Thankfully I didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn (7:30!) because it was scheduled to start at 11am. I was a little rushed for time since I had to drop Caralyne off at my parents in Knightsen (so I back-tracked a bit), and I left at 9am, so I barely made it in time for the ZFS talk.
A Closer Look at the ZFS File System
by Pawel Jukab Dawidek
I’ve heard a great talk on ZFS from Bill Moore, one of the primary developers from Sun, but this talk was really cool because it didn’t just say what ZFS is from Sun’s marketting department’s point of view, but the technical details its mail peices and how it integrates in FreeBSD. He also discussed the current status, and we should soon see the ZFS version get bumped from 6 to 13! Pawel went a little into why ZFS just doesnt work on a 32bit machine, and i guess Sun figured that by the time ZFS was out, everyone would be phasing out 32bit machines in favor of 64bit ones :) Wishful thinking, thankfully my little server is a 64bit system and handles my ZFS /home volume just fine.
There was some mention of ZFS’s limitations with high-volume databases. Hopefully ZFS matures quickly, it is hard to go from UFS2 which has 20 or so years of QA, but ZFS has so many new cool bells and whistles that PJD said it most appropriately with “ZFS will do for storage what VM has done for memory”
Summer of Code
by Murray Stokely
Murray, a Google employee (who helped organize all this and yet I forgot her name, shame on me), two students and a NetBSD developer/mentor talked about Google’s Summer of Code project. I don’t have much to say on this except I think its great that Google does the Summer of Code project for so many open source projects, especially with ones like FreeBSD that have very few corporations willing to pay someone full time to be a commiter.
FreeBSD Foundation Update
by Robert Watson
Robert helps run the non-profit side of FreeBSD that takes care of donations, legal snafu’s, and getting things like Java certification for FreeBSD, manage project grants, and helps developers attend important dev. summits and conferences. Since FreeBSD is 100% voluntary, donations are crucial in the post dot-com bust. A few companies, like NetApp, Isilon, Ironport, Juniper… have made large donations, thats because they all use FreeBSD in their commercial products (and with the BSD license you can do that). For the FreeBSD Foundation to keep its 403(c) status, it also needs at least 1000 individual donations, and it doesn’t have to be big, just a lot of people.
It’s been about 4 years since I last donated, and I decided it was time to pony up again. I refuse to purchase Windows ( my more recent copy was free because I did a survey!), but I use FreeBSD in all the important aspect of my personal IT life, and I love to see it in the server room at work so a few donations here and there is the very least I can do for the OS that I personally beleive is of the utmost quality.
Crypto Acceleration
by Phiilp Paeps
I’ve always had a fascination with hardware crypto accelerators. Its mainly because I’m always concerned with two things: security on the wire, and performance. Hardware devices just seem to be the natural solution!
What I took away from this talk was an answer to that, and its “sometimes”. A lot of crypto accelerators only work with a limited set of algorithms and key sizes, and when you application doesn’t fall into that it falls back to the cpu. There was also some interesting facts about why a 32bit pci crypto accelerator isn’t so useful on a 64bit architecture. It was very cool to hear and I’d still like to get my hands on a nice HIFN card
Seamless Service Migration with PF and FreeBSD Jails
by Josh Paetzel
I wish I knew PF more so I could do this. He has a fantastic solution to upgrading a network service seamlessly using PF and Jails. Yes, you could setup a virtual machine, or just have a redundant box, but he was able to do this with 1 FreeBSD machine and it’s native tools.
I’ve setup a few jails at work before VMWare was the hip thing (and before ESX took off) and it amazed me how powerful that OS level of virtualization can be. I setup a full training environment, which was one server that had 8 virtual FreeBSD server’s for the students to trash and play around with. I also setup a FTP server in a jail to protect the host OS.
What Josh did here was very creative and cool, and maybe I can sit down in the future to implement it so my Apache and MySQL upgrades can be a little more robust.
Isilon and FreeBSD
by Zach Loafman
Isilon builds cluster file system appliances that are built off of FreeBSD. FreeBSD kicks complete ass when it comes to any network service, and with a rock solid file system like UFS it makes perfect sense to build and sell a turn-key solution off of it. That is what NetApp has based its business off of.
Its nice to see a company like that give back to the FreeBSD project, they did a lot of NFSv4 improvements that the base system could use.
Help! My System is Slow! – Profiling Tools, Tips and Tricks
by Kris Kennaway
Its hard to teach someone how to troubleshoot, there are no hard and fast rules, but Kris did a killer job at starting off with some simple tools like top(1), and figuring out where your bottlenecks are. Aside from a few specific kernel parameters a FreeBSD admin could tweak, this presentation translates to anyone who is trying to speedup their server.
He also went a little into benchmarking, and both profiling and benchmarking went over some very useful and pragmatic steps to quantify “performance”.
Conclusion
I had a great time this weekend, and I would easily give up more another weekend to do it again. I got to spend some time with Corrigan and Chris and simply “Geekout” on FreeBSD with a collection of cool and very polite people. I had a few misgivings about the structure of the convention. First, Michele hated the mascot, and I can see why. Having that mascot instead of the traditional Beastie or the new official FreeBSD Logo prevented me from sending out this MeetBSD link to other System Administrators that I work with. It doesn’t offend me, but it might offend someone else, or even worse, make them think this is not a mature environment. I know, the fact that people may be offended by a mascot alone is the opposite of maturity, but its a fact that people WILL be offended by it. I also thought the whole laptop+projector issue could have been streamlined by having ONE laptop properly configured with the projector, and then have the speakers run their presentation off of a usb drive.
Other than those things, the people who set this all up are awesome and I can’t thank them or Google enough. So go Google for FreeBSD and give them both some credit. Better yet, support FreeBSD with a donation at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/
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Judge issues gag order in landlord case
Court files might also be sealed because of media interest
by Don Kazak
Palo Alto Online Staff
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A San Francisco judge issued a gag order Friday in the case of a Palo Alto couple who have been charged with threatening and stealing from the tenants of the San Francisco apartment building they own.
Kip Macy, 33, a software engineer, and Nicole Macy, 32, a real-estate agent, also failed in their attorneys’ request to have bail reduced.
The judge’s order prohibits the defendants, lawyers and any witnesses from talking to reporters.
Bail has been set at $350,000 each. Kip Macy is out on bail because the couple used their property as collateral. But that wasn’t enough to pay for Nicole Macy’s bail, too.
The couple decided Kip Macy should be the one out on bail so he can raise additional money through his work as a software engineer.
Media interest in the case has been intense since the San Francisco District Attorney’s office filed multiple felony charges last month against the two for allegedly harassing and threatening tenants of their Clementina Street apartment building.
Those charges include three counts each of conspiracy, two counts of harassment and threats, three counts of burglary, one count of interruption of electric service, two counts of grand theft and one of count of defacing property. All except the last count are felonies.
The district attorney has charged the couple of pouring ammonia on the clothing, bedding and electronics equipment of three tenants when they were not home and also removing other belongings from their apartment in an attempt to evict them.
Court documents also contend that Kip Macy called a now-former tenant, who is a witness in the case, and told him that Nicole Macy had a gun and if the tenant ever came by the building again she would shoot him. Investigators discovered that Kip and Nicole Macy purchased a handgun two days earlier from a San Rafael gun store.
Diana Kenny, an investigator for the district attorney’s office, filed a declaration with the court that said she had interviewed four tenants and two former tenants involved in the case. “All have told me that they fear for their safety as a result of the conduct of Kip Macy and Nicole Macy,” Kenney wrote in her declaration.
One television, one radio and three newspaper reporters were in court Friday morning for the bail reduction hearing. One newspaper and two TV photographers waited in the hallway, denied entrance to the courtroom.
Judge Garrett Wong denied motions for the two attorneys representing Kip Macy and Nicole Macy to reduce bail or release them on their own recognizance.
Assistant District Attorney Max Peltz argued against reducing bail because of the threats the Macys allegedly made to the tenants.
“The victims say they are afraid of retaliation,” Peltz said.
He described incidents including “a powered saw blade coming through a victim’s floor on two occasions,” incidents in which the Macys entered tenants’ apartments to remove personal items and “a threatening voicemail from Nicole Macy” that one of the tenants received.
“These are serious acts that put lives in jeopardy,” Peltz said.
However, Michael Whelan, the attorney representing Nicole Macy, said his client has had “no prior contact with the criminal justice system.”
Whelan said that San Francisco police had been called to the building several times because of disputes between the Macys and their tenants, but the police never chose to file any criminal charges.
One of the tenants had filed lawsuits against the former owners of the building, according to Lisa DrewBerry, the lawyer for Kip Macy. The same tenant was responsible for some of the current complaints against the Macys, she added.
If the tenant is a “vexatious litigant,” Wong said he would consider any evidence of that at the next court hearing May 23 when bail may be reconsidered.
Arguing against bail reduction, Peltz added: “There is a serious risk of flight,” noting that the Macys own property in Incline Village, Nev. That property is in the process of being transferred to Nicole Macy “as part of a divorce that is still pending,” he said, adding that Nicole Macy has a Nevada driver’s license.
Wong declined to reduce bail and then issued the gag order.