The conference is over, and it’s time to return to the mundane. It was a good time - formal talks, social activity and lots of idea exchanges. Actually a very good time. If I was independently wealthy, I’d probably spend most of my time attending conferences. I hear BSDCan 2010 will be on for next year, so at the very least I have that to look forward to.

I did not attend any of the highly technical presentations, as I’m effectively a BSD newbie (well, I used it for years in the 80’s), but I don’t really have much experience with the modern versions. That is a task for this year. I have the iso images, vmware, enough physical machines to brown out the neighborhood and time to learn.

We will be having the May meeting at the offices of the Pythian group. Location info is available in the “Meetings” link at the top right corner of the page.

This month, we have a talk on implementing production DNS. It might even prove mildly entertaining.

Suggestions for future talks are acceptable during the more social portion of the meeting. If you have a topic you wish to present on or have a topic you would like to have presented, please bring it up at the meeting.

Managing to outmaneuver IBM:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h-3DLt9Q_Yyl0h-XzDc7C8RJ9DNAD97M63805

The big question is: what will happen to MySQL and other open source Sun products?

Looks like we have a new home. The Pythian Group has offered us use of their space and it may be more convenient for some of us, as it is now downtown.

I was originally going to go over the repurposing of old watchguard units as firewalls or possibly talk about asterisk but that didn’t pan out. Due to an excessive amount of work over the past couple of weeks, all I have had time to look at was replacing my DSL modem and watchguard unit (running monowall) with a cisco 2621 router and a WIC-1ADSL card. It is a work in progress, as I haven’t quite figured out where to apply the access lists (for a DMZ) or how to determine the netmask for my static address.

This Thursday, 19:00 at Fidus.

We have a proposed topic of “Cloud Computing” and it is an interesting topic. I’m not sure that everyone has thought about the long term implications of on-demand computing or how it would affect the way we work. I’m sure it will be an interesting discussion.

Other things of note would be that I will be (if not by the time we get the meeting going) setting up an Asterisk server for my home use. I keep wanting to do it and never get to it. I do have an Asterisk based PBX in the office that I maintain and it’s not fun to be locked out. This is probably the real reason I’m going to get to it now. Once it’s up, I have to decide what I am going to do about my real PBX. Should be lots of fun. Setting up clusters will also be an interesting exercise. Once it’s complete, I’ll do a talk on the setup and how well it worked, as well as firewalls, protocols and strange things one has to do with enterprise gear.