Meeting Report - Friday, 27th April, 2001
The Usual Suspects
Kicking off the meeting earlier seemed to work, although those who
weren't incredibly early managed to miss Craige's, ah, special
video screening. During Q&A, we:
* discovered the differences between Red Hat and Mandrake...
Mostly "Red Hat sucks!" and "No, Mandrake sucks!" Mandrake is
obviously built for bleeding-edge desktop users and certainly
not servers, whilst no one could really fathom what Red Hat
was built for.
* allowed Conrad to set off a number of seizures in the audience
as he showed off his non-OpenGL SpeedWorm and SpeedMine hacks
for xscreensaver. You really have to read the man pages.
* discussed the finer points of fork() and clone(), and not
using shared memory to, well, share memory between user space
processes.
* thanked Anand greatly for telling us all about the 'x' option
to ps.
Netfilter
Chris Collins gave a well-rounded overview of Netfilter, Rusty's
new firewalling code in the 2.4 kernels. Outside the core,
Netfilter is highly modular, and according to Chris, building it
into your kernel monolithically "would just be stupid". The
modules provide features you'd recognise from ipchains, many new
features, and some mostly esoteric ones (like the mirror module
which is kinda useless, but "still funny" according to Conrad).
Unfortunately, whilst everyone was impressed with Netfilter, and
Chris's overview of it, no one was willing to entrust a production
firewall to Linux 2.4. Perhaps around 2.4.10...
cfengine
Previously described on the SLUG website as "cool remote
administration and configuration software", Gus showed cfengine up
for what it really was: A Prolog-inspired, buzzword-compliant
Norwegian research project. Gus - whose tangential talks generally
yield more interest and discussion in surrounding theories than
the topic at hand - made cfengine make sense, and backed it up
with examples from his own system administration experience.
Whilst the cfengine docs are quite good, examples are lacking, so
Gus will be putting up some in-use cfengine hackery on his web site.
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~gusl/
Dinner & BEEEER!!!!111
Again, dinner at The Amazing* House of Boiled Television Entrails!
Somehow the two tables managed to be positioned at opposite ends
of the restaurant, which made meme propagation difficult.
At the end of the evening, it was established that Beer was Owed
and that a Pub was Required. Eighties music was played, rounds
were exchanged, pool was played, and at one point, the pants were
off.
* Note that the Boiled Television Entrails may not actually amaze.
- --- -
Next SLUG Meeting - Friday, 25th May, 2001
Please note: We will be attempting to start and finish the meeting
earlier from now on, so dinner doesn't run so late. Talks will
start at 7pm, with the usual suspects beforehand.
The Usual Suspects
* Q&A - "What has Linux done for/to me lately?"
* Linux News & Discussion
The Agenda PDA
This perky new PDA is the first wholly Linux-based PDA around,
and it already has a good developer following. Catie Flick will be
showing us the hardware, and a few hacks made by herself and other
SLUGgers. http://www.agendacomputing.com/
And surely more!
Dinner
After the meeting at the House of Boiled Television Entrails. The
real name is of course, "The House of Guang Zhou" in Haymarket.
- Jeff
--
Great minds think different?
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
