Thursday, 31. October 2024
This year EuroBSDCon took place in Dublin and I was fortunate enough to go to the conference for the third time in a row. I've met a couple of newcomers and of course a lot of (by now) familiar faces. Thinking of it, it's crazy how quickly you turn from the newbie to a regular if you wish to! Last year I wrote that the obvious "upgrade" for me would be to become a speaker instead of a regular attendee next. When the call for papers opened earlier this year I simply gave it a try and submitted a proposal. It was accepted and I decided to just do it.
Like in the previous years I'll provide a comprehensive report both for people who know EuroBSDCon but couldn't make it this year and especially for people who have never been to it and like to get an impression of what it's like. To that end I'll try to also provide some insights about how things work for speakers. Perhaps you're also considering attending next year in Zagrab, Croatia?
EuroBSDCon 2023 report (1/2) - arrival & tutorial days
EuroBSDCon 2023 report (2/2) - Main conference, social event & conclusion
EuroBSDCon 2022, my first BSD conference (and how they are different)
Due to family and work related issues I unfortunately had to delay this post again and again. But now here it is.
For me the trip aspect is part of the experience so I will not just cover the actual conference. Like last year my journey started in Darmstadt (southern Germany). At 5:30 AM I was on my way through the not yet very lively city and reached main train station half an hour later. From there I took a train to Frankfurt central station and changed for the airport. I had to resort to the printed S-Bahn schedule since the displays just showed an out of order message.
Arriving at the airport station, I wanted to go to the restroom, but men's was closed due to construction work. I decided not to look for another one but to go to the shuttle boarding place to get to terminal 2 instead. Like last year I had to wait quite a while there before finally a shuttle bus arrived and picked us up. It was 7:45 when we arrived at the other terminal, which meant I had plenty of time. I found the counter and stood in the (reasonably short) line, waiting for it to open.
At 8:35 I had successfully checked in and was ready to kill a bit of time walking around before going to my gate. According to my boarding pass, boarding for my flight was supposed to start at 10:25. At 9:00 I decided to go through the security check. Unlike last year my gate was on the upper story, so it took me a moment to find it. Also unlike last time I also had to go through border control (while Ireland is in the EU, it's not Schengen area). So I lined up in the EU citizen line and it didn't take too long before it was my turn. I provided my ID card, the scanner's progress bar slowly filled up. Then the lights turned green and I was admitted into the small cabinet where my face was scanned as well.
Next was the actual security check. When it was my turn, this time I did not have to empty my laptop case and the check was done quickly. At about 9:30 I was in the International zone and waiting for the boarding to start in about an hour. Walking to my gate I noticed that the men's restroom was closed due to construction work (is there a pattern emerging?) and a notice said that the next one was outside of this area. Which means that anybody urgently in need would have to go through the security check again! Oh my. Good thing that I neither had to go there nor was I short on time.
Boarding was delayed for quite some time. Ironically the reason for that were people who had done the online check-in so that their passports had to be checked at boarding. With at least two of them there was either some kind of problem or it at least didn't work right away... For people like me who had their boarding passes from regular check-in, boarding started only after it should have already closed according to the original schedule. The plane was not in its usual spot, either, so a bus was organized to drive us to it (which was quite a distance actually). When we arrived at the plane, the doors of the bus remained closed. Without giving the passengers as much as a clue of what was going on, we waited there for another 20 minutes or so. Finally they opened the doors at 11:25 and we were admitted on board.
The crew apologized for the delay to every passenger individually and the captain then explained that they had arrived late in FRA due to fog in DUB which however had cleared by now and good flight weather was expected. Well, delays do happen and fortunately I was not pressed for time since this was a direct flight. I'm not happy with the information policy at the airport, though. It would not have been hard to just tell us what was going on, would it? Not just in the bus but on many other occasions on the trains, at the stations and at the airport I had heard other Germans talk about what this country is coming to and people seemed to have very little hope in general.
At about 12:10 we finally reached the targeted altitude above the clouds and I was able to close my eyes for a while. We landed about an hour late. I had to show my ID to the immigration police and later again to leave the International zone. After that I went looking for a place where I could buy a Leap Card (this is used in public transportation) and got one at a Spar in the airport.
Then I looked around again for the area where the Aircoach buses leave. I expected signs indicating the way but was surprised that it was not that straight forward to find. Eventually I asked somebody and was pointed to go to terminal 1 first (I had arrived at terminal 2). I walked over and found the bus stop. I bought a ticket and was told that the next bus was due in 15 minutes. The bus arrived and the driver asked the passengers for the bus stops they were heading for, which I think is nice. It was far from a short distance, though! The bus drove through the city for about an hour before arriving at the stop close to the hotel at about 3:00 PM (local time). The ride felt a bit special: The next station wasn't displayed anywhere and it was just the driver shouting the names through the bus. Not being used to the Irish accent and thanks to having had a bit of a cold which impacted my ears, this kept me on my toes to not miss my station (and if I had known this, I would have taken a seat closer at the front).
In the hotel I found the EuroBSDCon organizers and was told to just check in with my name. I did that and went to my room. There I made sure that the power adapter that I had brought with me works and I could use the WLAN. I did a little research on how the public transportation system works (wanted to do that at home but didn't find the time) and then left the hotel again to shop for some groceries. The latter took much longer than expected and not because I'm picky. I walked down the big road in front of the hotel for several kilometers in both directions, expecting that I'd discover a shop eventually. However the only thing I found were two petrol stations. In the end I had to ask a pedestrian who was nice enough to point me to a grocery store located in a side road. I got some water, sliced bread and cheddar cheese and walked back to the hotel.
Arriving just before 7:00 I finally had a shower and ate something. Then I tried to bring the notes that I took over the course of the day into shape so I would actually still understand them later. I was done at about 8:30 PM and decided that I had had too long of a day already and should get some sleep if I were to get much out of the tutorials tomorrow.
I had a good first night which was of little surprise considering how exhausted I've been. At 5:30 AM I got up to prepare a little for the day. I made some corrections to my slides and doing the first practice run, I found out what I had already suspected: I'll be hard pressed for time if I want to cover everything I have on the slides. So it would still need some refinement.
I went to have breakfast at about 7:30 where I had some bread, a fried egg, hashed browns (I will admit that I had to look up the English name as I only know the Swiss one!) and grilled mushrooms. It was good but I resisted the temptation to get more. You don't want to start the day weighted down, right?
Back in my room I checked my mail and planned the bus route. One of the benefits of me exploring the surrounding streets the day before was that I had an idea of how the bus stops seem to work. It's a bit complicated, though: They have a 3-digit or 4-digit number which is sometimes the only thing indicated on a physical sign at the stop. But they also seem to be referred to by a name that is not necessarily found at the stop and seems related to a location, important building or street corner near it! I also read about how to use the Leap Card on a bus.
At 9:00 I powered down my laptop after updating a couple of ports. Then I packed my stuff and left the hotel to get to the University. I had promised myself to eventually get accustomed to left driving. The day before I had (of course) always looked in the wrong direction when crossing the street! I avoided going across big road directly to the bus stop right vis-à-vis of the hotel but took the proper way a couple of hundred meters down the road to a pedestrian crossing. At the bus stop it didn't take long for a bus to arrive, stop briefly and then drive on without even opening the doors. I asked somebody if this was normal and was told that it does happen if the bus is already full.
I got on the next one, though. When the bus stopped at the next station, a couple of people got on, among them some BSD folks: Patric with his wife, one of the Dutch organizers and two others. A couple of stops later we got off at UCD and quickly found the way to O'Reilly Hall. I got my badge from Henning and collected my t-shirt from Peter.
Then I went in and ran into somebody from Hamburg who I remember having met last year in Coimbra. We talked about HardenedBSD for a moment as well as a couple of other things. When Robert Clausecker came by, I walked up to him as we had interacted online before. We had a good chat about CPU architectures, especially POWER and RISC-V but also CHERI and some other topics.
Soon the first tutorial started and it was really interesting. I definitely learned some new things about Bhyve there, even though it was a tutorial on basics only. We had lunch on 2:00 PM where I met Benedict and we had a quick chat. I got some nice grilled salmon on noodles and time flew by so I had to go to the second tutorial also about Bhyve. Here I met Jörg whom I knew from last year. This tutorial was much more advanced and I gained many new insights (also on the topic of jails!) that I will have to reflect upon when I got time for it.
After the tutorial was over, I left together with Jörg and we talked a bit about mail servers and other things until we headed off in different directions since he had booked a different hotel. While he chose to do some sight-seeing on Friday, my schedule said I'd be going to another tutorial.
The situation at the bus stop was utterly catastrophic. The tutorial had ended half an hour early at 5:30 PM, but I didn't arrive at the hotel until after 8:00... The reason is that in an hour's time I did not manage to catch a bus - even though there are several lines going from UCD that I could have taken! There were a couple of hundred people waiting there, many of the buses were already full when they arrived and some simply didn't arrive at all despite the displays hinting otherwise. This was a total mess. After the other tutorials had finished, too, some other BSD people showed up and together we tried to take a bus but eventually gave up and decided to walk. It was quite a distance but I'm convinced that it was the right choice as getting a bus seemed completely hopeless.
I talked a bit with Martin who is from Switzerland. One of the topics other than Dublin and busses - don't laugh - was the weather and its effects. He had arrived two days earlier for some sight-seeing and had actually managed to get a slight sunburn! Yes, in Dublin. In the autumn. In fact it was so warm that I left the hotel room's window open that night despite the noise from the busy street.
At the hotel I was happy to be able to take a shower as I was soaked in sweat after the march (I've been carrying two laptops around among other things - which was actually a life saver as would turn out later!). At almost 10 PM I decided to go to bed despite my hair not having dried completely, yet. Otherwise it would have been really hard to be less tired for the main coming days.
The next day I got up at 6:30 AM and was still struggling to keep my eyes open half an hour later. I decided to not go for breakfast until I stopped yawning every other minute or so. When I went there eventually I also took my time which had been worth it as it patched me up. My eyes still felt quite tired but I was in good spirits. I even felt adventurous and would have liked to do some sight-seeing, but my schedule didn't allow for that.
I worked a little bit on my slides, did a second practice run then had to leave for UCD in a bit of a hurry. Since I had witnessed air conditioning to be quite heavy yesterday (I'm not feeling cold quickly, but yesterday I did - indoors!), I left in a t-shirt but took a long-sleeve with me to change clothes at the university. While I was waiting at the red traffic light, all three busses going in the right direction passed me by. The next bus didn't even stop but I finally got the one thereafter. The stop before I had to exit, a large man got in and stood right before the display. Fortunately I recognized the bus stop UCD from the day before and got off.
On my way to the university building I encountered some political activists at a table. Being curious I took a look and that got me into a little discussion with one of them. We relatively quickly agreed on not agreeing, but now I had two pamphlets of the Irish section of the "Revolutionary Communist Party" to bring home as souvenirs (and from a text by Trotsky I actually learned that _lumpenproletariat_ is a valid English term)!
At the venue I asked Philipp about the mail he had written to speakers, recommending to test video output of our laptops with the recording gear. He told me to come back during lunch break for that. In the mail server tutorial we faced various problems, but Chris did some great live debugging and got things to work eventually. It was a very good session and I ended up with so many new insights that I'm slightly overwhelmed. It absolutely was the right choice to go to the Bhyve tutorials on the first day as much of the infrastructure for the mail servers made use of that. While it was not strictly necessary to understand these underpinnings in detail, that turned out what actually interested me the most!
For lunch I quickly grabbed the vegetarian meal which was some paella-like rice with vegetables. It was tasty but unfortunately I finished quickly because I was in a hurry to go to the screen recording test. It turned out that the recording gear was not ready, yet, though and the tests had to be postponed to the evening. Oh well! This gave me free reign to talk to some people, though. Right at the desk I met Stefano who owns a company in Italy that has been pushing BSD servers again in recent years. We talked for a moment and I will definitely have to get in touch again.
Next I talked to Taylor (whom I had also met last year) about what's new in NetBSD land as well as a bit about hardware architectures like RISC-V. I also briefly talked to Ruslan about CHERI and to a couple of other people. In the evening the recording test eventually succeeded (the problem was that a new but defective HDMI cable from hell had crept into the room and caused the mess!).
After leaving the university campus, I went to a Spar to get some groceries again and prepared for some more bus adventure. I had to wait a while but at least this time things worked out at all. When I got home at 7:15 PM, I found an additional key card had been left in my room, presumably by the room service. So I quickly returned that at the reception. I was really done, so much in fact that I considered showering in the morning so I could go to bed right away. But who knows what happens tomorrow? So I decided against it. It meant that it was almost 10 PM again before I got to sleep. But it's usually better to just get things done. What a day!
At that point I was really looking forward to the actual conference. I would however definitely not want to have missed out the tutorial days. Not only were the actual tutorials very good and I'm happy with having picked all three done by Chris (who really did some amazing work), but there were others that I would have liked to take, too. Well, the usual problem of not being able to be in two rooms at the same time, I guess.
Besides the tutorials however it was just great to be able to talk to other BSD people again. If you've never been to a conference: Don't underestimate the "hallway track"! It's just fantastic to be in a place where it's completely impossible to run into anybody that you could not have a great discussion with about the things that we all are passionate about. So if you are going next year and think about whether to go to the tutorials, too, I can highly recommend that. The main days are great, but even with the additional two days it's always over too quickly, anyway!
The next post will be about the main conference days and my trip home.
EuroBSDCon 2024 report (2/2) – Main conference and trip home