Like any self-respecting Open Source conference, we have an exhibition space with commercial sponsors and “dot org” groups. Starting with the orgs, we’ll have tables for some of the BSD projects.  The peeps over at iXsystems have their usual display of FreeBSD and PC-BSD goodies.  The OpenBSD project is shipping out merchandise for the conference.  They always have a nice selection of t-shirts and CDs for sale.  The DragonFlyBSD project is working to send out free install media, we’re crossing our fingers.  Matt Dillon and the team at DragonFly have been doing some exciting things with cluster technologies.

Rumor is that Beastie will make a surprise appearance, so bring your cameras.  I’ll buy anyone a few rounds of stout if they manage to sneak in a Segway.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the generous contributions from our sponsors.  Even under normal circumstances, it can be challenging to procure sufficient funding to host a large conference.  During a global recession,  executives everywhere are pressured to cut costs and hunker down.  Fortunately for us (and one could argue, the entire economy), these companies and organizations recognize that such a stance is self-defeating and serves only to worsen an already difficult recession.  They understand that spending, not just for the sake of meeting operational requirements, but to further stimulize the markets, benefits everyone.  Cheers to our sponsors over at Message Systems, iXsystems, the FreeBSD Foundation, Freedom Technologies, MatrixGroup, ShmooCon, OmniTI and Google!

And I’ll be tipping back a pint for every single one of them.

News Beastie, dot-org, DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD, sponsors

Sounds like a recipe for Witches Brew.  No, the title of this post refers to the last few talks to be announced for DCBSDCon 2009.  We have a lot of stuff to cover today, so I’ll cut to the chase and introduce our last group of speakers.

George Neville-Neil is the other half of the dynamic duo that brought us The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System and that will also be speaking at DCBSDCon.  George will be presenting his talk on FreeBSD’s Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters (HWPMC).

FreeBSD has included support for Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters for several years now.  The hwpmc system provides access to counters that are present in all modern Intel and AMD CPUs, as well as other chipsets, and which give the programmer the ability to understand the low level performance issues that may effect their code.  This talk will cover the motivation behind and basic usage of HWPMC.

I had the pleasure of meeting George in NYC this past year while we attempted to install PC-BSD on my MacBook Pro.  He’s quite a bit of fun and has a great wealth of FreeBSD knowledge.

Robert Luciani comes to us all the way from Sweden.  Robert is studying for his Masters degree in Algorithms and Logic at the University of Chalmers.  He’s been working actively with DragonFly BSD since 2006, and with BSD in general since 2001.  Robert’s research into M:N threading for DragonFly provides us with a unique look at the performance issues affecting SMP.

Ineffective concurrency mechanisms in an operating system can lead to low performance in both single and multiprocessor environments.  Practical setbacks involved with attempting overly invasive kernel changes have made it difficult in the past to implement new and innovative concurrency systems.  This paper describes the rationale behind interfaces in the DragonFly BSD operating system intended to provide high performance and scalability on multiprocessor architectures.  Using a lock-free processor centric approach, DragonFly BSD has developed a unique thread system with the potential for excellent scalability.

Last but not least, I mentioned weeks ago that we would have someone from ShmooCon speak at DCBSDCon.  Each year, organizers of the ShmooCon hacker conference recruit a team of volunteers to design and deploy their secure conference network.  The event is known as ShmooCon Labs.  Ken Caruso has kindly volunteered himself to sneak away for a few minutes this year to give us a short talk about how they utilize BSD in their conference infrastructure.  As a former volunteer from the 2006 ShmooCon Labs, I’m interested to see how their network has expanded in two years to support this year’s 1200 attendees.

This winds up the formal announcements for speakers and talks at DCBSDCon 2009.  Make sure to keep reading the blog as we will continue to have stories and announcements over the coming weeks.  If you missed the earlier post, make sure you make your hotel reservations very soon.  The group discount code expires this Friday!  And of course, don’t forget to register for the conference.

News DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, George Neville-Neil, HWPMC, Ken Caruso, ShmooCon

Because I’m still in the holiday spirit (or maybe it was the spirits at lunch today), we’ve decided to announce our next two speakers.  Let’s get right to it.

Although well known for his Tao of Security blog, Richard Bejtlich’s official working title is the Director of Incident Response for General Electric.  He’s a highly sought-after speaker and the author of The Tao of Network Security Monitoring.  And wouldn’t you know, he’s a fan of FreeBSD.

I’ve been using FreeBSD as my preferred platform for Network Security Monitoring (NSM) since 2000.  In this presentation I’ll discuss my latest thinking on using FreeBSD to identify normal, suspicious, and malicious traffic in enterprise networks.  FreeBSD is a powerful platform for network traffic inspection and log analysis, and I’ll share a few ways I use it in production environments.

I’ve crossed paths with Richard due to our proximity and interest in BSD User Groups.  I heard him speak at ShmooCon 2006 and immediately appreciated his speaking style and expert knowledge in network security.  I think attendees will walk away from his talk with a fresh perspective on security monitoring.

Next up, we have the RAID and storage guru of the OpenBSD project.  Marco Peereboom introduced me to my first pint of Guinness, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful.  I think it’s rather apropos that I announce his presentation on New Year’s Eve.

Tired of tape and their weaknesses?  So am I!  Epitome is the next generation backup mechanism.  It is based on the idea of providing instant available backup data while removing duplicate files & blocks from backups (yes really!).  It is a disk based WORM backup system.

This talk will go into the Epitome protocol and its application.  The code is generic enough that it can address all 3 major (buzzword compliant) technologies known as: CAS, DEDUP & SIS.

Looking over his online man pages, the epitome suite specializes in data deduplication.  This certainly has some practical uses, in spite of the ubiquity of multi-terabyte disk arrays.

Have you already registered?  Don’t wait!  It looks like we’re going to push forward the deadline for registration to January 31, in order to give us more lead time heading into the conference.  We’ll broadcast this change soon, but don’t wait until it’s too late.  Get your barcode today!

News data deduplication, FreeBSD, Marco Peereboom, monitoring, OpenBSD, Richard Bejtlich

I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday festivities this week.  You might be running out the door this very moment to spend that gift cash/cheque.  Stop! Check out our next speaker first.  You just might be inclined to spend those greenbacks on a front row seat to hear Brooks Davis talk about his work with FreeBSD computing clusters…

At The Aerospace Corporation, we run a large FreeBSD based computing cluster to support engineering applications.  These applications come in all shapes, sizes, and qualities of implementation.  To support them and our diverse userbase we have been searching for ways to isolate jobs from one another in ways that are more effective than Unix time sharing and more fine grained than allocating whole nodes to jobs.  In this paper we discuss the problem space and our efforts so far.  These efforts include implementation of partial file systems vitalization and CPU isolation using CPU sets.

Brooks is an Engineering Specialist at the Aerospace Corporation and a hobbyist blacksmith.  As such, I expect a riveting discussion while he forges through red-hot points of interest and hammers home the concepts of clustering performance and predictability.  Steel interested?  Register for DCBSDCon 2009 now!

News blacksmith, Brooks Davis, clustering, FreeBSD

What do you get when you cross an enterprise-class packet filtering subsystem with a graphical front-end for easy configuration and maintenance?  A throbbing headache for commercial vendors like SonicWALL, that’s what.

pfSense is a FreeBSD-based firewall distribution that uses the excellent packet filter (PF) subsystem ported from OpenBSD.  pfSense started as a fork of the m0n0wall project but has evolved beyond their focus on embedded hardware to be well suited for a wide variety of PC systems.  One of the founders, Chris Buechler, will be coming to DCBSDCon to present a new talk entitled Network Perimeter Redundancy with pfSense.

This session will first provide an introduction and overview of pfSense and its common uses. It will then go on to cover means of providing redundancy for the critical portions of your network perimeter using pfSense, including redundancy for your Internet connections, firewalls and DNS. Live configuration examples will be shown for as many of these topics as the session’s length permits. This session will cover pfSense 1.2.1, but will also offer an overview of some of the enhanced capabilities in this area that pfSense 2.0 will provide in the future.

As a firewall nerd, I’ve been pleased to see pfSense bring the PF codebase to a wider audience.  I’m looking forward to seeing the new features they’ve released in 1.2.1 as well as the upcoming features in 2.0.  This talk should be of interest to network and systems administrators alike.

News Chris Buechler, FreeBSD, networks, OpenBSD, PF, pfSense, security