We had a rather small attendance this month, so rather than have the puppet talk, I decided to put it off until March and we had a free-form meeting instead. Some discussion of Wordpress, which linux distros are appropriate for what settings, etc. We need to have another idea session, so part of the time at the next meeting will reserved to put together a topic list for the rest of the year and see if anyone has a pet project or new technology they wish to give a talk on.

This seems to happen every couple of years. I keep trying to find a Canadian hosting provider that offers capabilities similar to the one I use in the US and at a similar price point. Every time I find one, it ends up getting bought out. The last one was adequate, but had a number of issues (no shell access for starters) that I had problems with. This time I’m using a VPS from a Montreal provider to see how well it works.

Due to some unexpected interruptions and the visiting season that has just passed, I didn’t get enough prep time to get this talk ready, so I’m punting it to February. Instead, I’m going to go over building a lab environment on a server with the free version of VMWare ESXi 5.5 and the joy of getting things installed. This has a few challenges, which I will be covering in the talk, not the least of which is the method of managing the box, as the system has been “improved.

Met up with a few sysadmins for SysAdmin Appreciation Day at Pasticceria Gelatteria Italiana in Ottawa’s Little Italy. Not everyone was in the picture, I only managed one due to conversation. Good times… lots of stories, work talk, tech discussion, good natured insults, vocabulary expansion, coffee, paninnis, gelato, pastries, etc. Looking forward to next year.

We had an informative talk by Kelly on online training options based on his recent experiences. As we discussed the information, we discovered the talk could be expanded to include all of the local and online resources to provide continuous self-improvement for sysadmins who either have free time outside of work, are working part-time, may be between contracts or are looking to take some time off for training. Kelly is looking to update the talk to include the extra items we discussed and possibly do a followup talk in the new year.