The largest #BSD technical conference in North America, established 2004. Come join us yearly in May for two days of tutorials + a two day conference. Past talk recordings are at https://youtube.com/@BsdcanOrg
(visit https://lists.bsdcan.org/mailman/listinfo/ to sign up for announcements or join the volunteers mailing list)
Would you like to learn how to design user interfaces in the shell?
No Problem! We have a tutorial for that: "Introduction to TUI Programming using bsddialog" given by Benedict Reuschling
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-Introduction-to-TUI.html
Register here: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
Announcing #BSDCan 2026 Travel Grants
Deadline: Friday the 19th!
To encourage and enable more first-time and returning attendees at BSDCan 2026, this year’s travel grant is a free room for up to five nights in a shared-bathroom private suite at the 90U residences.
Full details:
https://blog.bsdcan.org/2026/05/14/announcing-bsdcan-2026-travel-grants
What happens when you write to /dev/null ?
You can find out by attending this talk given by Martin Vahlensieck at BSDCan 2026.
Registration: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
Scedule: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-all.html
Worried about time? BSDCan early registration ends April 30th! Worried about network time? Henning Brauer is giving the talk: OpenNTPD - 20 years and a few milliseconds later at BSDCan 2026:
OpenNTPD hit the OpenBSD CVS in late 2004. Now, 20 years and a few milliseconds later, it's time to look back, how it was received, and what changed.
We'll briefly look at the world 20 years wrt having systems' clocks synchronized (or not), the design of OpenNTPD and how it fundamentally differed from everything around back then, and how it was - intentionally or not - misunderstood by some with very little knowledge but a lot of opinion, and how FUD from 20 years ago is still around. We'll cover what changed in OpenNTPD after it went public, and what changed in OpenBSD to increase accuracy substantially. We'll also cover the later added constraint feature to further defend against getting fed incorrect time.
Need to migrate off of VMWare?
Come see the "Migrating from VMWare to FreeBSD bhyve" by Sarder Kamal.
Register before May 1st and the Saturday reception is free!
Register at https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
Schedule: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-all.html
Want to learn how to filter packets on BSD? Come see the Network Management with the PF Packet Filter Toolset tutorial!
The OpenBSD Packet Filter (PF) is at the core of the network management toolset available to professionals working with the BSD family of operating systems.
The OpenBSD Packet Filter (PF) is at the core of the network management toolset available to professionals working with the BSD family of operating systems.
Understanding the networking toolset is essential to building and maintaining a functional envirionment. The present session will both teach principles and provide opportunity for hands-on operation of the extensive network tools available on OpenBSD and sister operating systems in a lab environment. Participants will be performing practical excercises in their choice of OpenBSD and FreeBSD environments. Basic to intermediate understanding of TCP/IP networking and basic Unix command line skills are expected and required for this session.
Topics covered include
The basics of and network design and taking it a bit further
Building rulesets
Keeping your configurations readable and maintainable
Seeing what your traffic is really about with your friend tcpdump(8)
Filtering, diversion, redirection, Network Address Translation
Handling services that require proxying (ftp-proxy and others)
Address tables and daemons that interact with your setup through them
The whys and hows of network segmentation, DMZs and other separation techniques
Tackling noisy attacks and other pattern recognition and learning tricks
Annoying spammers with spamd
Basics of and not-so basic traffic shaping
Monitoring your traffic
Resilience, High Availability with CARP and pfsync
Troubleshooting: Discovering and correcting errors and faults
Your network and its interactions with the Internet at large
Common mistakes in internetworking and peering
Keeping the old IPv4 world in touch with the new of IPv6
You can register for this tutorial and the BSDCan conference here:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
If you register before May 1st, you can take advantage of the free reception on Saturday!
Are you looking to sharpen your Shell Scripting chops? Then you may be interested in the BSDCan Shell Scripting Tutorial for Beginners and Sysadmins with Mathias Eggers.
Anyone who works with BSD and other Unix- and Linux-like systems will sooner or later have to deal with the shell and shell scripts, e.g. automation of repetitive task or starting services in /etc/rc.d. Understanding scripts and how to meaningfully extend or rewrite them is the goal of this tutorial, which is mainly designed for beginners and sysadmins.
Simple shell scripts often consist of a sequence of arbitrary shell commands executed in a specific order to achieve a particular purpose. This is where the tutorial will begin, and I will then walk participants through the other components of a script using examples:
Variables
Sourcing
Control structures
Loops
In- and output redirection
Parameters and options
Functions
Testing scripts
From the tutorial the participants will get an impression of what could be achieved with the well-equipped toolbox the shell provides and use that knowledge for creating own scripts for their projects.
Participants should bring their own machines to try out the examples. I encourage everybody to ask questions and bring examples or problems from their daily work to the tutorial to foster a vivid discussion.
I've been writing shell scripts as part of my work since I got in contact with Unix in 1993 and have been teaching shell programming to apprentices for over ten years. This tutorial will be a shortened and in regards to rc-scripts extended version of that one-week course.
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-Shell-Scripting-Tutorial.html
You can register for this tutorial and the BSDCan conference here:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
If you register before May 1st, you can take advantage of the free reception on Saturday!
The Schedule for BSDCan 2026 has been posted:
Just a quick note to let you know what we have been up to.
The BSDCan 2026 Schedule has been posted. 30 regular talks, one set of lightning talks, and one Audio BoF.
Both FreeBSD and NetBSD will be holding two day Dev Summits across the hall from each other in DMS.
Just like last year, the reception on Saturday night is free if you register early. This year you must register before May 1, 2026.
More info: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/
The BSDCan 2026 Schedule has been posted. 30 regular talks, one set of lightning talks, and one Audio BoF.
Both FreeBSD and NetBSD will be holding two day Dev Summits across the hall from each other in DMS.
Just like last year, the reception on Saturday night is free if you register early. This year you must register before May 1, 2026.
Schedule: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/schedule.html
Registration: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
Have you been wondering about ZFS AnyRAID? Allan Jude will be giving a talk about Flexible Disk Layout @ BSDCan
If you register before May 1, the closing reception is free!
Register at https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
#bsdcan #conference #bsd #unix #development #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd
#sysadmin #devops
BSDCan 2026 is June 19-20, with tutorials 17-18. If you register before May 1, the closing reception is free!
Register at https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
#bsdcan #conference #bsd #unix #development #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #sysadmin #devops
BSDCan: North America’s largest BSD conference is open for registration!
Tutorials: June 17-18, 2026
Conference: June 19-20, 2026
Full list of talks here:
https://blog.bsdcan.org/blog/
Register before May 1 and the closing reception is free!
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
#bsdcan #conference #bsd #unix #development #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #sysadmin #devops
This list of talks & tutorials is out!
Tutorials: June 17-18, 2026
Conference: June 19-20, 2026
Full list of talks here:
Register before May 1 and the closing reception is free!
BSDCan 2026 registration is now open! List of accepted talks coming soon.
Today is the day! Please get your submissions in. The deadline is in less than 24 hours!
See https://www.
bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html and links therein for instructions.
https://www.
bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html and links therein for instructions.
There is only 1 more day to get your submissions in. Submit today! Ottawa is beautiful in June ;-)
BSDCan 2026 is now accepting submissions for the June 2026 conference, see https://www.
bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html and links therein for instructions.
Submissions deadline is January 17, 2026, the conference runs tutorials June 17-18, talks June 19-20.
2 more days!
BSDCan 2026 is now accepting submissions for the June 2026 conference, see https://www.
bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html and links therein for instructions.
Submissions deadline is January 17, 2026, the conference runs tutorials June 17-18, talks June 19-20.
#bsdcan #conference #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #bsd #development #networking #freesoftware #libresoftware
3 more days!
BSDCan 2026 is now accepting submissions for the June 2026 conference, see https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html and links therein for instructions.
Submissions deadline is January 17, 2026, the conference runs tutorials June 17-18, talks June 19-20.
#bsdcan #conference #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #bsd #development #networking #freesoftware #libresoftware
The #BSDCan 2026 Call for Participation closes Saturday the 17th!
All are welcome and we would love to hear about the exciting BSD projects you are working on and stories you have to share!
Thank you Apple, ARM, Netflix, and the FreeBSD Foundation for returning as #BSDCan 2026 sponsors!
We could always use more and the CFP closes soon!
The largest #BSD technical conference in North America, established 2004. Come join us yearly in May for two days of tutorials + a two day conference. Past talk recordings are at https://youtube.com/@BsdcanOrg
(visit https://lists.bsdcan.org/mailman/listinfo/ to sign up for announcements or join the volunteers mailing list)
