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

© 2025, 2026 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, has alternated between Tokyo (JP) and Taipei (TW). AsiaBSDCon 2026 was March 19-22, 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. AsiaBSDCon 2027 will be in Tokyo, dates and specifics to be announced.
• BSDCan, traditionally mid May to mid June, Ottawa (CA). BSDCan 2027 will be July 7-1 in Vancouver, Canada.
• EuroBSDcon, September timeframe, each year in a new European city. EuroBSDCon 2027 will be September (exact dates to be determined) in Bratislava, Slovakia.

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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Elvis is alive! How 'AI' stunts modern mythmaking

© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen

A chance followup to an old geek joke reveals how AI creates myths based on severely limited historical inputs

Sometimes LinkedIn discussions run much like informal office banter. Earlier this week, Niall Murphy posted there, saying

Best joke hostnames? I'll go first:
"switchen" - network equipment close to the fridge
"madwoman" - storage server somewhere up high (guess how high)
"wutheringbytes" - storage server in rural surroundings

This had me respond with

Never forget that it is required for any network with Solaris boxes to have one host called elvis

This comes from a fairly widely known and respected part of geek culture, based on the Solaris operating system's implementation of the ping(8) command.

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

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If you're a Unix person, you will get the joke immediately after following the link to the ping(8) manual page and reading the first three lines of the DESCRIPTION part.

The cultural background is a reference to Elvis Presley, the "King of Rock'n'Roll", who passed away in August of 1977. Pretty much immediately after the sad news arrived via ordinary channels, speculations started turning up that The King was not actually deceased.

There have been quite a few versions of those rumors in circulation, and if some of those were to be believed, our man had actually arranged a disappearance in order to join some top secret undercover assignment for one or more of the federal three letter agencies of the United States govenment.

Be that as it may, fast forward a few years, and by the time I entered the ranks of Solaris admins, it had become something of a standing joke to put new hires in front of a terminal or simply an Xterm open on a Solaris box and tell them to enter ping elvis and press Enter.

The interaction would then run like this:

$ ping elvis
elvis is alive


at this point everybody would have a laugh, and work would go on. Until the next rookie turned up.

That was the joke, repeated almost ad nauseam at all Solaris sites I have been to.

So I was a bit surprised by Niall's followup

Peter Hansteen glad to see Gemini's got it's finger on the pulse:
"Bohunt School:
The context of the phrase "Elvis Solaris" comes from a Facebook post from Bohunt School, indicating the school used the dogs to help students with their well-being. "

My immediate reaction was along the lines of that's bulls**t, phrased as

Whatever they fed that one, I don't think I want to know.

ping(1)!

A screenshot of the entire sequence is preserved here.

-- and my impulse here was that this was yet another example of AI hallucination, courtesy of the Gemini assistant tool. After all, what other link between Elvis Presley, King of Rock'n'Roll and the Solaris operating system could conceivably exist? So I just dismissed the thought and went on with my day.

But the next morning I noticed I was still slightly irritated by the whole thing, so I decided to investigate again, using the clues Niall had provided.

Searching with the obvious keywords, it turned up that indeed, a series of Facebook posts existed that showed that in connection with Bohunt School, an outfit calling itself Solaris Healthcare had indeed been involved in a number of events using the name Elvis in the event title, apparently involving one or more Elvis impersonators.

So the reference was real after all.

The thing was not completely made up, but pointing to those Facebook posts about the Elvis themed events as the original context shows very clearly what the language model was trained on. They included social media posts, but apparently did not manage to suck in references to a fairly widely know part of geek or hacker culture.

To my mind at least, this shows that even the latest fad in Artificial intelligence (AI)has been unable to evade one basic truth about information processing systems:

The quality and usefulness of the output from any information system depends critically on the inputs provided for the system to process.

Or as some less kind commentators have uttered, Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO for short).

When the hypemasters of the large language models forget this simple truth about their systems, we all end up poorer for it. The tool acts as if it has absorbed all knowable truth, and presents it with all the confidence of a veteran mansplainer. Whatever was not in the training data set simply falls by the wayside.

If in this way modern myths and folklore stripped away and deleted, only what the robot trainers could be bothered with included, and as a consequence the scope of what will form our future myths and folklore culture becomes narrowed and stunted.

This all echoes the sentiments that I found in a fediverse post that I lost the original reference for, but which I included in my my pinned post,

I just saw a post that referred to ChatGPT as "Mansplaining as a service", and it is so wonderfully correct - instant generation of superficially plausible yet totally fabricated nonsense presented with unflagging confidence, regardless of topic, without concern, regard, or even awareness of the expertise of its audience :D #chatgpt #mansplaining #GenerativeAiIsGoingGreat

Take "ChatGPT" there as a stand-in for "any large language model system". In the current iteration of what popular culture considers Artificial intelligence, much of the hype we have heard can be condensed to

"but this time around, it is laced with our special large language model magic."

The sceptics among us might be justified in thinking

"actually, this time around its GIGO+M (Garbage in, Garbage out, plus magic)".

I am an old man. I regularly yell at clouds.

Good night and good luck! I welcome your comments.

Bonus note: Niall told me in a message, about the "is alive" reference, he was "wondering if it was sourced anywhere and turned to my favourite search engine to see. And that was the Gemini result placed at the top, which I thought was so beautifully wrong/weird I should share it with you..."

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Update 2025-08-07: My colleague Eirik Sangolt decided to put OpenAI GPT-4.1 to the task of explaining.

Here is what happened:

Eirik: Explain the following Tweet: "Never forget that it is required for any network with Solaris boxes to have one host called elvis."

OpenAI:
The Tweet "Never forget that it is required for any network with Solaris boxes to have one host called elvis." is a reference to a long-standing joke in the Unix and Solaris system administration community.

Explanation:

• Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems.
• In Solaris, there is a command called ping used to test network connectivity.
• If you run the command ping elvis on a Solaris system, the system responds with:
  elvis is alive
• This is a playful Easter egg built into Solaris. The system is pretending that "elvis" is a host on the network, and the phrase "elvis is alive" is a joke referencing the popular culture myth that Elvis Presley is still alive.

So, the Tweet is a joke:
It suggests that every network with Solaris machines should have a host named "elvis" so that when someone runs ping elvis, they get the amusing response. In reality, it's not a technical requirement-just a bit of fun for system administrators.

If you want more details or examples of other Unix jokes or Easter eggs, let me know!

This response is Al generated and is based only on parts of the available information. Do not use it as a basis for important decisions.

Screenshot preserved here.

I think perhaps the answer provided here could be based on fairly low rated stackoverflow answers.

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Elvis is alive! How 'AI' stunts modern mythmaking is © 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen (published 2025-08-06)

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You might also be interested in reading selected pieces via That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List (also here).

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 (also here). 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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Ubuntu Made Easy May Have Achieved Its Noble Goal

A new No Starch Press title sets out with the intention of making Ubuntu Linux accessible to newcomers of the more timid kind. It may very well have succeeded.

If you've been part of the open source community for a while, you will have seen quite a few books and that set out to make some version or other of Linux accessible to beginners.  While some of these efforts have been quite compentent and admirable, others have been too shallow, barely rewritten from a template originally created with other systems in mind.  Others again have failed by being simply too massive and not actually very beginner oriented past the first ten to fifteen pages or so.

It's fair to say that a new Linux beginners' book has the odds stacked against it in several important ways. But then for a greying unixer like myself, there is the always a lingering hope that the next Linux or other Unix for beginners book will finally get it right, and manage to strike the right balance between a gentle learning curve and providing enough information to be genuinely useful.

So when No Starch Press asked me if I would like a review copy of Rickford Grant and Phil Bull's Ubuntu Made Easy (I have a pre-existing business relationship with No Starch Press, see note at the end), I hesitated for a few minutes and told them I'd take a peek.

When my review copy landed on my desk a few weeks ago I had already had access to PDF version for a little while.  Seeing the total page count in the PDF I was at first a little worried that this would be another one for the too big to be useful category.

But I needn't have worried. The writing in the approximately 420 pages of core text flows well and the subject matter is presented in a way that in my limited testing on less experienced users (I do not have easy access to truly fresh newbies, unfortunately) seems to build a useful and gentle learning curve.  A gentle learning curve does not necessarily mean low information density, however -- even my not totally green test subjects all found pieces of new information or useful tips in all chapters.

The text (with fairly frequent and useful illustrations) flows through a total of 22 chapters and four appendixes that takes the reader from a very gentle introduction to the system (even suggesting that you run from the live CD at first, only committing to a permanent install once you've gotten your feet wet) through a sequence of smaller projects in a full range of Linux desktop life topics that are clearly designed to both expand the users' skill set and to build their confidence in their own abilities.

After the project or task oriented chapters that make up the bulk of the book, the later chapters include an introduction to interacting with the Ubuntu community as well as a fairly useful symptom-oriented troubleshooting guide.

More experienced users may opt to skip or browse rather quickly through the early chapters, but as I mentioned earlier, even the more experienced may be able to find new information or at least a fresh perspective on familiar topics in various sections of this book.

So my verdict is that all in all, I think the authors of Ubuntu Made Easy may be very close to succeeding in the much longed-for goal of making a Linux beginner book that is actually useful to beginners.

Title: Ubuntu Made Easy - A Project-Based Introduction to Linux
Authors: Rickford Grant with Phil Bull
Published: No Starch Press (San Francisco), July 2012. 480 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-59327-425-2

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Note: I have a pre-existing business relationship with No Starch Press.  The good people there had the patience to work with me through the process of writing three editions of The Book of PF, and they have sent me review copies of more books than the ones I've actually gotten around to reviewing.