Live from BSDCan

Day one of BSDCan today was great. I first attended Network Buffer Allocation in the FreeBSD Operating System by Bosko Milekic. He gave an overview of changes made in FreeBSD 5.x to improve TCP/IP performance, especially on SMP systems. I then heard conference organizer Dan Langille discuss Bacula, a backup solution I intend to try.

After lunch I presented Network Security Monitoring with Sguil, which was fun. The last formal talk I saw was by Poul-Henning Kamp. He described GEOM-based Disk Encryption. Browsing the freebsd-current mailing list, I found a thread discussing novel ways to use GEOM and GBDE called ggate or GEOM gate. Check it out in src/sbin/ggate. The thread discusses using ggate to encrypt a floppy.

I also spent some time in a BoF on IPSec and learned about isakmpd, an alternative to racoon for managing IPSec keys. It's in security/isakmpd too.