Title: October Meeting
Location: The Second Cup, Bells Corners
Link out: Click here
Description: We have a couple of topics for October:

• Documentation systems
  • basically what systems do you use, what could we do better?
  • Do you use a Wiki? a CMS? a spreadsheet? Google docs? etc.
  • self-contained or db based?
  • What works and what does not?
• Certifications - do they have any value?
  • Who has certifications?
  • Why do you have them?
  • Have they helped?
  • Should “I” get any/more?
  • Do certifications help with my job?

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-10-13
End Time: 21:30

Title: September Meeting (Note that this is the LAST Thursday in the month)
Location: The Second Cup, Bells Corners
Link out: Click here
Description: As we had a very small turnout for the last meeting, I’ll bring along some photos of the new firewall appliance I assembled with components from pc engines. I’m quite impressed so far.

Hopefully we can stand another of my “doc” talks as well. If I’m successful, I’ll provide the whole thing as an epub file.

Title: August Meeting
Location: The Second Cup, Bells Corners
Link out: Click here
Description: Time for the monthly meeting.

Topics:

• Firewall appliances (DIY and commercial)
• Diagramming tools
• Documentation tools
• Other “stuff”, ask questions, bring topics

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-08-18
End Time: 21:30

I recently decided to upgrade the unmanaged 24 port gig switch I have been using to a managed switch - make that 2 managed switches. I saw a deal on ebay for a couple of Dell 2724 switches that can be placed in managed mode. The price was quite good and I wanted to be able to create a couple of VLANs, but I didn’t want the howl of the fans from the Cisco switch I have.

It was a smallish crowd (four) who met for the July meeting on what may have been the hottest day of this summer. The initial discussion list was waived in favour of talking about tablets and smart phones. The tablet we were discussing was an acer refurb tablet running Android and attempting to:

1. Connect to a public WiFi access point
2. Tether it to a recently purchased Android phone. Via WiFi hotspot and USB.

Connecting to the wireless network seemed to work, but free wireless was not found. Rather than continue on, the real objective was to use the 3G service on the phone for places where WiFi is unavailable.  Initial attempts appeared to succeed, but actual connectivity was not present. I offered my phone (iPhone) as a hotspot and everything worked flawlessly. I used both the local WiFi and 3G as services and it worked on both. Bruce had his Android phone and we tried with that and it worked properly as a hotspot and USB tethered. It seems the phone has a firmware bug.