We all met at Epok's office in Bethesda, MD for our first official meeting last night. A total of eleven members were in attendance to hear Mike Erdely's presentation on the binpatch binary patching system for OpenBSD. It looks like nice way of maintaining patches for multiple systems, although I argued that the same could be done with a few shell commands. However, if some of the proposed features that Mike discussed (patch_add, patch_info, etc) become realized, some very interesting advancements could develop (commercial patch distribution, anyone?). Presentation slides: HTML or PDF.

There was time left, so I did a quick overview of FreeNAS running in a Parallels virtual system on my MacBook Pro. FreeNAS is a very simple way of getting a commodity NAS installed for any home or business. It supports software RAID, and the footprint clocks in at a miniscule 38MB.

In a general discussion, Mike talked briefly about using FuzzyOcr with SpamAssassin to more successfully catch image spam.

Around 8:30pm EST, we decided to grab some dinner over at the Daily Grill. It was a cold 4-block stroll over to the Hyatt Regency, but the Guinness was worth it. The bill was almost as painful as a weekend with SELinux, but the food and service made it worthwhile.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the first official get-together. I'm looking forward to meeting all of the other members who couldn't attend. The next meeting will be held at Todd C. Miller's office in Columbia, MD. More details to follow.