Somehow the idea finally percolated through the chunk of rotten cork I
have for a brain. I liked the EUG-LUG meeting I went to a lot, but
it's hard to get to -- I have to take a trip to Eugene to attend. So
why not go to a meeting of the the thriving, well known, and extremely
local Silicon Valley LUG? www.svlug.org.
So, tonight I did, for the second time ever. You can't imagine a LUG
meeting more different than the EUG-LUG meetings.
The meetings happen once a month (EUG-LUG is clearly winning here).
It was in a huge auditorium on Cisco's campus in north San Jose. The
room probably seats 500-600 people; over 200 were in attendance. The
speakers all used mics and the room's PA system. The meeting started
off with announcements - within 5 minutes we heard about the next
BayLISA meeting, an upcoming EFF presentation with Lawrence Lessig,
and half a dozen more events. There was an announcement that the jobs
offered/wanted announcements section of the meeting had to be dropped
from the meeting because it takes too long, and the usual
after-meeting restaurant had closed so they were eating at IHOP for
this month only. (EUG-LUG scores another point. Nobody at an EUG-LUG
meeting ever suggested going to IHOP.) Then one of the officers
announced the speakers for March and April, and introduced the main
speaker, Eric Allman.
Eric Allman is best known as the author of sendmail, about 20 years
ago when he was an undergrad at Berkeley. Now he's the CTO of
Sendmail, Inc. His topic for the meeting was "Milters", or mail
filters. The Sendmail guys have come up with a plugin architecture
for filtering incoming mail. He spent quite a while talking about the
plugin API, future plans, and what plugins people have written.
After the talk, they gave away a 1U rack mount chassis, donated
by Linux-1U.net. Not a whole computer, just a chassis w/ power
supply. They gave it to the person who got the most applause
for their idea about what to do with it. One guy proposed using
it to let people control his telescope over the internet. The
other was from Nairobi (He explained that Nairobi is in Africa :-))
and proposed taking it to Nairobi and doing something with it.
Giving it to a school or something. The Nairobian won.
Somebody had a Linux PDA, which I didn't look at, and somebody else
had one of the new Crusoe powered Sony PictureBooks with a Ricochet
modem attached. Ricochets are cool - 128Kbps metropolitan area
wireless. The one he had is a USB device, and it "just works" under
the 2.4 kernel. Of course, the ricochet and its cable are nearly
as big as the PictureBook, but it's still cool.
Anne went with me, because she pampers me. The guy sitting to her
left was a Cisco employee. He got his laptop out and his 802.11b card
and connected to the building's network and did some surfing while
listening to the presentation. A few minutes later a security guard
came to him and asked whether he was a Cisco employee. Apparently the
guard had seen his packets. He proved he was an employee, and told
the guard he was able to connect to the building network without any
encryption keys or even a network name. The guard went away. A
computer security guy came. The security guy watched while the guy
showed that he could access Cisco intranet stuff. Got very agitated
at the gaping hole in their security. Presumably they will make some
changes in that building.
Anyway, there you go. LUGs are different. Imagine such a thing!
--
Kbobsoft Software Consulting K<bob>
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
