Review of my first FreeBSD Workshop in Landshut on 15 May 2015

Last Friday I held the first FreeBSD workshop in our new link.work location in Landshut. It was a lot of fun for the 12 participant and me.

The first workshop introduced the FreeBSD basics and the installation procedure. It was a hands on workshop which means that everyone had a device or virtual machine on which he followed the first steps to setup the FreeBSD operation system. My part was to introduce the options and and answer questions. Additional to that, I tried to help with decisions when to use ZFS or when its better to stick with UFS, or do I need a firewall or what is the difference between RELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT. The workshop started at 6pm and we ended on 9:30pm, so more than 3 hours of FreeBSD fun.

To answer some more questions in detail, I will setup more workshops this year. Some of the people asked to make a single workshop about Jails and ZFS. This are very interesting features of FreeBSD and nearly everyone was interested to hear more about them.

This is the current line up, the dates will follow as they are fixed:

1. First steps with FreeBSD (done - 15. May 2015)
2. Jails a FreeBSD power feature
3. ZFS a short introduction
4. PXE setup environment for multiple FreeBSD machines
5. Ansible and FreeBSD
6. Firewalling on FreeBSD, short introduction to PF and IPFW. Introduction to Opnsense and Pfsense.
7. Automated role out of a complete company network (dns, dhcp, fileserver, webserver, firewall) based on FreeBSD within 30 minutes. (kind a bring it all together)

If you know FreeBSD yourself, think about setting up a local event at your location, too! Landshut is just a smaller city 70km away from Munich and only with meetup and some mailing lists post 12 people were interested in my workshop. Start your own and share your knowledge with others and learn more yourself this way. I am happy to share all my presentations. I wrote them in English but held them in German to make it easier to reuse them.

If you want to keep in touch with all the other events we are organized at the link.work in Landshut, you should join the meetup group here. All events are free and open!