Meeting Notes: Sept 2009

The Annapolis Linux Users Group had their fist meeting in Mavenspire’s conference room. We are very happy to have a new meeting place.

Meeting notes:

1) Need to get sign for LUG meeting.
Annapolis Lug meets here

2.) We had some volunteers for future presentations, additionally mavenspire said they could bring in some vendors.

Here is a list of possible future presentations:

scribus: open source publish package.
Dave Blyle

idiots guide to rack mounting servers
Nick he said he knows most of the snafu.

Recovering File systems: Ted
My home directories have all been XFS up to now.
Problem: occasionally I type rm -fr in the wrong place.

Seems ext2 is the only one that allows you use recover deleted files.

3) Mavenspire could bring the following vendors for a presentation:
a. VMWARE
b. Novell (
c. Digium

Some members expressed an interest in the following possible presentations:
Kanadical
IBM super computers
Digium: Switch box
ZenOS ( Pseudo open source) system monitoring company (Nagios is their competitor)
Cirtix Xen Server presentation

After Michael gave his little show-in-tell about an embedded Linux machine he had found in the closet we talked about current events.

AMD has a new produced that allows visualizing at the CPU level.

BTRFS – high end file system, does snapshots, volume management.
This file system is now in the kernel.

Nick was asking what is going to happen to SUN. He wants the SUN management console for Linux.

ZFS is Micheal’s favorite file system. Unlike BTRFS, it is probably the most mature FS with the most features in it.

Currently, mysql and SUN are now owned by Oracle.
The merger seems to cause Oracle to start some layoffs of non seniority positions.

Splunk seems like a neat program. This program lets you tie system logs for all systems into on central location. Spluk is an Open Source Log file processor engine. It has clients for Windows servers, SUN, FreeBSD and Linux. All logs can be in one central location in a search able/ categorized database.

Seems like it a good time to find deals on servers. Micheal said HP is selling G5 for really cheap. Additionally, AMD memory is very cheap.
For example, you can upgrade from 16GB to 64GB for less than $600.

Sun has its own new virtual solution. It is called Virtual Box and can be downloaded for free at the SUN site like XEN.

Microsoft wrote the evolution plug in. Novell washed their hands because they find it counterproductive. Microsoft will be creating a Linux client for exchange in the future.

The US govt is now researching cloud computing to cut costs.
Article http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/cloud-saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220000493&cid=nl_IW_daily_html

Dave mentioned that he was interested in the Gluster
Disturbed file system. Here are some other distributed file systems.

Hadupu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop
Fuse part of the kernel that makes files mountable.
It is slow, but allows a lot of flexibility for distributed file systems.

Router using Open source firmware. That is in a performance war with Cisco and Juniper. http://vyatta.com/