We had a successful SysAdmin Day get together. Unfortunately I didn’t take many pictures.

Title: Sysadmin Appreciation Day
Location: Big Rig Brew Pub
Link out: Click here
Description: Details on the what is it are available here:

http://sysadminday.com/

In our case, it’s an excuse for a small party. Come out and there will be no fixing of computers, networks or security audits.

Start Time: 17:30
Date: 2013-07-26

Here are a few followup items from the meeting:

The Raspberry Pi as a FM transmitter: http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter

Monitoring Tools - this turned into a segue on configuration management as well:

• Zenoss - http://zenoss.org
• Nagios - http://nagios.org
• xymon - http://xymon.org
• Ground Works Open Source (core) - http://gwos.com
• Zabbix - http://zabbix.com
• Spiceworks (there is a free edition) - http://spiceworks.com
• Big Sister - http://bigsister.ch
• MRTG - http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg
• Cacti - http://cacti.net
• Puppet - http://puppetlabs.com
• cfengine - http://cfengine.com (community edition)
• chef - http://www.opscode.com/chef/
• ansible - http://ansibleworks.com
• cdist - http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cdist

There was a short PXE discussion where I mentioned a very good writeup on using it with FreeBSD. The thing that made this a great resource is that it talks about the options and features that can be used as well as the actual booting portion. It also happens to be available as a HTML page or a PDF. According to the author, he used AsciiDoc to generate it and this is a great example of the type of documentation you can create with AsciiDoc

Title: July Meeting 2013
Location: Tim Horton’s, 660 Eagleson Rd, Kanata
Link out: Click here
Description: It is July already…

Not a lot of topic info for this month, given that it is typically a quiet month for our meetings.

I was considering the following items:

• Fun things to do with a Raspberry Pi - FM Radio transmitter
• Monitoring tools has come up as a side topic at OCLUG, so a list of basic ones comes to mind. Maybe we will have some discussion on experiences with them
• Renato wanted some PXE boot info, so we can certainly add that to the pot, including all of those nice things we can do with a PXE environment and TFTPD and DHCPD
• SysAdmin Appreciation Day is coming, so we should pick a venue for a short social evening
• Any other topics

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2013-07-18
End Time: 21:30

Title: June Meeting 2013
Location: Tim Horton’s, 660 Eagleson Rd, Kanata
Link out: Click here
Description: Followup to the MythTV topic

Designing a useful presentation - discussion, not a presentation

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 20130620
End Time: 21:30