EuroBSDCon 2009 and the preceding dev summit happened last weekendq in Cambridge, UK. Robert Watson, who has organised this successful event, noted that the FreeBSD Developer’s Summit was the largest yet in the EU with around 70 attendees. The conference was attended by about 180 attendees, and the dinner sponsored by iXsystems was sold out.

Slides, papers, and audio recordings should be available soon on the UKUUG website. Will let you know when they’re up.

Rodrigo Osorio has posted some pictures here and a couple of my eurobsdcon photos here.

View photos

The dates of FOSDEM 2010 have been confirmed: 6-7 February 2010 in Bruxelles.

FOSDEM Dates and other BSD Conference dates can be found on BSDEvents.net

Mail system for distributed network. Presentation held by Andrey Zakharchenko at AsiaBSDCon2009:

Sometimes it is necessary to organize a mail domain for large and geographically distributed network, which may consist of independent subnets with their own separate Internet connections (and some of those connections may be not very good, or not very fast, or not very cheap). But users of the network need mail system, and it should be fast, convenient, and reliable.

In this paper some ways of distributed mail domain implementation are discussed, and a new one is introduced. The new method allows us to implement distributed mail system fast and convenient for end users, convenient for administrators, using network traffic sparingly, and reliable enough (at least without single point of failure).

PDF of presentation

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Kristaps Dzonsons’ presentation: Deprecating groff for BSD manual display, AsiaBSDCon2009:

There are few GPL-licensed utilities remaining in BSD base installations, most of them written in C++. groff, GNU’s roff text-processing language implementation, claims a significant share of this count. Why does groff still persist in base? Although its text-processing features have been mostly usurped by LaTeX, groff persists in order to render Unix manual pages. In this paper, we introduce mdocml, a compiler for mdoc documents. mdocml replaces a very specific function of groff — namely, that of rendering mdoc documents for one or more output devices. It’s our intention, in contributing this tool, to deprecate groff as the default utility for Unix manual page display; by doing so, and presuming that manual display is the primary usage of groff, we intend to decouple BSD base installations from another GPL and C++ tool.

PDF of presentation

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