What is BSD? Come to a conference to find out!

© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen

What is BSD? It's where the Internet comes from!

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is a family of computer operating systems derived from the software developed at the University of California at Berkeley from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.

You may or may not be aware that the BSD code still powers a lot of things, and we meet up regularly for conferences. More about conferences later, first a little history to set the context.

A short history of the BSD operating systems

The history of the BSD family of operating systems is to a large extent the history of the Internet itself. You may have heard of the time back in the 1980s when the likes of IBM and Digital were slugging it out in the corporate IT sphere and the US department of defence paid for experiments in distributed, device independent networking.

That's when a loosely organized group of hackers somewhat coordinated by researchers at University of California's Berkeley campus rose to prominence with "BSD Unix", which by a sequence of happy accidents became the home of the reference implementation of the TCP/IP internet protocols.

By the early 1990s, commercialization of the Internet had started, and the Berkeley Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) that had coordinated the efforts was set to be disbanded. In addition to the net itself, the main tangible product out of Berkeley was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), often distributed on tapes in the mail but also available on the net itself, which had started as a collection of software for AT & T's Unix but had over the years been extended become a full featured Unix operating system.

Several different groups wanted BSD to go on even if the CSRG did not, and several things happened in fairly rapid succession:

• Lynne and Bill Jolitz ported BSD to Intel x86 (actually 80386sx), creating 386BSD. This was chronicled in a series of articles in Dr Dobbs' Journal (also see a more condensed summary over at salon.com)
• Next up, hackers started sharing improvements to the 386BSD code as "patchkits", eventually forming two separate groups that took the work further to form their projects: The FreeBSD group would be working on bringing the best possible BSD to PC-style hardware, while the NetBSD group's ambition was to make BSD run on any hardware they could get their hands on.
• A group of former CSRG employees formed BSDi Inc. and marketed their product BSD/386 with among other things a contact phone number "1-800-ITS-UNIX". The activities of an actual corporation in turn triggered a lawsuit from the owners of the UNIX trademark over code copyrights.

The lawsuit was eventually settled -- only six files of several thousand in the tree were 'potentially encumbered' and had to be replaced, leaving both NetBSD and FreeBSD with a rush to replace the code which was at least in part fairly central to the virtual memory subsystem.

That episode was however just a temporary setback, and by 1996 we also had OpenBSD, which forked off the NetBSD code base and formed the third main member of the BSD family, with a stated purpose to focus on security and correct code. Finally in 2003, the DragonFly BSD project forked off the FreeBSD code and became the fourth member of the family of open source BSD operating systems.

Code from the BSDs is widely used in Internet infrastructure and in numerous not too obvious contexts. In fact, all devices with TCP/IP Internet capability ran some derivative of the BSD code until alternative implementations started appearing during the early 2000s.

The likely most popular BSD variant is Apple's macOS, which shares a huge amount of code with the FreeBSD project. Modern BSD systems include DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and, by some counts, Apple's macOS.

BSD code continues to be the base, however largely unsung, of significant technology development wherever the Internet is relevant. And you can even meet developers and practitioners at regional conferences every year!

The annual, regional BSD conferences

Most of the time, the development of the BSD systems is done by developers working by themselves or in small groups, in locations all over all inhabited time zones. However, by the early 2000s, a number of individuals in the various BSD communities started seeing the need for in-person meetups.

In addition to some projects calling up developers for hackathons, pioneered by the OpenBSD project, or developer summits, groups of interested parties including individual users and organizations started meeting up for conferences. The main regularly arranged BSD conferences are,

• AsiaBSDCon, March timeframe, alternates between Tokyo (JP) and Taipei (TW). AsiaBSDCon 2026 will be March 19-22, 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan.
• BSDCan, Mid May to mid June, Ottawa (CA). BSDCan 2026 will be June 17-20 in Ottawa, Canada.
• EuroBSDcon, September timeframe, each year in a new European city. EuroBSDCon 2026 will be September 10-13 in Brussels, Belgium.

All three conferences will welcome submissions for talks, tutorials and other types of sessions as well as general participation by people regardless of geographic or other origin.

For further information, browse the conference websites.

We hope to see you there at future events!

Further reading

Explaining BSD on the FreeBSD documentation site

What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (part 1) at the APNIC blog site, continued in part 2 and part 3

DragonFly BSD project website

FreeBSD project website

NetBSD project website

OpenBSD project website

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Historic project art follows: Left to right: OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD

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That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List

© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen

A collection of pointers to things I have written and that I think may be of value to you too, my fellow geek friend

I was recently (late May of 2025) asked to provide a list of things I have written over the years that would be suited to offer useful insights to someone not familiar with my work or the field(s) I cover.

In addition to the book I wrote and have revised when the time seemed right, I have written the odd blog post over the years, and this is the list I came up with, in roughly reverse chronological order:

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Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here.

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EU CRA: It's Later Than You Think, Time to Engineer Up! (2025) -- A call for stepping up to real, good engineering practices in software development and maintenance, with a slight emphasis on the fact that by the end of 2027, there will be legislation in force that will in fact compel the industry to act. Expands on the earlier No Project Is an Island: Why You Need SBOMs and Dependency Management (2025) with a view to performing an introductory workshop for working or aspiring developers and devops/sysadmins. And perhaps even their suits-clad managers.

For Upcoming PF Tutorials, We Welcome Your Questions (2025) -- I have been giving PF tutorials for about 20 years, for the last few years in cooperations with Max Stucchi and Tom Smyth. This piece was written to encourage questions and other input while we are preparing for the BSDCan 2025 session, which we are still working on preparing as I write. However, we always welcome your input and we have provided contact information in the piece itself. Also available tracked, prettified.

Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? (2025) -- A long-running experiment, started all the way back in 2007, with the intent to make undesired activity less desirable to engage in, reached a milestone of sorts. That event I considered significant enough that I finally wrote that retrospective some of my readers and correspondents had been asking me to do for some time. Also available tracked, prettified.

No Project Is an Island: Why You Need SBOMs and Dependency Management (2025) -- This piece is really about software engineering coming to grips with what real world engineering is all about. The world, or parts of it, finally decided that we could no longer consider software "just a bit of typing", and we are answering the challenge by leveraging lessons learned by working on free software. A further evolved version could turn up at future public events. Also available tracked, prettified.

A Suitably Bizarre Start of the Year 2025 (2025) -- Because, well, the time around the start of the year showed up a few truly bizarre things, a surge in truly nonsensical spamming activity being one item. The number of imaginary friends collected has kept up the pace, see links in the piece itself for up to date information. Also available tracked, prettified.

You Have Installed OpenBSD. Now For The Daily Tasks. (2024) -- I am much indebted to Solène Rapenne for pointing out to me that two earlier pieces I had written about life with OpenBSD were, while not actually wrong, just quite a bit out of date. This piece recitifies that situation, and provides some basic advice for day to day life with our favorite operating system. Also available tracked, prettified.

Three Minimalist spamd Configurations for Your Spam Fighting Needs (With Bonus Points at the End) (2024) -- Fresh off writing his excellent mail server book, Michael W. Lucas posted a thing on the Mailop list that had me write a short piece on domain-only trapping (linked in this one), and after a quick think, also this piece that offers other minimalist but actually usual configurations. Also available tracked, prettified.

The Despicable, No Good, Blackmail Campaign Targeting ... Imaginary Friends? (2022) -- A follow-up to an earlier piece on the embarrasment-based extortion spamming campaigns we had been seeing for some years. This piece makes a hopefully clearer case than the previous one that the potentially embarrasing video material the messages claim exist most likely does not. After all, multiple thousands of addresses that have been known to never have existed are targets of these campaigns, swelling temporarily the list of greytrapped hosts. Also available tracked, prettified.

A Few of My Favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools (2022) -- The good people at SEMIBUG asked me to give a PF talk for one of their user group meetings. This is the writeup for that talk, with links to slides and other material. Very much colored by my tastes, but hopefully useful. Also available tracked, prettified.

Badness, Enumerated by Robots (2018) -- Way back when, I started setting my systems to collecting IP addresses that were the source of undesirable activity and publishing updated lists at intervals. That activity stayed useful for longer than I had anticipated, and at some point I wrote this summary of what those systems do, with references to other resources, of course. Also available tracked, prettified.

Maintaining A Publicly Available Blacklist - Mechanisms And Principles (2013) After running the greytrap-based blocklist for some years, I felt the need to explain my thinking about the hows and whys. The first paragraph sums it up,

When you publicly assert that somebody sent spam, you need to ensure that your data is accurate. Your process needs to be simple and verifiable, and to compensate for any errors, you want your process to be transparent to the public with clear points of contact and line of responsibility.

-- Also available tracked, prettified.

Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord - On The Cheap With OpenBSD, pflow And nfsen (2014) -- "Have you ever wanted to know what's really going on in your network? Some free tools with surprising origins can help you to an almost frightening degree.". Yes, with tools that are either part of OpenBSD or within easy reach via the package system, you only need to put in rather modest efforts to reveal deep truths about the life on your network. Also available tracked, prettified.

Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures - Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools (2014) -- Originally a BSDCan paper from the late noughties, with emphasis on the exploit mitigation techniques in OpenBSD and how to leverage them in the effort to limit or even get rid of spam and malware. Even after all those years, some aspects of this text are still quite relevant. This piece has seen occasional updates as indicated by the copyright line. Also available tracked, prettified.

The Hail Mary Cloud And The Lessons Learned (2013) -- The Hail Mary Cloud was a widely distributed, low intensity password guessing botnet that targeted Secure Shell (ssh) servers on the public Internet. The first activity may have been as early as 2007, but our first recorded data start in late 2008. This summary article describes the botnet activities and countermeasures as well as offering some more forward-looking statements about Internet security. Also available tracked, prettified.

Those, I said to my correspondent, are likely the more interesting entries.

If you have read this far and found something useful or enlightening by visiting the linked items, that will make me happy to have turned some Sunday afternoon procrastination into something useful to others. And I have this to offer as a bonus for your perseverance:

I have also been a guest blogger at blog.apnic.net:

What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (2021) in three parts, starting with What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 1: How it all started (also the original in one piece, What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (tracked, prettified), and

A few of my favourite things about the OpenBSD Packet Filter tools (2022) also ran as a two part series at APNIC, starting with A few of my favourite things about the OpenBSD Packet Filter tools (part 1) and A few more of my favourite things about the OpenBSD Packet Filter tools (part 2)

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Upcoming events:

Ottawa, Canada: BSDCan 2025 has tutorials June 11-12, 2025 and talks June 13-14. A new version of Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset will go ahead there.

A little later on in 2025, the EuroBSDcon 2025 conference is still accepting submissions for papers and tutorials, so if you have an interesting BSD-related topic you want the world to know about, your submissions will be welcome at the EuroBSDcon submissions system, where the deadline is 2025-06-21, or June 21st, 2025 (full disclosure: I'm on the program committee). This year's conference is set in beautiful Zagreb, Croatia in late September.

At EuroBSDcon 2025, there will be a Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset session, a full day tutorial starting at 2025-09-25 10:30 CET. You can register for the conference and tutorial by following the links from the conference Registration and Prices page.

Separately, pre-orders of The Book of PF, 4th edition are now open. For a little background, see the blog post Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon. We are hoping to have physical copies of the book available in time for the conference, and hopefully you will be able to find it in good book stores by then.

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