Several people got to the Hamilton Library at 6:30pm to set computers. Wayne Hardy, Gerry Ely, and Jeffery Yepp got seven, yes 7, PCs and laptops into a network. One PC was a DHCP server to assign IP addresses. It worked well. We had one Windows 98 PC to allow us to try things across platforms.
Before the main presentation, we had several "business" items to cover. 1. The maintenance of the HamLUG Website. David Ross and I volunteered to help. Jeff Yepp suggested using PHP-Nuke for the Website. He will arrange with the Web hosting service to set up for PHP and MySQL. 2. Having a Linux related booth at the Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) May 4th & 5th. TCF info is at http://www.tcf-nj.org. One of the questions was how to coordinate with other local Linux groups and what groups are active these days. Jeff Yepp will contact people he knows in other groups. A question was brought up what is a Linux group's function. Spurred interesting discussions. No profound conclusions. No <egads!> "mission statements" but a good glimpse of how people can get different things out of a LUG. Gerry Ely gave an excellent presentation of how to use Linux as an inexpensive network sniffer to diagnose networks. He used Ethereal and showed how it could be used, for example, to check a network printer transaction. A very powerful tool. Towards the end of the meeting, we also saw EtherApe, a graphical program for visualizing the interactions among networked computers. J.D. Abolins
