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LibreSSL at BSDCan

Thanks to various airline problems, we had an open spot on the BSDCan schedule. Bob Beck filled in at the last moment with a talk on the first thirty days of LibreSSL. Here are some rough notes on Bob’s talk (slides now available).

LibreSSL forked from OpenSSL 1.0.1g.

Why did “we” let OpenSSL happen? Nobody looked. Or nobody admitted that they looked. We all did it. The code was too horrible to look at. This isn’t just an OpenSSL thing, or just an open source thing. It’s not unique in software development, it’s just the high profile one of the moment.

Heartbleed was not the final straw that caused the LibreSSL fork. The OpenSSL malloc replacement layer was the final straw. Default OpenSSL never frees memory, so tools can’t spot bugs. It uses LIFO recycling, so you can use after free. The debugging malloc sends all memory information to a log. Lots more in Bob’s slides, but this all combined into an exploit mitigation technique countermeasure. Valgrind, Coverity, and OpenBSD’s randomized memory tools don’t catch this.

Someone discovered all this this four years ago and opened an OpenSSL bug. It’s still sitting there.

LibreSSL started by ripping out features. VMS support, 16-bit Windows support, all gone.

LibreSSL goals:

  • Preserve API/ABI compatibility – become a drop-in replacement.
  • Bring more people into working on the codebase, by making the code less horrible
  • Fix bugs and modern coding processes
  • Do portability right

    As an example, how does OpenSSH (not LibreSSL, but another OpenBSD product) do portable?

  • Assume a sane target OS, and code to that standard.
  • Build and maintain code on the above, using modern C
  • Provide portability shims to correctly do things that other OS’s don’t provide, only for those who need it.
    – No ifdef maze
    – No compromise on what the intrinsic functions actually do
    – Standard intrinsics
    – Don’t reimplement libc

    How does OpenSSL do portable?

  • Assume the OS provides nothing, because you mustn’t break support for Visual C 1.52.
  • Spaghetti mess of #ifdef #ifndef horror nested 17 deep
  • Written in OpenSSL C – essentially it’s own dialect – to program to the worst common denominator
  • Implement own layers and force all platforms to use it

    The result? “Chthulhu sits in his house in #define OPENSSL_VMS and dreams”

    Removed scads of debugging malloc and other nasties.

    What upstream packages call and use them? No way to tell. LibreSSL makes some of the very dangerous options no-ops. Turn on memory debugging? Replace malloc wrappers at runtime? These do nothing. The library internally does not use them.

    Some necessary changes that were implemented in massive sweeps:

  • malloc+memset -> calloc
  • malloc (X*Y) -> reallocarray(X, Y)
  • realloc and free handle NULL, so stop testing everywhere

    OpenSSL used EGD for entropy, and faked random data. OpenSSL gathered entropy from the following sources:

  • Your RSA private key is pretty random
  • “string to give random number generator entropy”
  • getpid()
  • gettimeofday()

    In LibreSSL, entropy is the responsibility of the OS. If your OS cannot provide you with entropy, LibreSSL will not fake it.

    LibreSSL is being reformatted into KNF – the OpenBSD code style. OpenSSL uses whatever style seemed right at the moment. The reformatting makes other problems visible, which is the point. More readable code hopefully means more developer involvement.

    The OpenSSL bug tracking RT has been and continues to be a valuable resource.

    OpenSSL exposes just about everything via public header files. Lots of the API should probably not be used outside of the library, but who knows who calls what? OpenBSD is finding out through constant integration testing with their ports tree.

    The LibreSSL team wants to put the API on a diet so that they can remove potentially dangerous stuff. Their guys are being careful in this by testing against the OpenBSD ports tree. Yes, this conflicts with the “drop-in replacement” goal.

    Internally, LibreSSL uses only regular intrinsic functions provided by libc. OpenSSL’s custom APIs remain for now only to maintain compatibility with external apps.

    Surprises LibreSSL guys in OpenSSL:

  • big endian amd64 support
  • Compile options NO_OLD_ASN1 and option NO_ASN1_OLD are not the same
  • You can turn off sockets, but you can’t turn off debugging malloc
  • socklen_t – if your OS doesn’t have socklen_t, it’s either int or size_t. But OpenSSL does horrible contortions to define its own. If the size of socklen_t changes while your program is running, openssl will cope.
  • OpenSSL also copes if /dev/null moves while openssl is running.

    So far:

  • OpenSSL 1.0.1g was a 388,000 line code base
  • As of yesterday, 90,000 lines of C source deleted, about 150,000 lines of files
  • Approximately 500,000 line unidiff from 1.0.1g at this point
  • Many bugs fixed
  • The cleaning continues, but they’ve started adding new features (ciphers)
  • Code has become more readable – portions remain scary

    LibreSSL has added the following cipher suites under acceptable licenses – Brainpool, ChaCha, poly1305, ANSSI FRP256v1, and several new ciphers based on the above.

    FIPS mode is gone. It is very intrusive. In other places governments mandate use of certain ciphers (Cameilla, GOST, etc). As long as they’re not on by default, and are provided as clean implementations under an acceptable license they will include them. They believe it’s better people who must use these use them in a sane library with a sane API than rolling their own.

    If you want to use the forthcoming portable LibreSSL, you need:

  • modern POSIX environment
  • OS must provide random data – readiness and quality are responsibility of OS
  • malloc/free/calloc/realloc (overflow checking)
  • modern C string capabilities (strlcat, strlcpy, asprintf, etc)
  • explicit_bzero, reallocarry, arc4random

    You can’t replace explicit_bzero with bzero, or arc4random with random. LibreSSL wants a portability team that understands how to make it work correctly.

    LibreSSL’s eventual goals:

  • provide better (replacement, reduced) api
  • reduce code base even more
  • split out non-crypto things from libcrypto
  • split libcrypto from libssl

    There’s lots of challenges to this. The biggest is stable funding.

    The OpenBSD Foundation wants to fund several developers to rewrite key pieces of code. They want to sponsor efforts of the portability team, and the ports people track the impact of proposed API changes.

    They will not do this at the expense of OpenSSH or OpenBSD.

    The OpenBSD Foundation has asked the Linux Foundation for support, but the Linux Foundation has not yet committed to supporting the effort. (I previously said that they hadn’t responded to the request, which is different. The LF has received Bob’s email and discussions are ongoing.)

    In Summary:

  • OpenSSL’s code is awful
  • LibreSSL can be done
  • They need support

    If you’re interested in supporting the effort, contact the OpenBSD Foundation. The Foundation is run by Bob Beck and Ken Westerback, and they manage all funding. (While Theo de Raadt leads the OpenBSD Project, he actually has nothing to do with allocating funding.)

    • Posted on

    BSDCan keynote

    Karl Lehenbauer, CTO of FlightAware, is giving an excellent BSDCan keynote: a retrospective of his BSD experience. As part of the mass of flight troubles plaguing North America this week, his flight to Ottawa was cancelled. He landed in Toronto at midnight last night.

    I wouldn’t have blamed him for canceling the keynote.

    Instead, he rented a car and drove to Ottawa. Overnight. After a bad day of travel. That’s about a four-hour drive.

    Lehenbauer is clearly a man who keeps his promises.

    Plus, he speaks very well despite not sleeping. Or maybe because he didn’t sleep. Whatever, he’s good.

    Posted on

    FreeBSD devsummit notes: ports & packages

    The ports and packages summit was a lot more discussion of options as opposed to the state of items and future plans. A very dynamic session, where each of the dozen or so scheduled speakers was more “moderator of the moment.” Plus, I staggered in half an hour late, because breakfast was really really good.

    But, in general, what happened:

    I walked in on an overview of Debian packages. It’s always good to assess others’ work.

    Discussions on dependencies.

    Ed Maste on possibly using certificate transparency via X.509v3 extension, rather than creating our own signing infrastructure.

    Using qemu BSD user mode for cross-building packages. Qemu still needs some work, and you can pitch in.

    bapt: want to control what scripts can do, so arbitrary scripts can’t harm system. Have the system provide a utility that will let programs check config files or update a database, rather than run arbitrary scripts. Would also help with cross-building packages.

    Cross-building is improving. Now nightly ARM crossbuild packages in test. Hopefully ready by EuroBSDCon.

    PortCI: project for build cluster automation. Various port building processes are manual, such as testing and QAT. PortCI lets you manage these queues easily via a simple front end. The idea is to eventually let commiters request and configure their own experimental runs.

    Jenkins – https://jenkins.freebsd.org. Uses bhyve VMs. Testing ports on all platforms.

    Do not use freebsd-version(1) in the ports tree. Designed only for use in the base system. Security fixes that don’t touch the kernel won’t affect uname -r, and freebsd-version doesn’t apply to releases built from source. Ports tree needs something to say exactly what version you have no matter which how that version was produced.

    Discussion on handling port licenses.

    Packaging base! pkg doesn’t handle chflags yet, but they’re working on it. Split packages per build system option. But this changes how some programs are linked–what about NIS? Bapt is pondering that. We could offer multiple versions of packages, such as NIS-free. But FreeBSD’s “build system is not a paragon of configurability, but a bunch of hacks on what annoyed people the most” (Warner Losh).

    I’m teaching in less than an hour, so I left the discussion here.

    Posted on

    FreeBSD devsummit virtualization session

    Some notes from the FreeBSD virtualization devsummit. Very rough, but my understanding is very rough, so all is as it should be.

    Bhyve moving to UEFI loader away from FreeBSD and grub2
    • Fork of intel EDKII (BSD License), OVMF build target
    • For bhyve instead of Qemu
    • Includes CSM BIOS emulation for non-EFI aware OS’s
    • Currently in-house, being moved to public git repo
    • Buildable on FreeBSD (GCC 4.6 or later), needs to be a port – bhyve folks need port creation help
    • Serial console only: working on VGA emulation with VNC client

    Networking:
    • Virtio doesn’t support modern networking features
    • One NIC, e1000 ((multiq, jumbo frames, TSO) under way
    • e1000e (82580) dev emulation in progress
    • each has thousands of registers, still working on them

    Considering:
    • user mode using WANProxy/libuinet
    • simple kernel eth switch

    Storage
    • zvol GEOM-avoidance in place (mav@) – prevent geom from sniffing ZFS partition tables, so host will never see VM filesystem
    • virtio todo: asynch block writes, add virtio SCSI
    • Wanted: BSD-licensed sparse image tools for working with vmdk, qcow2, vhd, etc. Would be nice to point bhyve at a VMDK file and so “go!”

    Future
    • AMD-SVM
    • Windows guest support (requires UEFI)
    • Illumos doesn’t need UEFI, needs a real BIOS – use BIOS compat in UEFI
    • ARM(64) chips have virtualization support, get bhyve to work on it.
    • Save state/restore/migrate
    • configuration file, as the command line is unwieldy for hierarchical info – use UCL because the ports people also use UCL
    • Regression suite – bhyve supports lots of different hardware and operating systems, so we need to have automated testing

    Other virtualization
    • Virtualbox – FreeBSD is tracking very closely, 4.3.10 came out 25 March, port updated on 28 March.
    • HyperV – 10.0, amd64 and i386 guest support

    o Recent Azure image announcement
    o Nobody in the FreeBSD community tracks Hyper-V, it could use a nanny

    Luigi Rizzo on performance with device drivers
    • One option – e1000 emulation, performance will be poor, will be slow
    • Some emulation drivers fake TSO, etc
    • No good solutions outside paravirtualization
    • High performance = modify guest device driver to be virtualization-aware
    • Luigi got 17GB/s using netmap with bhyve

    Roger Pau Monne’ on Xen
    • Changes in FreeBSD 10

    o Vector callback for injecting event channel interrupts
    o PV timer
    o PV IPIs
    o Add Xen support into GENERIC – can now use freebsd-update
    o Sponsored by SpectraLogic and Citrix

    • PVH domU

    o Supported guest mode since 4.4
    o Builds atop of the PVHVM work introduced in FreeBSD 10
    o Half-merged into –current, some work remains
    o Same speed as PVHVM, main difference is way it boots
    o Not as intrusive as a traditional PV port

    • PVM Dom0

    o Xen side patches almost fully merged
    o Main difference between PVH DomU and Dom0 is that on Dom0 FreeBSD needs to manage the hardware
    o Add support for PIRQ (physical interrupts routed atop event channels)
    o ACPI tables parsed by Dom0, and Xen must be made aware of the underlying devices
    o Xen user-space control devices needed by the toolstack:

     Privcmd – allows issuing hypercalls into Xen and mapping foreign domain memory from userspace
     Evtchn – allows registering and receiving interrupts by user-space applications

    • Big items remaining

    o Add multiboot support to the FreeBSD bootloader – right now, you must use pxelinux or grub
    o Improve if.xn – doesn’t work correctly with a NetBSD dom0, doesn’t work properly between guests on the same host, paravirtualized interface does not perform well yet.

    • Hoping to have Xen work for FreeBSD 11

    VirtIO/VMWare guest drivers by Brian Venteicher
    • Work done over last year
    • VirtIO: new

    o Unmapped IO – block and SCSI
    o Network multiqueue
    o Random (entropy) device
    o Initial console driver –can do multi-consoles, hotplug is so-so

    • VirtIO: remaining

    o Support missing devices – MMIO
    o Non-x86 architectures
    o SCSI multiqueue
    o VirtIO version 1 specification – very similar to existing virtio

    • VMWare

    o Vmxnet3

     Vmware provided driver, messy
     OpenBSD imported their own vmx driver May 2013
     Ported to FreeBSD 10.0

    • TSO/LRO offload
    • Multiqueue

     To do: PVSCSI & VMWare tools

    Device emulation in bhyve

    • Most emulated in userspace usr.sbin/bhyve
    • Kernel ones in vmm/io/ (PICs and timers)
    • ISA-LPC – uart, rtc
    • PCI

    o Virtio

     Block – storage
     Net – tap
     Rng – random entropy from /dev/random

    o Ahci
    o Pass-through

    • Go through how virtio device drivers work. Interesting, lots of diagrams he should post, but way above my head, so I didn’t take too many notes
    • Virtio random number generator

    o Usr.sbin/bhyve/pci_virtio_rnd.c
    o Guest rng driver requests 32-bit number to replenish its random pool
    o FreeBSD /dev/random is non-blocking, using Yarrow and (soonish) Fortuna

    Posted on

    FreeBSD 11 feature goals

    I’m at the BSDCan FreeBSD devsummit, and the current topic is FreeBSD 11 Goals.

    As the Great Committer John Baldwin has requested that people take notes and blog about the discussions, and this might be of wider interest, here’s the goals.

    These are my notes. I probably missed things. I would be shocked if I didn’t, actually. And I probably misunderstood some stuff.

    Test suite/QA (jmmv) – some stuff merged to 10
    Mips64 & more MIPS stuff
    Scatter/Gather mbufs (scottl) – collapse down mbufs from a long chain into one unit
    Lldb (emaste) – make it first-class citizen, fully functioning & working in 11 on all platforms, native cross-platform debugging
    Uefi boot and install support (emaste)
    Package the base system (gjb/bapt)
    Open to floor:
    AES GCM added to ipsec – jmg
    ASLR – Shawn “The Goats Are His Fault” Webb
    DNS improvements – Erwin
    Suspend/resume
    Libc++
    OpenMP
    FreeBSD devs – Want icc? Talk to gnn@
    Kload – hot swap kernel upgrade
    Dragonfly mailer as default
    Ncurses cleanup
    Capsicum and casper improvements – use casper to help apps use dnssec correctly
    TCP performance and enhancements (gnn) – project as a whole needs broader TCP patch reviewers
    L2 rework
    Libuinet
    Arm64 (andyt)
    Package building Mips32 packages via qemu
    External toolchain improvements (imp) – some people need GCC
    Remove gcc by 11 – gnn willing to remove it right after this devsummit session
    Remove ia64 (marcel)
    Useland dtrace (marki)
    Xen dom0 for x86 (rogier)
    Kqueue64 from osX – available from Apple, we could pull this in (jmg)
    Async sendfile (glebius)
    Lightweight reference counts (maybe) (glebius)
    Kdbus (need for desktop)
    Vt + newcons default (emaste)
    KMS, DRM, AGI impromements (dumbbell & kip)
    SMT (need)
    Encrypted kernel dump (gnn)
    Nand flash (warner)
    Superpages for certain arm & mips
    Multi-endian ufs
    Libdispatch (sson)
    Move libraries to private (need, bapt, bdrewery help)
    /etc/src.conf improvements
    64-bit linuxulator
    newer linuxulator (xmj)
    new autofs (emaste)
    unionfs improvements (need)
    64-bit struct stat & dirent, mount_pathlen, max_pathlen, (benno)
    X32 – alternate abi for amd64 – jhb wants, but no commitment
    PF – improve its internal API so we can manage stable branches, merge newer version, IPv6 improvements (glebius)
    Bhyve – UEFI
    Vxlan
    Reproducible release builds – remove usernames, host names, timestamps from builds
    IPv6 security improvements
    Network stack backpressure
    Network multipath (stretch goal)
    Capsicum shell – will sandbox package building
    Non-root image building

    Will all this happen? Who knows. But plans are nice.

    Posted on

    My NSP ebooks, 50% off

    Today is International Day Against DRM.

    All No Starch Press ebooks are available at 50% off. The titles include:

  • Absolute OpenBSD
  • Network Flow Analysis
  • Cisco Routers for the Desperate (both editions, I’d recommend the 2nd)
  • PGP & GPG
  • Absolute FreeBSD

    Plus books by other authors, of course. Once you’ve bought all of mine, check them out too.

    Use coupon code RIGHT2READ to get the discount.

    For the record: all of my books[1] are published without DRM. In my opinion, once you buy my book it’s yours to do with as you please. I trust my readers.

    Yes, unlicensed downloaders discourage me from writing tech books. On the other hand, the shocking number of people who seek out and use my poorly advertised tip jar encourage me more than the illicit downloaders discourage me.

    1: I lie about being 100% DRM-free. I have one short story with DRM, because I didn’t notice the DRM checkbox when I put it on Amazon. The only way I can remove DRM is to un-publish and re-publish the piece. If I do that, I lose all the nice reviews it’s gotten. Fiction reviews are hard to come by, so I chalk this up to the learning curve and move on. But if you buy that story, and you strip the DRM, I really won’t mind in the slightest.)

    • Posted on

    Penguicon 2014 Schedule

    “Hey, where is Lucas? Why hasn’t he posted lately?”

    I’ve done nothing worth posting about. Most of this month I spent removing a per-millennial switch from the core of the network, which was painstaking and annoying but not noteworthy. I then spent nine days at a writing workshop, which was fascinating, educational, and utterly exhausting. I could argue that the workshop was worth blogging about, but I was too busy writing to waste time writing. If you’re interested in writing, though, and you have a chance to do any of Dean or Kris’ workshops, go.

    So:

    Next weekend, I’ll be at Penguicon, appearing on various panels. You can see me at the following one-hour events.

    Friday

  • 5PM: BSD Operating Systems, a Tour – What it says on the label

    • Saturday

  • 11AM: Sudo – You’re Doing It Wrong – Why your popular sudo configuration is incorrect, and how to do it safely
  • 1PM: Copyright versus Free Information – What happens when the concept of ‘information can’t be contained’ clashes with content creators who want monetary recompense for their hard work? Speakers include:Michael W. Lucas, Shetan Noir, Eva Galperin, Cory Doctorow
  • 6PM: SSH Key Authentication Tutorial – If you’re not doing SSH key authentication, show up here.
  • 8PM: Self-Publishing 101 – Do you? Should you? Various tools and techniques and recommendations.

    • Sunday

  • 2PM: DNSSEC in 50 minutes – How DNSSEC works, and why you should care

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a whole great big heap of slides to do…

    • Posted on

    Book Review: “Applied Network Security Monitoring”

    Chris Sanders kindly sent me a review copy of Applied Network Security Monitoring, written by Sanders along with Jason Smith, David J Bianco, and Liam Randall. It’s a very solid work, with much to recommend it to IT people who either have been told to implement security monitoring or who think that they should.

    Some of Applied Network Security Monitoring will be very familiar to anyone who has read any other security book–I’ve read many times that risk equals impact times probability. Every book on this topic needs this information, however, and Sanders and company cover it in sufficient detail to ground a probie while letting the rest of us easily skim it as a refresher.

    Then they take us through selecting data collection points and how they make decisions on where to collect data and what kind of data to collect. Ideally, of course, you collect full packet data everywhere, but in my semi-rural gigabit ISP world I don’t have enough electricity to spin that much disk. Where can you get by with session data, and where do you need full packet capture? ANSM takes you through the choices and the advantages and disadvantages of each, along with some guidance on the hardware needs.

    Data is nice, but it’s what you do with the data that makes security analysis interesting. ANSM uses Security Onion as an underlying toolkit. Security Onion is huge, and contains myriad tools for any given purpose. There’s reasons for this–no one NSM tool is a perfect fit for all environments. ANSM chooses their preferred tools, such as Snort, Bro, and SiLK, and takes you through configuring and using them on the SO platform. Their choices give you honeypots and log management and all the functionality you expect.

    Throughout the book you’ll find business and tactical advice. How do you organize a security team? How do you foster teamwork, retain staff, and deal with arrogant dweebs such as yours truly? (As an aside, ANSM contains the kindest and most business-driven description of the “give the arrogant guy enough rope to hang himself” tactic that I have ever read.) I’ve been working with the business side of IT for decades now, and ANSM taught me new tricks.

    The part of the book that I found most interesting was the section on analysis. What is analysis, anyway? ANSM takes you through both differential analysis and relational analysis, and illustrates them with actual scenarios, actual data. Apparently I’m a big fan of differential diagnosis. I use it everywhere. For every problem. Fortunately, Sanders and crew include guidelines for when to try each type of analysis. I’ll have to try this “relational analysis” thing some time and see what happens.

    Another interesting thing about ANSM is how it draws in lots of knowledge and examples from the medical field. Concepts like morbidity and mortality are very applicable to information technology in general, not just network security monitoring, and adding this makes the book both more useful and more interesting.

    Applied Network Security Monitoring is a solid overview of the state of security analysis in 2014, and was well worth my time to read. It’s worth your time as well.

    postscript

    Not long ago, I reviewed Richard Bejtlich’s The Practice of Network Security Monitoring. What’s more, I have corresponded with both Sanders and Bejtlich, and while they aren’t “help me hide a body” friends I’d happily share a meal with either.

    The obvious question people will ask is, how does Applied NSM compare to tPoNSM?

    Both books use Security Onion. Each book emphasizes different tools, different methodologies, and different techniques. Practical NSM shows Bejtlich’s military background. While Sanders has worked with the military, Applied NSM reads like it’s from an IT background.

    I can’t say either is a better book. Both are very very good.

    Personally, I have never implemented any plan from a book exactly as written. I read books, note their advice, and build a plan that suits my environment, my budget, and–most importantly–my staff. Reading them, I picked between tools and strategies until I found something that would work for my site. Security monitoring is a complex field. Maintaining, let alone building, a security monitoring infrastructure requires constant sharpening of your skills.

    I recommend anyone serious about the field read both books.

    Posted on

    The Con is a Lie

    I hadn’t planned to post this, but enough people asked me that I feel obliged to explicitly state:

    DetroitBSDCon is a joke. So is Oracle buying BSDCan. I did not play off of Dan’s posting: we planned it together, as well as the resulting fight on Twitter. (I must concede that Dan won the Twitter argument by enlisting Randi Harper for Oracle BSDCan. Nobody can stand against @freebsdgirl‘s awesome social networking mojo. Mind you, Dan has absolutely no clue about how we do things here in Detroit.)

    I don’t expect anyone to believe anything posted anywhere on 1 April. Dan and I did not expect to fool anyone, but we did find the idea funny. And so did a lot of other people, so that’s okay. A few folks hate 1 April in general, but they’re not going to change the world. I won’t do gag posts on random days–unless, of course, something is laugh-so-hard-you’ll-herniate-yourself funny and must go on a certain day as part of the joke.

    I’ve done three 1 April gags: this one, the Great Committer in 2011, and FretBSD (also with Dan) in 2003. I only do them if my inspirational muse kicks me in the head.

    A surprising number of people contacted me about DetroitBSDCon — not because they believed it, but because they want me to do it. They don’t care if I hold it in an abandoned factory, they just want DetroitBSDCon to happen. I have run conferences before, but these days I lack the time, energy, and flexibility to do so. Plus, it fails the WIBBOW test. Like, utterly fails the WIBBOW test. Fails with screeching and tears and thrashing about on the ground, running from the test room bawling like a whipped piglet.

    Holding a conference is easy. A lot of work, but it’s very straightforward work.

    If you want a BSD event in your city, here’s what you do.

  • Start small. Try a one-day event, like NYCBSDCon. If you’re successful, up it to two days next year.
  • Find space and a date. The space needs chairs, a screen for slides, projection gear, and clear lines of sight for attendees. mug.org rents a really nice space in the Farmington Hills library. NYCBSDCon found a restaurant with a screen. BSDCan sucks half a dozen rooms off of a university. EuroBSDCon takes over part of a hotel. Space can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be.
  • Get the date well ahead of time, so people can plan ahead. Don’t overlap a big BSD event.
  • Get speakers. Local speakers are good. Try to coax a couple “big names” into making the trip, sure, but having locals helps make it your conference.
  • Food. People will want to eat. Either have lunch brought in (tricky), or identify the local restaurants that don’t suck. Talk to the restaurant managers before the event; they might do a special rate for a large group at a predictable non-peak time, or at least staff up to handle a flood.
  • Figure out how much all of this costs. Divide by the number of attendees. Double it. That’s your admission rate. Every plan that says “we’ll break even” loses money — you will have unexpected expenses, and everything costs more than the quote. If you make a profit, either use it to bootstrap next year’s con or donate it to various BSD projects the way NYCBSDCon does.
  • About 3PM, everyone starts to drag. Have caffeine, cookies, and for us health-conscious sorts, fruit. (My only critique of NYCBSDCon? No afternoon snack.)

    My conference appearances for this year end in May. I don’t want to travel. But if you have a BSD event within a couple hours drive of Detroit, and it didn’t conflict with my prior commitments, I’d show up. (Or, if you ask politely, I’ll stay home. Whatever you prefer.)