Meetings and Events

BSD init(8) and rc(8): Room for Improvement?, Raul Cuza
2016-03-02 @ 18:45 EST (23:45 UTC) - Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St

The current init(1) and rc(1) startup services have served BSD well for many years. But are they long in the tooth?

There are a host of problems that it does not solve. This begs the question of whether it is time to replace it with something better. More importantly what could be better? This talk will look at the existing initialization and coordination system that currently serves the major BSD projects, what problems they solve and what problems they do not solve. We will review alternatives and how their approaches will impact how we work. Some of the alternatives that will be discussed include relaunchd, nosh, and systemd.

Raul Cuza makes pretenses to being a modern hip SysAdmin, but can't forget late nights installing Sun-3s to pull it off successfully.

He has spent most of his career in K-12 schools reminding Cupertino- designed hardware that there is BSD somewhere under all the glitz. Many years making OpenBSD firewalls to replace web ads with student artwork and keeping OS X machines useful tools for learning has taught him that the real impact of the computer age does not happen in the server room but couldn't happen without it either.

He is currently challenged with getting meaningful work done on other people's hardware residing in other people's server rooms distributed around the globe. He has permission to use them.