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)
2 weeks until BSDCan 2026!
Get some poutine. Get some shawarma. Put it down with some Canadian beer.
While at it, attend some talks!
For instance, "Geographically fault-tolerant SSH on OpenBSD" by Rob Keizer where you'll learn to keep ssh alive when things go south.
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-Geographically-fault-tolerant-SSH.html
Register here: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html
Are you an OpenBSD user and afraid you won't be able to use it while blind?
Come to the "OpenBSD and Temporary Blindness" talk given by Sean Howard:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-OpenBSD-and-Temporary.html
Only at BSDCan 2026!
We are pleased to announce that the Karels family is sponsoring a permanent Mike Karels Travel Fund to reduce barriers to attending BSDCan.
The 2026 Mike Karels Travel Fund grant is a reimbursement of $500 USD to three attendees for whom a little help makes the difference between attending and not attending, in exchange for a post-event blog post.
Anyone can apply but we specifically welcome members of any under-represented groups.
To qualify you must:
• Be prompt in your communication, due to tight deadlines
• Make your own travel and accommodations arrangements, and register for the conference
• Be willing to write a post about your experiences at BSDCan for our Blog
To apply, email [email protected] with:
• Your name
• If you have attended BSDCan before
• If you have already registered for BSDCan 2026
• If you are comfortable having your name recognized as a grant recipient
• What you hope to learn or achieve at BSDCan
• What other financial support you are receiving for BSDCan
• What under-represented demographic(s) you represent, if any
2026 Travel Grant Application Deadline: May 26th
Approval date: May 29th
We are pleased to announce the permanent #BSDCan Mike Karels Travel Fund grant which for 2026 will be three $500 USD grants to people who need a little help attending. Anyone can apply but we specifically welcome members of any under-represented groups.
https://blog.bsdcan.org/2026/05/20/announcing-the-mike-karels-memorial-travel-fund
We are also pleased to announce that we received and accepted three travel accommodation grants today!
If it's not obvious, we REALLY want to enable first-time and under-represented attendees.
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!
