A Redundant Array of Independent Dans
BSDCan 2025 will be held on June 11-14 2025 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (Why Ottawa? See the last post.) As usual, two days of tutorials followed by two days of papers.
We plan to open the CFP on 1 December, and run it for six weeks. An official announcement will be made to the bsdcan-announce mailing list and on various social media.
The team is working hard on the new web site and the registration system, with the intent of having everything ready well before our deadlines.
We’re not planning on moving, but folks keep asking. Why is BSDCan always in Ottawa?
For years the answer was “because Dan lives there.”
Then it was “because Dan knows everyone there and can arrange it remotely.”
Now it’s “because the committee knows everybody there and can arrange it remotely.”
Today, a more useful question would be, “What would we need to move BSDCan to $MYFAVORITECANADIANCITY?”
The answer? “Someone to do the work.”
Moving BSDCan to a new city would require someone in that city to take point on arranging convention space and attendee housing. Yes, we could sift through AI-spam-infested travel guides to find a place, but nothing can replace a live human looking at conference space and the neighborhood saying “Yeah. My people will like this.”
One of our goals is to be inexpensive. Last year BSDCan raised its prices for the first time since 2005. Many tech conferences cost thousands of dollars. We will not do that. That excludes the downtowns of Toronto or Vancouver.
We want nearby pubs and restaurants. We want interesting stuff for tourism. We want easy travel. This excludes, say, Nakina, Ontario. (MWL has been to Nakina. It’s lovely. It’s not right for BSDCan.)
Not only do we need a volunteer to do the work of talking to facilities, that volunteer must be demonstratably reliable. That means they need to be an active ops committee member for a good year before their proposed move.
You gotta help run a BSDCan before we’ll trust you to host a BSDCan.
We meet on the last Saturday of the month at 1800 UTC, and every Saturday the month before the con.
Having compared notes with EuroBSDCon, we are very glad that we can keep the same venue year after year. If BSDCan does ever move, we would want to choose a location that we can use for many years.
At the BSDCan 2024 closing session, I said we’d be transparent with our finances. Here is that report.
This summary excludes colocated events such as bhyvecon and the FreeBSD Developer Summit. While BSDCan provides considerable logistical support for these events, they pay their own expenses. We encourage these organizations to become BSDCan sponsors once they can. If you have a BSD-related event that you would like to host around BSDCan, do let us know.
We’re a Canadian conference, so amounts are in CAD. Numbers will not add up perfectly due to rounding.
Our income:
Registration $27,000
Sponsors $76,000
Misc $300
Total Income $104,000
Expenses:
Speaker travel $35,000
Speaker hotel $9,000
Food $15,000
Facilities $15,000
Closing party $11,000
Tshirts+totes $5,000
Miscellaneous $6,000
Total Expenses: 96,000
One of our goals is to have sufficient funding to pay deposits and fees due before we open registration. In 2024, Colin Percival fronted those expenses. While we reimbursed him once sponsor and registration funds arrived, “borrow an organizer’s credit card” is not a viable long term strategy.
We do sincerely thank Colin for his faith and trust in us.
We now have nearly $8,000 towards self-sustainability. We’re working to gather sponsor support earlier so we can avoid loans from the committee.
At the finance level, one of the things I’m notably proud of is that our travel team reimbursed most speaker travel expenses within a month. A couple people took longer for logistical reasons. We’re changing our CFP to gather basic reimbursement information up front, so that we can quickly reimburse everyone next year.
The goal of 2024 was to replicate the traditional BSDCan experience with our new committee. We wanted to learn what worked well and what could easily be changed. With our deeper understanding of the con’s finances, we’ll be looking at how to make BSDCan 2025 even better. I can already promise two things:
Speaking slightly more personally for a moment: my goal in taking over BSDCan was to transform it into a self-sustaining team effort supported and run by the community. It would do no good to transform BSDCan from the “Magnificent Dan and Adam Show” into the “Less Magnificent But More Snarky MWL Show.” Finance is integral to that effort. I am delighted with what the volunteers have accomplished, and look forward to handing the 2026 con chair (Patrick McEvoy) a functional and financially sustainable conference.
The first official BSDCan 2024 event — the Goat BoF — takes place two weeks from today. The Goat BoF is an informal gathering for early arrivals and yes, there is a goat.
The University of Ottawa guest network restricts outbound traffic to TCP ports 80 and 443. We have requested they open the network for us. Some years our request is granted, sometimes not. Like many folks who travel frequently, you might consider running an SSH server on port 80 and 443.
We are seeking volunteers to help staff the registration desk! Most everyone should have registered before the conference, but someone has to mark names off the list and help haul T-shirts and bags into the event. We need help:
If you’re interested, please reply to this message.
We also have a newcomers orientation and membership session Thursday night at 6PM, in the same Hacker Lounge. If you’ve never been to BSDCan before, our fifteen-minute talk will help orient you and give you a chance to meet old hands who are volunteering to help ease you into the community.
Finally, you should know that UO has active protestors encamped near the conference. We strongly urge you to leave them alone. Interfering with a protest is a great way to attract police attention. As a general rule, BSDCan staff cannot help you in legal matters.
Two weeks. See you soon!
Michael W Lucas
BSDCan 2024 Chair
Twenty-two days! If you are coming from a country other than the USA, you should start thinking about getting your eTA Real Soon Now(tm) – they’re quite backed up right now.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/visit-canada/eta/apply.html While the committee’s goal is to keep BSDCan largely traditional, you should be aware of a few changes.
Most everyone goes for shwarma at some point, so we might as well bring it to you. For Friday lunch! If you registered a guest, they are welcome to join us for lunches and snacks.
Speaking of guests, if you register them they get a shirt and badge as well as lunch. If the guest shirt option wasn’t on the form when you registered, contact registration@bsdcan.org with their size. Fitted shirts are available.
If this is your first BSDCan, try to come to the newcomers session at 6PM Thursday in the Hacker Lounge (in the lobby lounge of the U90 Residence Hall). It’s only ten minutes long, and at the end experienced volunteers can guide you to the people you want to meet and the places you want to see.
If this isn’t your first BSDCan, and you want to welcome newcomers and help ease them into our community, please come to the Hacker Lounge at 6PM Thursday for the newcomers session.
Tutorial attendees are sharing a lunch buffet with the FreeBSD Developer Summit rather than the traditional boxed lunches.
If you haven’t seen the schedule, take a look at https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/1/timetable/#all.detailed. Five tutorials, four talk tracks, and on Tuesday night: a goat.
We look forward to seeing you all in Ottawa!
We would like to invite everyone to join us 28 May-1 June 2024 for the twentieth year of BSDCan!
It’s a new registration system, so we’re rolling it out in phases. Speakers have been asked to register, but you’re next. Don’t wait, register now.
(by Pamela Mosiejczuk and Michael W Lucas)
We just sent out submission acceptances and rejections. We’re months out from the conference and everything can change, but if everything works out we’re gonna have a great con. So let’s talk about rejection.
Conferences reject submissions for reasons. Submitters feel that those talks get rejected for completely different reasons. It’s not that unaccepted talks are bad. Conferences generally weed out a very few submissions where the abstract was not of a quality/completeness that we could actually judge, sure, but these committees aren’t gauging your worth like an academic board. We’re tasked with creating a lineup like a programming block for television.
After years of working with poster sessions, colloquium, and conference scheduling, especially for BSD conferences, here are the common reasons why we turn down a submission.
Note that this list does not include “your proposal was bad and you should feel bad.”
People are reluctant to re-propose the same talk again. Don’t be? Maybe people filled up the fuzzy bunnies track really early the first year you submitted and yours was simply one of the sacrificial ones because a few of the others fit together especially nicely thematically. The next year, the masses might be on to slithery snakes and there will be a prime space for your etymology of fuzzy bunnies talk, which was always interesting, there was nothing wrong with the bunnies!
People forget that we are generally not gauging quality at all, we’re rating things like “is this clear for this audience?” and “can this talk be a good way to get people to meet during the discussion and be able to continue to chat into lunch?”
There are certainly ways to slamdunk a submission to get it noticed. An abstract where we can imagine the precise audience who will be interested, which makes it obvious the level of experience required, talks clearly about the topics to cover (and sounds reasonable for the timeframe and experience of the presenter) and explains how the audience will be able to use what they’ve learned for their own purposes? That is immediately noticed. One that simply presents a topic without much context requires that both the committee and the audience know exactly what you are on about and can identify the talk’s purpose and end results on their own. If you want to talk about filaments in light bulbs produced between 1982-1995 we NEED to understand what is interesting about that. We believe you, but you only get a paragraph or two, is it there? Showmanship does matter, but this detail is why we can get excited about your topic.
Sometimes it’s just not exciting, it’s informational. Then we need to have someone around who understands its value. Teams tend to have both specialists and generalists doing these reviews. I’m a generalist and will alert on talks providing interesting looks into history, social topics, future planning, etc. Someone else might be the light bulb person. If we don’t actually represent that specialty to judge well? That’s OUR shortcoming, not yours.
This process is a balancing act where a handful of people try to stack a bunch of blocks in such a way that we’ll hit a nice variety of topics and provide an interesting broad cross-section of what’s going on in a particular world without letting the blocks fall because we didn’t provide a sufficiently varied mix of popular and niche, this topic and that, intro and advanced, rote technical and something-new.
Also, we all want to hear these sample talks about bunnies and light bulbs. But not at BSDCan.
Also also, you should know that the people who handle BSDCan’s money have no say in which papers get accepted. BSDCan has never sold talk slots. (I would say “never will,” but a million dollars up front and a generous trust fund for every attendee might change our minds.)
With that: here is the tentative list of talks for the 20th annual BSDCan! (Subject to change, slippery when wet, use as directed, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.)
Tutorials
Managing OpenBSD Networks with NSH — Tom Smyth
Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset — Peter Hansteen
BGP 101 — Massimiliano Stucchi (AS58280.net)
Run Your Own Email Server — Michael Lucas (BSDCan ConCom)
BoF
ZFS BoF — Allan Jude (Klara Inc.)
Implementing Routing Domains on an OpenBSD workstation for use with WireGaurd — Josh Grosse
Contributing to FreeBSD
Contributing to NetBSD
Talks
Supporting Business IT and network needs with OpenBSD and NSH — Tom Smyth
HardenedBSD 2024 State of the Hardened Union: A Decade of Hardened Bits — Shawn Webb (The HardenedBSD Project / The HardenedBSD Foundation)
A Journey Into BSD and Standards: BSD and POSIX — Katie McMillan (Government of Canada)
The FreeBSD and Windows Environments — Michael Dexter (Call For Testing)
NetBSD Subfiles — Elijah Sherwood (Western Washington University)
The State of Email — Michael Lucas (BSDCan ConCom)
Zelta: A Safe and Powerful Approach to ZFS Replication — Daniel Bell (Bell Tower Integration)
Alamosa: A Tiered Disk Block Cache for NetBSD — Kira Ash
20 Years of NYC*BUG, and Can We Handle 20 More? — George Rosamond (NYC*BUG)
Supporting FreeBSD in the Field — Allan Jude (Klara Inc.)
LLDB FreeBSD Kernel Module Improvement — ShengYi Hung (National Taiwan Normal University)
Summa Tetraodontidae: Thomas Aquinas Explores OpenBSD’s Medieval Orderliness — Corey Stephan (University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas))
Address space reservations: Re-thinking address space management for pointer provenance — Brooks Davis (SRI International)
NetBSD on RISC-V – It Finally Runs NetBSD — Dylan Eskew (Western Washington University)
Running your own network using BGP, OSPF and IS-IS on the BSDs — Massimiliano Stucchi (AS58280.net)
Making NetBSD as a fast(er) booting microvm — Emile Heitor (NetBSD)
The Accidental Release Engineer — Colin Percival (Tarsnap Backup Inc.)
Why fsync() on OpenZFS can’t fail, and what happens when it does — Rob Norris (Klara)
Supporting a development lab with FreeBSD — Chuck Tuffli (FreeBSD)
DJ-BSD: DJing and music production in FreeBSD — Charlie Li
Encouraging and enabling SMEs (small to medium enterprises) to contribute to BSD development — Tom Smyth
A userspace NVMe over Fabrics Implementation — John Baldwin (FreeBSD Project)
Calling the BATMAN: Free Networks on FreeBSD — Aymeric Wibo
Improving Haskell Development Experience on FreeBSD — Daniel Lovasko
How to get started hacking NetBSD — Taylor Campbell (The NetBSD Foundation)
quiz: tiny VMs for kernel development — Rob Norris (Klara)
Contributing to FreeBSD via Github — Warner Losh (Netflix)
Towards a Robust FreeBSD-Based Cloud: Porting OpenStack Components — Chih-Hsin Chang
USB Debug Capability on FreeBSD, Revised — Hiroki Sato (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
Hot cross builds: cross-compilation in pkgsrc — Taylor Campbell (The NetBSD Foundation)
FreeBSD as the backbone of a vaccine/medication refrigerator monitoring system — Phillip Vuchetich (Arxsine Inc.)
FreeBSD at 30 Years: Its Secrets to Success — Marshall Kirk McKusick (McKusick Consultancy)
Full Disclosure! BSDCan Finances
The CFP for the 20th Annual BSDCan has ended and the program committee is busily reviewing your submissions. I’m not only the organizing team chair, I’m also on that papers committee, and all I’ll say is that we got some good stuff this year.
Thanks to the efforts of Allan Jude and Colin Percival, BSDCan now has a new business organization and a bank account. Sponsor support is starting to come in and prospective sponsors often rightfully ask us how we spend their contributions. While numbers increase every year, here are the rough figures from 2023 (in Canadian dollars, because Canada).
Total: $74,000
One of the things that makes BSD conferences special is that we pay for speaker accommodations and travel. This breakdown shows why we need sponsors. 2024 will cost more than this.
Note that this does NOT include the FreeBSD DevSummit. The FreeBSD Foundation pays those expenses. Some speakers attend the DevSummit as well as the conference, but that doesn’t increase the flight cost so we’re delighted to help out there. Some speakers volunteer to cover their travel costs and we sincerely appreciate it. If your employer will cover your travel and accommodation, we’d be thrilled to list them as a travel sponsor. If you want to host a similar DevSummit or mini event, reach out immediately so we can get you a room. My next post will be too late.
BSDCan registration fees haven’t changed for years and we pride ourselves on keeping costs low. We could pay for the entire conference by raising the admission to $750 or so, but BSDCan’s traditional motto is Bringing BSD Together. We want to welcome younger folks who will become tomorrow’s contributors. Instead, we’ve slightly increased admission for regular attendees. If you work for a large company that has a serious training budget, please sign up as a corporate attendee. We’re being pessimistic and thinking we can raise $30,000 that way. We’re also planning to charge for the closing social, but there’s a possibility that a per-head fee will keep some folks away. Who knows how that will work out?
That leaves $44,000. Our sponsorship goal is $50,000 to give us some leeway for increased costs. We’ve been promised a good chunk of that so far, but only about $8,000 has arrived in our account and some of that money has already gone—reserving rooms means paying deposits.
For BSDCan to succeed, we must make pessimistic assumptions. We might have more attendees. We certainly hope to have more attendees. Any funds raised over the goal will go to replenishing BSDCan’s financial reserves for 2025 and beyond.
If you work for a company that uses BSD, they’re getting a heck of a deal. I’d encourage you to ask your employer to sponsor us. They’ll want to know why. Here are some things you can use to persuade them to support us.
Why Support BSDCan?
BSDCan’s traditional motto is Bringing BSD Together and we do that in many ways. For twenty years we have brought developers together to discussion technical matters, helped users learn from authoritative presentations and tutorials, and brought people of every level of experience to the hands-down best BSD hallway track in the world. No matter where you’re from or what your level of BSD experience is, you are welcome at BSDCan.
BSD Unix and its projects are about building quality infrastructure. We would not have the Internet as we know it without BSD, nor many of the most popular appliances, phones, and web sites. This reach is possible thanks to our commitment to sharing our work without charge and without restrictions. This permissiveness spurns innovation and has done so for nearly half a century.
What is on the BSDCan program?
Users and developers will discuss real-world problems and resolve edge cases to enhance system reliability, performance, and usefulness. Tutorials expand users’ skills while various projects will host their own meetings. Well-known BSD technologies represented at BSDCan include OpenSSH, OpenZFS, Packet Filter, IPFW, OpenPAM, Jails, bhyve, IPFW, DTrace, LibreSSL, and Clang/LLVM among many more.
Who is the target audience?
The target audience includes everyone from potential BSD users up to advanced developers. Tracks include Development, Systems Administration, and real-world Experiences.
Our core constituency includes:
We are specifically reaching out for two other groups:
How does your sponsorship help?
BSDCan has always kept its ticket prices low to allow the broadest demographic of community members to attend. We also pride ourselves on funding the travel and accommodations of our presenters to further remove barriers to participation. Your sponsorship goes directly to our venue and travel costs, plus luxuries at your discretion such as the social event.
Visit our Sponsorship page (https://www.bsdcan.org/2024/sponsorship.php) to learn more and we hope to see you there!
Michael W Lucas – for the BSDCan organizers
We need you.
While sponsorships have started to arrive, we have several potential large sponsors and are honing our pitch to them. They want to know how BSDCan has changed both people and organizations. I don’t know how often I’ve seen some bewildered first-time attendee asking someone about their problem and be led to the person who created the code responsible. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen that same newcomer standing in a tight group with a handful of other users and developers discussing exactly how the software should function. Many times, I have seen that same “bewildered newcomer” return the next year to present on their solution for the problem.
I know many people who found employment via BSDCan.
I know of many companies that decided to use BSD software, came to BSDCan seeking guidance, and learned we could solve not only the problems they knew about but ones they hadn’t yet considered.
Potential sponsors want these testimonials.
If you or your organization are one of them, and you’re willing to go on the record saying that BSDCan changed your life for the better, please send us a brief testimonial. You can comment below (please sign your real name, not “DeathDaemon1999” or whatever your handle is), or email it to me at mwl at mwl dot io.
In other news: all web sites are painful, but sites from 2004 are differently painful.
We now have a functional 2024 web site on the new team’s infrastructure. It’s the same old BSDCan web site we all know and, supposedly, love. I’m not knocking Dan; this is how it was done, back in the day. Bringing this site up has really driven home that the operations team includes zero front end people. We would really like to archive the historical sites and start over, but have no good options for doing so. (Yes, we could slam up WordPress and get something running, but I said good options.) We need something that can easily be replicated and archived year after year, but works well on mobile devices. If you’re a web designer who regularly attends BSDCan and want to get involved, do drop Lucas a note at mwl at mwl dot io.
The CFP was supposed to be live 1 December. You’ve probably noticed it isn’t. David is working hard, and we should have a submission system ready soon. When it’s ready you’ll see it here, and on the announcements mailing list and the various social media sites.
At a vendor meeting last month, Dexter spoke with several prospective sponsors. We’ve implemented their suggestions, and simplified the sponsorship tiers and created a handy brief explaining why people should sponsor BSDCan. We’re approaching potential sponsors hat in hand, but you can do that same. If your employer uses any BSD-adjacent technology, such as OpenSSH or OpenZFS, our conference aligns with your business interests. While I’d love to have a single $50,000 sponsor, ten $5,000 sponsors is far more sustainable. Getting your company immortalized in the conference videos is the kind of publicity money can’t buy—except it can. If you’d like to help us restart without full-on sponsoring us, we’re taking donations via Paypal at funding@bsdcan.org.
BSDCan is now an Ontario non-profit corporation. This simplifies a whole bunch of stuff, at the cost of Allan and Colin doing extra paperwork. Everybody but Colin and Allan are fine with this, and those two don’t mind too much.
Things are coming together. I expect this month to have an extra blog post once the CFP launches.
(MWL, for the ops team)