Thursday night I went to the first meeting of the Netherlands
Opensolaris User Group.
The program was quite interesting (even if I only understood half
of it). Both Bart Muijzer
and Casper Dik spoke in
dutch but at least their slides were in english so that I think I
might have understood the important parts and only missed most of
the jokes. The one joke I didn't entirely miss was the one about
why they chose NLOSUG rather than NOSUG. The main talk of the night
was Darren Moffat talking about opensolaris development and zfs
crypto. The zfs crypto project looks very interesting and I was
quite pleased to hear that many of the hard bits in the
implementation of an encrypted filesystem already has been
identified and are being handled in the implementation. I hope
Darren will soon manage to get some code online because I think
this code has the potential to become one of the most solid
implementations of an encrypted filesystem and by using the Solaris
crypto providers, support for hardware acceleration and key storage
should be simple.
The turnout was quite impressive with something like 60 people
there.
The trip there and back again was a bit more interesting than I had
planned. First was a 1:30 train ride through Utrect to Amersfoort
and then the fun began. I'd looked at the usually quite practical
9292ov site and found that the last
bit of way from the station was supposed to take around 30 minutes
involving 2 busses and a fair bit of walking as well. Rather than
having to deal with that, I opted for the 45 minute walk that
viamichelin suggested. Note
to self:not all routes suggested by them for walking are good -
a sidewalk would have been a nice feature rather than having to
walk the grass at the roadside. The walk back to the station was a
lot less eventful, although I'd have preferred a map with slightly
more detail than the whole city in 2x2 inches. The usual trick of
checking that you're headed in the right direction by looking at
the maps in bus stops also failed because for some reason they had
taken away the detailed maps from every stop I passed leaving only
a large map with less detail than my own. Other than that, it was
quite uneventful, I got some good exercise and was back at my place
by 1:30.
Saturday I met up with a couple of friends and went to Bof day and was quite impressed by the turnout at the opensolaris bof. For some time I've been talking to a friend about starting a DK OSUG, but we were still in the early planning stages because Solaris isn't all that widely used in Denmark and most of the opensource activities in the Copenhagen area seems to be either Linux or BSD. The turnout at the bof and the enthusiasm and curiosity displayed by the people there has made us rethink the whole thing and we've started looking at the possibility of doing an evening with a couple of introductory presentations and a sort of installfest. Watch this space and announcements going to opensource.dk for more details. The bof day also had sessions about virtualisation and tuning of live systems where we got to talk even more about opensolaris.