March 2008

The March meeting consisted of a brief presentation (given by me) about using CVS for Configuration Management. We had a fairly light crowd comprised of most of "the regulars". After talking about CVS, we also discussed Nagios and I gave a demo of how I'm using it to monitor my home network.

Following the meeting, most of us convened at the Dog Pub for some pizza and beer (or soda, as the case may be).

Thanks to everyone that made it out.

March Meeting - From Diff to Errata & Configuration Versioning

This month, we'll be meeting on Tuesday, March 25 at Raba in Columbia, MD.

Todd Carson will give a brief talk on how his diff became OpenBSD 4.2 Errata entry 008. Todd will talk about his Errata submission next month. I will talk about using CVS to store your configuration files.

As usual, we'll grab a beer and food after the meeting at either Green Turtle, Nottingham's or the Dog Pub.

February 2008

Our February meeting consisted of Sysadmin Games (the brainchild of Jason Dixon). Jason brought with him a "server" (beige box) running some form of Linux and VMware Server. He had prepared blank VMware guest systems ready to be loaded with Open, Net, Free or Dragonfly BSD. After a quick trivia contest to choose which team was assigned which BSD, we got started.

The goal was to install your assigned BSD, configure networking, a web server with HTTPS and the firewall. While we were allowed "shout-outs" for help, no one seemed to use that and preferred to use their 10 minute "web search" lifeline. All of the teams fared very well, running into small problems along the way. Only one team completed the task with perfection. :)

All in all, Sysadmin Games was a huge success. We will have to start planning for future competitions.

Update: (notes from Jason)

I took notes during the meeting to track how teams were doing, how well the server was holding up, and what can be done better in the future. Surprisingly, everything went very smoothly except for the host platform (VMware on CentOS) choking at times. It seems that VMware doesn't behave nicely when you have four teams beating on the vmware console over the network. Regardless, we managed to clear those minor obstacles and every team finished with a "passing" score.

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