EuroBSDCon 2009
Cambridge, UK. 18-20 September 2009
There are 3 tutorials on Friday 18th September
- Tutorial 1: Kirk McKusick's FreeBSD Overview, and a focus on FileSystems and VM
- Tutorial 2: Building the network you need with PF - Peter Hansteen
- Tutorial 3: SCTP Introduction and Workshop - Randall Stewart
Tutorial 1: Kirk McKusick's FreeBSD Overview, and a focus on FileSystems and VM
This course is of direct use to the professionals who work with FreeBSD systems. Individuals involved in technical and sales support can learn the capabilities and limitations of the system; system administrators without direct experience with the FreeBSD kernel can learn how to maintain, tune, and configure the system; applications developers can learn how to effectively and efficiently interface with the system; and systems programmers can learn how to extend, enhance, and interface to the system.
This course provides a broad overview of how the FreeBSD kernel implements its basic services. It will be most useful to those who need to learn how these services are provided. Students who will benefit from this course include operating-system implementors, system programmers, UNIX application developers, administrators, and curious users. This course is directed to users who have had at least a year of experience using a UNIX-like system. Knowledge of the C programming language is helpful, but not essential. They should have an understanding of fundamental algorithms (searching, sorting, and hashing) and data structures (lists, queues, and arrays).
Description: This course will provide a firm background in the FreeBSD kernel. In the morning, the course will cover basic kernel services, process structure, the FreeBSD jail facility for hosting virtual machines, scheduling, and showing how special devices are handled. In the afternoon, the course will cover the implementation of the filesystem and its capabilities including soft updates and snapshots. The filesystem interface will then be generalized to show how to support multiple filesystem types. The presentations will emphasize code organization, data structure navigation, and algorithms.
Morning Session - Kernel Overview
- Process structure
- Locking
- Communications
- Process groups and sessions
- Jails
- Scheduling
- Autoconfiguration strategy
- Configuration of a device driver
Afternoon Session - Filesystem Overview
- Filesystem organization
- Block I/O system (buffer cache)
- Filesystem implementation
- Soft Updates
- Snapshots
- Support for multiple filesystems
Course text: Marshall Kirk McKusick and George V. Neville-Neil, ``The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System'', Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Massachusetts, 2005, 720 pages.
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick writes books and articles, consults, and teaches classes on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects. For the past ten years he has been a developer and commiter to the FreeBSD Project. His particular areas of interest are the virtual-memory system and the filesystem. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast file system, and was the Research Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. He earned his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and did his graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received Masters degrees in Computer Science and Business Administration, and a doctoral degree in Computer Science. He is a past president of the Usenix Association, is on the editorial board of ACM's Queue magazine, and is a member of ACM and IEEE.
Tutorial 2: Building the network you need with PF - Peter Hansteen
This tutorial focuses on building the high performance, low maintenance network you need. Along the way we explore the whys and hows and cover all bases from the basic one machine configuration and basic local area networks, all the way up to configurations with traffic shaping and load balancing with "self-healing" networks and counter-measures against common problems such as DOS attempts and spamming.
A basic understanding of TCP/IP and some Unix knowledge is assumed. This tutorial will happen very close to the time OpenBSD 4.6 is to released and will be cover significant changes in the upcoming release. OpenBSD 4.6 is set for release on October 1st, and the plan is to preview and if time allows demonstrate some of the new or changed features.
Who should attend? Those who use or are considering using PF on any BSD. It goes from the basics to advanced usage of the latest versions of PF, including traffic shaping using altq, and the supporting features for higher level services such as trapping spam via greylisting and http filtering, SSL proxying, and load balancing. PFs simplicity and ease allows those new to PF to understand it quickly, while refreshing the best practices in filtering for those who have used PF for years.
Tutor Biography: Peter Hansteen is a consultant, sysadmin and writer based in Norway. A long time freenix advocate, he is a member of the BLUG (Bergen (BSD and) Linux User Group) core group and current vice president of NUUG (the Norwegian Unix User Group). During recent years a frequent lecturer and tutor with emphasis on FreeBSD and OpenBSD topics, and most recently the author of The Book of PF (No Starch Press, December 2007).
Tutorial 3: SCTP Introduction and Workshop - Randall Stewart
SCTP is a relatively new transport protocol that can be used in any situation in which one wants relaible data communcaition, much like TCP. However SCTP offers some real advantages that TCP does not offer, such as:
- The ability to send un-ordered messages
- The ability to have parrallel ordered streams of messages that perserves message order with respect to one stream but not with respect to others.
- An unreliable option that allows a sender to "give up" sending a message if it does not arrive in a timely fashion.
- Redundancy via multi-homing at the transport layer, a feature some in the TCP world are just beginning to think about.
- Message boundary preservation so an application sends and receives messages and does not have to worry about message framing.
This day long tutorial will begin with a half day lecture that will expose you to the basics of the protocol. Walking you through the mechanisms that give the protocol the flexibility to offer the feature set it does. In the second half of the tuturial we will walk through how a user interacts with the socket API to activiate and use these features. Looking at a number of examples including:
- Connecting with multiple addresses to a peer.
- How to send data on the third leg of the setup handshake.
- When and how to use multiple streams.
- A survey of the large number of socket options that SCTP gives the application to control the association.
- How to send data with various order and reliability characteristics
- How to use the authentication module.
- How to add new addresses to an existing association.
The second half of the tutorial will assume that the attendee can follow along in the 'C' programming language and has some familiarity with the socket API.
Randall Stewart is a consultant based in United States specializing in *NIX kernel, and is a FreeBSD committer that maintains the SCTP stack in FreeBSD. In past lives Randall has been a Cisco Distinguished Engineer, and a Member of Technical Staff for Motorola, NYNEX S&T, Bell Northern Research, Fijitsu Network Switching, and AT&T communications. His work has always focused on *NIX Operating Systems, Fault tolerance and base infrastructure (e.g. Rserpool RFC5351-6). More information can be found at: http://www.sctp-consultant.com
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