Friday, 15. November 2024
In the previous part I covered my arrival and the two tutorial days. This one is about the main conference, the social event, my trip home and a conclusion.
EuroBSDCon 2024 report (1/2) - arrival & tutorial days
I got up at about 6 AM, checked my mail and began to research how to get to the Social Event in the evening. Since the location was in a distant spot of the city, the public transportation route wasn't completely straight-forward but in the end I figured out how I thought it should work best.
At 7:30 I finally left my room to go downstairs and eat something. Waiting for the elevator, I ran into Sven. We went to have breakfast together and talked BSD conferences a little. Like me he had been to his first EuroBSDCon in Vienna two years ago, where we caught the bug. Unlike me he went to AsiaBSDCon and BSDCan, too! It's impressive how many people you can get to know in a short time. But this is BSD, right?
At 9:15 I had finished the last practice run of my talk. This time I managed to stay within my time-frame and leave a couple of minutes for questions, which is good! After checking the conference plan for possible changes I tidied up my room and went for the bus. I saw a couple of people waiting at the stop and was tempted to finally just cross the street like seemingly everybody else. In the end I took the longer path again, seeing all three buses pass by once more. So when I got to the stop there was nobody there, anymore. A couple of minutes later however, Renè, one of the organizers from NL, joined me and we talked a bit about Dublin, buses and several other things. He also answered a question I had about correctly pronouncing Dutch names (I'm a hobbyist fiction writer and am working on a project that takes place in the Netherlands and it always felt weird that I was unsure of how to pronounce the name of one of the protagonists!).
At the venue I went straight for the main room as there wasn't too much time left before the opening session. I briefly talked with Joseph Mingrone about a Bhyve case study and have to get in touch with him once I got this report done and a couple of other things taken care of. Henning held the opening presentation, telling us about the sponsors, reminded the attendees of the "6-2-1" rule (6h of sleep, 2 meals, 1 shower per day!) and let his tongue "slip" to "accidentally reveal" next year's conference location: supposedly Kiev! Of course I had already been wondering about the actual location, so well done CTO ("Chief Trolling Officer") Henning!
Next was the keynote by Tom Smyth. He talked about the structure of the EU bodies relevant to making decisions that affect all of us and SMEs in particular, explaining how to get your voice heard and his experience with "lobbying" for his company's interests. The major takeaway was: The EU is not nearly as bad as some people think, they are actually interested in feedback and do listen. Since we of course know better than the politicians, we should make our voice heard. I agree with Tom here and I'm glad that he does this (I'm not a business owner and if I were I probably wouldn't find time to meet people in Brussels).
For the first talk I picked Franco's and it was interesting to hear about how the OPNsense tooling had come together (I've played around with it a couple of years ago, so I recognized a surprisingly large amount of things).
After lunch I went to the main room again for service scripts mastery. Mateusz did a really good job at introducing people to this topic and while I already knew much of it, I definitely learned something new, too. I now also have a much better picture of how the whole system works.
Next was my own talk, so I just stayed in the room and decided against getting something to drink. Which was a good thing as things went sideways immediately: Despite having checked my laptop against the recording gear the day before, this time graphics output would simply not work. I applied all the tricks that I knew of, but no. Guido tried to help, too, and checked the connection with his laptop which simply worked. Others joined in and we tried to get it to work somehow - no luck, though. HDMI-2? No sir! _xrandr_ kept insisting on that.
Alright, time for plan B... Luckily I had prepared for the unthinkable and brought another laptop with me. Unfortunately it does not have HDMI output, only VGA and DP. Guido quickly organized a display port adapter and I copied the latest version of my slides over. When he came back and I attached it - I finally saw my slides on the projector!
While I'm a calm person and usually confident speaker, this incident did impact my state of mind as one might expect. In the end this caused me to somewhat rush through the slides, leaving out some information that I had planned to touch on. Others slipped my mind. Then again, I think I made a lot of important points and the talk covered quite a bit of ground, anyways. Judging from the feedback I got later it was probably okay nevertheless, even though I actually finished early.
After my presentation I talked to Franco a bit about some OPNsense history with HardenedBSD which was quite interesting. This highlights one of the main benefits of going to conferences: Being able to meet people in person and exchange info that you simply wouldn't find on the net like that! So I have a better understanding of some of the decisions that I had had some trouble with before. Fetching something to drink, I came by the table of Franco's employer, Deciso. As I was taking a look at the swag, I was encouraged to grab a t-shirt and a bag which I gladly accepted (especially the bag which says "everything under ctrl" on the back is pretty cool!). We also talked a little about OPNsense and I told them that I had been an early adopter and had already been there when the smear campaign against it happened. Even though that particular incident was just crazy, there are still some nice memories, too. (Damn, that was 10 years ago already? Seriously, where did all that years go??)
Next I attended Kim's talk after chatting a while with Lukas, a fellow sysadmin from the area I used to live in. He's still rather new to *BSD but really enjoying it a lot despite having tons of things to learn. Kim presented on behalf of the FreeBSD foundation and I liked that presentation as well, particularly for encouraging people to get more involved. In the following break, Robert and somebody working on ports asked me about categories in Ravenports and jokingly pointed out how important _x11-clocks_ is! The little discussion was pretty funny and almost made me be late for the next talk.
I went to Walter's "Hacking - 30 years ago" and that one was really excellent. I'm very glad I attended as per Walter's request it was not recorded or streamed. He presented on what hacking back in the day meant and what it really was like when there there was no laws about it. I heard lots and lots of fascinating stories about old systems and the generally very poor security at the time!
For the last talk of the day I picked Stefano's and did not regret it. He told the story of his business bringing most of their machines back over to BSD in recent years and generally delivered a passionate call for using more BSD systems in production. Then it was time to go for the SOC.
On the way out I asked Robert if he was going to the SOC, too, and whether he had a plan on how to get there. His proposal was to "follow the crowd" and we decided that Kristof knew what he was doing (even though I'm fairly sure that he was simply putting his trust in Google). We took a bus and then walked 20 mins or so, eventually arriving at the destination: The Brew Dog, located at the river Liffey. During the bus trip and the walk, Robert and I talked a bit about the late Jörg Schilling (a Solaris diehard and the author of cdrtools and other important software who unfortunately lost his fight with cancer in 2021), commercial Unix, retro computing and things like that. So while we were en route for quite some time it actually went by pretty quickly.
Inside the building we all got three tokens from Philipp which basically meant three free drinks. I met Jörg again and we stayed at a table together, soon joined by another German (this has happened to me the third year in a row now, even though it was never planned. Then again, according to the statistics there's simply a lot of German attendees to EuroBSDCon every year so chances are not that low). I have to admit that I didn't like the place too much - it was very crowded and the music was too loud to be able to talk to others comfortably (even though I was told that it was actually decent with music at many other pubs being even louder).
Food was chaotic; the vegetarian meals were served first but most people seemed to not have understood that they were for the vegetarians only! So I didn't end up getting a huge amount of food, but what I got didn't really convince me, either. I guess the fact that I don't drink alcohol (for medical reasons) doesn't make such a location extremely appealing in the first place? It was okay for what it was, but comparing this SOC with those in Coimbra or Vienna, it absolutely was no match (even when you disregard the general atmosphere). Of course it would have been a disgrace to have visited Dublin without going to any pub at all, so it was not a bad choice at all, just not my personal highlight.
At 9 PM or maybe a little later, Jörg and I decided to leave early and rather get some fresh air on the streets than continue to almost yell at each other, trying to maintain a conversation. We walked around for quite some time and eventually took a bus back to our hotels. I was back in my room at 10:45 or so, quickly took a shower and waited for my hair to dry. At 0:30 I finally went to bed after taking at least some quick notes which would later result in this report. Allan Jude once summed it up on BSDNow! like this: "You don't sleep much at conferences." And that's the plain truth.
I got up at 7 AM the next day, even though it was slightly painful, but I wanted to take a couple more notes while the memories were still fresh (even though "fresh" was probably the wrong word to describe anything related to my dizzy brain at that time!). When I finally finished that as well as breakfast, it was almost 10 AM already. So I quickly checked the weather, packed my stuff for the day and ran off.
Having arrived at the venue, I of course first heard the keynote. It was an interesting topic and I learned some new things about it, but I do not fully agree with all the points that were made. In the big picture the speaker certainly was right, though. Since the talk the day before had inspired me, I talked to Kim about submitting a user story (which I still have to actually do). The FreeBSD Foundation is doing excellent work and we as the community should definitely support their efforts as good as we can, right?
For the first talk I went to Sven's and that one was really interesting. He had struggled with losing his voice the day before and was still having some problems but did fairly good in the end fortunately. This was even more important as the room he held his talk in didn't have a PA system, so a microphone could only be used for the recording but not for addressing the actual audience! Talking about recordings: If you have even some interest in the topic of AI and home automation, this is one of the talks to watch if you missed it! After the talk, I was able to ask Brooks a couple of questions about CHERI and gained some very interesting insights about what the state of the project is and what to expect in the future. I don't want to spread rumors, but if one particular thing they are trying to do were to work out... That would be extremely cool.
After lunch and the family photo I talked a while with Lukas about how he came to BSD and why he's using it at work now. I would not have bet on finding our favorite family of operating systems in that spot, but that was a pleasant surprise, of course! We went together to Kirk's talk which was great as one would assume (he's known for giving great talks for years after all). Next was one of those vexing spots where I was having a very hard time to decide which talk to attend. In the end I missed all three of them, because as I was taking a little breath of fresh air outside I had met Christoph with whom I had talked quite a bit last year. I ended up not watching the time closely enough and so, yeah, hallway track for once!
During the break I briefly talked to Dan and had actually planned on attending his talk. I chatted a bit with two Austrians for a while and somehow ended up in Dave's talk eventually. That one was definitely also interesting, so I can't say I regret it. In fact I'll have to find some time and take a closer look at his project on my own. Boris' talk sounded pretty interesting but then again I like pf more than ipfw and am not an expert in networking anyways. So I decided to go to Allan's instead and that one was fantastic! I learned a couple of new things and some of the examples were really inspirational.
Before the closing session I talked to Eirik for a moment as it had come to my mind that I didn't thank him for sponsoring GhostBSD when we talked last year! The closing session is of course not something you look forward to as it concludes the conference, but the EuroBSDCon organizers always do a great joy at making it amusing, interesting and exciting, since at the very end the location of next year's conference is being revealed. So 2025 will be in Zagreb which sounds great to me! A surprise was the explanation of what a particular detail on the speaker's gifts was: Ogham (yes!)!
Back in the hotel I showered, ate something and quickly looked at the results of the election in Brandenburg (a federal state in Eastern Germany). Then I sat down to process the day and write down my notes for later before going to bed around 11 PM.
I got up at 5:30 and ate the rest of the bread that I still had. While technically I could have had proper breakfast at the hotel, I wanted to leave when it opened and I needed to eat up my own supplies, anyway. Then I packed my stuff which took quite a bit longer than anticipated (or was I that slow because I was tired?). So when I was finally done, I hurried to the checkout where I met Philipp again who wanted to take the next Aircoach so he could have a quick breakfast.
At 7:05 I was sitting in the Aircoach and felt pretty happy that this had worked out. Once again the trip took quite some time, but I was so early that nothing should be able to go wrong. Well, of course I exited the bus at terminal 2 because I expected that it would stop at terminal 1 first! Even though I had my complete luggage with me, walking over to T1 was fine. I quickly figured out the correct counter and thought about already lining up, being curious how long I'd have to wait before it would open up. I was surprised to find it open already - of course that was a pleasant surprise, though! So I checked in without problems and then went over to the security check.
Having read the rules there I decided that they might be more strict than for the arrival flight. So after emptying my last bottle of water, I decided to just dispose of the tiny rest of my shampoo and toothpaste as well to avoid having to argue. I actually even had to take my shoes off in addition to taking out laptops and phone if the laptop bag. Therefore I assume it was the right choice with the liquid / paste.
At 8:45 I was sitting at the airport behind the security check and took some notes again as well as just relaxing a little. Since I got the earlier Aircoach bus that I had hoped for, didn't need to wait at the check-in at all and only needed about 15 minutes for the security check, I had almost 2 hours left until boarding started. But I'd much rather have it like this than the other way round!
I got to the gate way early and by chance met Jörg again who was however flying to Munich and not to Frankfurt like me. We said goodbye as the boarding for his flight started. I took a seat at my gate and waited. An Irishman approached me and asked whether I'd be willing to participate in a survey. I had nothing else to do, so why not? He had a couple of questions related to tourism in Ireland and it was done in no time.
A little while later some other BSD people arrived who had booked the same flight, among them Benedict, Kristof and Lukas. We had lots of time to talk again because boarding was delayed quite a bit and even the gate changed in that process. Eventually we were told that the plane was going to be very full and that people are requested to check-in their carry-on baggage. I decided to play nice and comply - my suitcase received a "priority" label but of course that meant that I would have to wait for the baggage return later.
When we finally were able to board it was already clear that the others who had connecting flights would miss them... For some this meant that they'd be stranded in Frankfurt the whole day and could only go on in the evening, which really sucks. On board of the machine I found out that I was sitting in the line of the emergency exit and that in this particular place it's not allowed to have the laptop bag under the front seat. Well, could be worse. The crew told us that the machine had been ready in time for an undelayed flight but the airport had been operating at capacity and had not been able to assign them an unoccupied starting position.
We landed in Frankfurt without any further complications, said goodbye and left in different directions. Lukas and I went to the baggage claim to get our late checked-in possessions and then took different S-Bahn trains. When I needed to buy a ticket I realized how sluggish the ticket machines felt (I kept having to go back one screen as it would interpret my touch wrong after finally loading the next one...). It looks like it's still the same ones that were already there when I was studying in the city one and a half decades ago. However they must have received a system "update": Not only has it become painfully slow but is also lost functionality: 15 years ago you could also get information on connections from them while now you can't! Yeah, "progress" I guess.
In the end I went to the information desk at main train station and asked the person there about which would be the next train to my destination. He told me and I went to that platform only to read the notification on the display there that today the train would be leaving at another one. Whatever, everybody knows that Deutsche Bahn is broken, right?
I had an absolute blast at the conference and as usual the only real downside was that time flew by so fast. September has become a known highlight of the year for me and of course I'm already making plans to go to EuroBSDCon 2025 again if at all possible. I'm also happy that I got the opportunity to present on a BSD topic: Despite my little technical difficulties it was a great experience!
If you've never been to any BSD conference and you get the chance to, don't consider it too much and just go. There's nothing like meeting other folks who are passionate about our operating system family of choice. Really.
I have not yet decided on the topic that I'm going to write about next.