Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 65

BSDCan keynote

Karl Lehenbauer, CTO of FlightAware, is giving an excellent BSDCan keynote: a retrospective of his BSD experience. As part of the mass of flight troubles plaguing North America this week, his flight to Ottawa was cancelled. He landed in Toronto at midnight last night.

I wouldn’t have blamed him for canceling the keynote.

Instead, he rented a car and drove to Ottawa. Overnight. After a bad day of travel. That’s about a four-hour drive.

Lehenbauer is clearly a man who keeps his promises.

Plus, he s...

FreeBSD devsummit notes: ports & packages

The ports and packages summit was a lot more discussion of options as opposed to the state of items and future plans. A very dynamic session, where each of the dozen or so scheduled speakers was more “moderator of the moment.” Plus, I staggered in half an hour late, because breakfast was really really good.

But, in general, what happened:

I walked in on an overview of Debian packages. It’s always good to assess others’ work.

Discussions on dependencies.

Ed Maste on possibly using certificate tran...

FreeBSD devsummit virtualization session

Some notes from the FreeBSD virtualization devsummit. Very rough, but my understanding is very rough, so all is as it should be.

Bhyve moving to UEFI loader away from FreeBSD and grub2

• Fork of intel EDKII (BSD License), OVMF build target

• For bhyve instead of Qemu

• Includes CSM BIOS emulation for non-EFI aware OS’s

• Currently in-house, being moved to public git repo

• Buildable on FreeBSD (GCC 4.6 or later), needs to be a port – bhyve folks need port creation help

• Serial console only: working...

FreeBSD 11 feature goals

I’m at the BSDCan FreeBSD devsummit, and the current topic is FreeBSD 11 Goals.

As the Great Committer John Baldwin has requested that people take notes and blog about the discussions, and this might be of wider interest, here’s the goals.

These are my notes. I probably missed things. I would be shocked if I didn’t, actually. And I probably misunderstood some stuff.

Test suite/QA (jmmv) – some stuff merged to 10

Mips64 & more MIPS stuff

Scatter/Gather mbufs (scottl) – collapse down mbufs from a...

Next week: BSDCan, with goats

BSDCan is next week. I will be there. You should too.

This year’s conference includes goats. For reasons too complicated and sordid for me to explain. If you really want to know, see here.

Goat BOF. Tuesday night. Royal Oak pub. Be there or be not one of the cool kids.

And as an afternote: I feel really sorry for Bryan Lunduke.

My NSP ebooks, 50% off

Today is International Day Against DRM.

All No Starch Press ebooks are available at 50% off. The titles include:

Absolute OpenBSD
Network Flow Analysis
Cisco Routers for the Desperate (both editions, I’d recommend the 2nd)
PGP & GPG
Absolute FreeBSD

Plus books by other authors, of course. Once you’ve bought all of mine, check them out too.

Use coupon code RIGHT2READ to get the discount.

For the record: all of my books[1] are published without DRM. In my opinion, once you buy my book it’s yours to do w...

Penguicon 2014 Schedule

“Hey, where is Lucas? Why hasn’t he posted lately?”

I’ve done nothing worth posting about. Most of this month I spent removing a per-millennial switch from the core of the network, which was painstaking and annoying but not noteworthy. I then spent nine days at a writing workshop, which was fascinating, educational, and utterly exhausting. I could argue that the workshop was worth blogging about, but I was too busy writing to waste time writing. If you’re interested in writing, though, and you...

Book Review: “Applied Network Security Monitoring”

Chris Sanders kindly sent me a review copy of Applied Network Security Monitoring, written by Sanders along with Jason Smith, David J Bianco, and Liam Randall. It’s a very solid work, with much to recommend it to IT people who either have been told to implement security monitoring or who think that they should.

Some of Applied Network Security Monitoring will be very familiar to anyone who has read any other security book–I’ve read many times that risk equals impact times probability. Every bo...

The Con is a Lie

I hadn’t planned to post this, but enough people asked me that I feel obliged to explicitly state:

DetroitBSDCon is a joke. So is Oracle buying BSDCan. I did not play off of Dan’s posting: we planned it together, as well as the resulting fight on Twitter. (I must concede that Dan won the Twitter argument by enlisting Randi Harper for Oracle BSDCan. Nobody can stand against @freebsdgirl‘s awesome social networking mojo. Mind you, Dan has absolutely no clue about how we do things here in Detroit...

Announcing DetroitBSDCon: May 14-17 2014

Dan Langille has sold BSDCan to Oracle. From the early announcement, it’s clear that they’ll ruin the conference. I take this VERY personally, as I’ve worked with BSDCan for over a decade. Dan has made it clear that he’s taking the check and walking away without a second thought. This is unconscionable.

If I want something done about it, I’ll have to do it myself.

OpenBSD committer Nick Holland lives about two miles from me. We’ve had some discussions about what needs to happen to give the West...