[PLUG] PLUG West meeting notes 2007.09.20 (delayed)

[TuskenTower <tuskentower@gmail.com>]

Attendance: about 15
New Users: Brian Stempin (the presenter)

We discussed the Monday vs Thursday date for the PLUG West meeting.  Again.

There was a discussion about the Gnome release and the ugliness of its
source code with long lines and hacked OO code.  It seems with every
change to the code base you have to update your applications GUI code
(yikes!).  The new release has broken multiple desktops (I guess its
time to switch back to KDE).

Paul decided to follow on the topic by asking people what GUI and
shells they use.  Most of us have been switching back and forth
between KDE and Gnome with no real attachment.  Only one person used
Enlightenment instead of the big two.  Xfce was also mentioned.

I have no notes on shells except for ZSH (http://www.zsh.org/).  ZSH
has some awesome auto-completion features and is built for interactive
use.  The online book (at http://zsh.sourceforge.net/) is the best
reference for ZSH.

Someone asked about Personal Finance software.  There was a decent
amount of discussion (pretty much the same as in the list) and I went
into a rant about how much I hate quicken (see
http://mysoftwaresucks.com/content/view/32/1/ for more details).  I
really hate the annual upgrade tax with Quicken and I took a few
seconds to poke at my favorite company Apple with the Mac OS X upgrade
tax (I buy it nonetheless).

The conversation wandered into OS and hardware problems.  Linux does
not yet have a 802.11n driver and people were wondering how do we go
about finding what is in the hardware when the manufacturer just says
"wireless card" or won't give out the specs that help us to identify
supported hardware.

Someone asked about iptables management because the number of active
sessions was killing his old firewall machine.  Connections in one
location is killing his firewall but not in another.  Iptables changed
a lot from 2.4 to 2.6.  The failing host, a P3 was running an debian
release with a 2.4 kernel.

Brian Stempin stepped up to give a presentation on Nagios with a
laptop and two intel mac minis running Linux.  It is a monitoring tool
with low pre-requisites with a command line and web front-end.  Brian
highlighted the utility of the web front-end and the use of plugins to
monitor to services.  There is not builtin reporting, but the web
front-end has a nice dashboard for your PHB.

Next month, someone from Bhaskar's team with FNIS will present on
their infrastructure for developing and testing across multiple
platforms for GT.M.  This is a follow-on to his presentation on the
architecture of GT.M that went 45 minutes over time.

Site News:
None :)

Meeting Information:
PLUG West is held ... did we come to a decision?
Meeting Host: Paul Snyder
Site host: Amul Shah (amul.shah@unisys.com)
Site: 2476 Swedesford Rd, Malvern, PA 19355
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