This was originally the About page for the site. A few things have changed over time, as I have adapted to meet the changes. You should see the original from the first web page.

What is ovSAGE?

ovSAGE is a recognized local affiliate of the System Administrator’s Guild (SAGE) and the League of Professional Systems Administrators (LOPSA),  founded in 1998 in Ottawa, Ontario. We are primarily a group of system administrators from around the National Capital region that meet once a month to be social, get a heads up on new ideas, technology, and to have a little fun. Ideally, we will be inviting vendors in to demo technologies that we could use in our daily employment, have training sessions, and bring in some of those nasty problems that we all run into, and try to find an answer.

Day 1 is completed - so far so good. Other than some difficulties with the room wiring, causing me to miss most of the morning session on VOIP, things went well. Maybe I can get a copy of the slides to go over. On the plus side, the wireless networking was flawless after I took a shortcut to solve the room jack issue.

I did manage to take a photo of the presenter and a shot of the room on my PDA, so that will get posted eventually.

It appears that I’ve managed to get myself volunteered for the wireless networking for BSDcan. That’s interesting, especially when I haven’t set up a network for a conference before. Luckily, I’ve been able to get some assistance from the previous wireless maintainer.

In the past, the conference used NetBSD for the gateway machine and standard NAT and dhcp to provide the networking, so I went with the old standard. This is interesting simply because I haven’t used NetBSD before. It was a quick download and install, although it doesn’t install bash by default. Now BSD uses a ports collection - probably where Gentoo got the idea for a source repository. It wasn’t intuitively obvious how to add software, but a quick net search showed that all I had to do was install the package list (example given) and go to the correct directory and type ‘make install’. It actually worked first try - much easier than gentoo was :)

Well, the BDcan 2007 conference starts in a week. I’m looking forward to it, as I actually plan on attending a few of sessions this time. In the past it’s been a little randon if I attend a session as it’s usually a last minute decision.

The first year I was taping the sessions, so I never actually managed to listen to the session. I missed the next year due to work commitments, and the year after that I was doing security (checking to see if people actually were supposed to be there), so I ended up sitting in on whatever I was closest to.

The May meeting will be pushed out a week, due to the BSD Canada conference. It would be too difficult to race from the conference to the meeting, so I’m bumping the meeting a week.

Don’t forget the topic for this month, configuring email. I believe we were going to look at postfix (which should be new to most of us). If you have a laptop, feel free to bring it along.