I’m Kirk Russell, a Google Site
Reliability Engineer who
moves files around the cloud at a massive scale. I use BSD software on
a daily basis -- in my Android
phone, my home NAS and my MacBook. My
newest toy is a small
ARM board that runs FreeBSD.
Earlier this year I attended BSDCan, a software
conference for BSD
based operating systemprojects.
I attended this conference to learn about new BSD technology that will
someday become part of my daily life and to meet people with similar
interests -- there is time to chat in-between the scheduled talks and
in the pub.
BSDCan is a conference where I learn about new development that I can
put to use both at work and at home. Learning these things from the
original developers makes it that much more interesting.
Here is a quick reflection on some highlights of past conferences:
In 2004, I attended Ryan
McBride's talk about PF, a BSD licensed packet
filter.
In 2005, I learned about spamd at a talk from Bob Beck.
After the conference, I deployed spamd at home -- my spam count dropped
to almost zero. Spamd uses PF to block spam at the IP level. This saves
resources on your server because you do not actually receive the mail.
Adding packet filtering features to the base operating system has
enabled new applicaitions, like spamd, to develop.
In 2006, I attended the Debugging
Kernel Problems tutorial (PDF)
given by Greg Lehey-- I continue to use these debugging tricks when
debugging FreeBSD kernels today.
I attended Pawel
Dawidek's ZFS talk in 2007. Today I use FreeBSD/ZFS
on my home NAS -- I wouldn't think of running my NAS without the
features of ZFS. I want my data to have data
corruption detection. It is fantastic that a production filesystem
can work in my tiny NAS! In 2007 I also saw the brilliant Poisonous
People talk by Brian
Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman.
Part of this talk is about avoiding bikeshedding-- it
was funny to watch when Fitz and Ben realized that Poul-Henning Kamp, the
author of the original
bikeshed email, was attending their talk.
2009 was a good year for NetBSD and
filesystems. There was a talk about WAPBL a journaling filesystem in the
NetBSD tree and RUMP -- a framework that allows
NetBSD kernel filesystem code to execute in user space.
2010 showed BSD continuing to be used
as a platform for OS research. Kirk
McKusick's new Journaled Soft-Update improvements now allows fsck in a few seconds, instead of
hours.
The BSD community continues to produce exciting software that can be
used in small gadgets and production servers and BSDCan continues to be
a fantastic venue to meet the people behind the scenes. Congrats to
Dan and his team to volunteers -- I
am looking forward to 2011.
By Kirk Russell, Site Reliability Team
