snapshot/restore features and I think people left with a better understanding of why ZFS is a good thing,” Dru commented.
Ken also gave us a brief overview of how the rest of the conference went: “The *big* impression I got was that a lot of the people we talked to were very impressed with FreeNAS and PC-BSD, specifically with respect to ZFS features (data backup/recovery in particular) and the PBI system (separation from base system “slush”). Most of the people we talked to either said they had heard FreeBSD before (but they did not know that much about it), or they had never heard of it previously.
We never had a chance to rest (except for about thirty minutes near lunchtime) with constant traffic at the booth. The table pretty much got picked clean with many people in the afternoon asking if we had any more horns left. In short, this was a very good conference. I would also say that it was a good mix of system administrators and desktop users. There were over one thousand attendees, by my rough estimate. The organization and management of the conference was excellent. “
Thanks to Dru and Ken for giving us a recap of OLF. Stay tuned for the next conference update from Linuxcon, coming soon!
Annie Zhang
Marketing Assistant
