After having located Maharaja TUX banner from afar I walked into a
jam-packed discussion room on what should be the most efficient way of
Distributing CDs of distributions and updates with Raj Mathur coordinating
the discussion.
(This was nowhere on agenda *but I wasn't surprised it happens* the speaker
who had to speak first hadn't yet landed) This discussion continued well
after the who had to speaker who had to speak first landed.
As usual the discussion ended without any formal decision on how the CD
distribution and update packages need to be distributed in this bandwidth
starved (rant: and clueless ISPs who don't run any local mirrors for ISO
downloads and bill bandwidth as a precious commodity) country.
Edwin and Azad Singh suggested that we co-opt the Nehru Place IT Hardware
Community into this mammoth(thus profitable by volumes task) of CD
distribution as Nehru Place is visited by a lot IT enthusiasts asking for
Linux CDs anyway. We will need to work out what should/can ILUGD members do
on that.
Akshay promised unlimited master ISO downloads at his facilities.
Other things discussed in this non-agenda item included where to spend the
potential monies from a sponsor ideas included
1. Buy a CD duplicator
(Certain issues need to be resolved related to efficient and cost effective
CD distribution and where the CD duplicator fits into this scheme)
2. Buy a couple of Wifi Cards and an Access Point for use in the future Wifi
Enabled ILUGD meetings.(Yes we would be the first ILUG in India if we do
that)
3. Buy cordless collar mike and 'surround' sound system for the benefit of
low volume speakers ( we have too many of them as well )
I shall start a separate thread for the above two discussions
1) Efficient CD distribution
2) Spending the potential sponsor money
Finally the originally planned speakers for the meet were allowed to speak
and discussion brought to an abrupt end (only to potentially brew into
flamewars on the list)
First speaker was Raj Shekhar who explained with the help of a live demo
installing emacs (oh that was easy #apt-get install emacs) and configuring
the Xresources file for PHP syntax recognition and integration of
online(locally installed) PHP help into the system.
The syntax Xresources resembled or was LISP so Pankaj readily suggested that
we would since in any case need to learn LISP lets give PHP a go by.
(Pankaj lives and will die by the maxim do perl || die and doesn't seem to
be in love with PHP)
The talk was over with a few helpful interruptions by another Raj present in
the meet.
Raj was followed by Akshay Lamba who almost made the audience drool on his
l33t hax0r sk1llz until he made it clear that he didn't understand the
shell code written in Hex. Akshay explained the use of nmap, ntop,
nessus... security tools with the help of the virtual LAN he carried on his
Laptop. Akshay also emphasized an integrated approach to security.
This was followed by an unusually long tea/coffee and cold-drink break
tempered with category killer samosas and Rasogullas (woe be those who
didn't attend the meet) peppered with varied discussions ranging from
socitification of ILUGD (Anand Shankar suggested that perhaps it maybe a
better idea to get ILUGD registered in Haryana), the futility of including
Visual Basic/ASP in IT syllabi of a seemingly enlightened university in
Delhi, A few rounds of Table Tennis, CD distribution.
Yashpal also the Meet Coordinator and co-host (along with Ajay Anand)
explained the setting up of a ipsec network and explained the difference
between a normal Gateway to Gateway VPN setup and Gateway to Roadwarrior
setup. He also explained rsync and its utility for backing things across
the VPN networks and helpfully interrupted by Raj Mathur explaining how he
used rsync over ssh tunnels in P2P mode of operation instead of the
client-server mode explained by Yashpal. Sandeep added his bit into the
discussion by explaining that once you get a non-pristine ISO whose md5sum
doesn't match you can rsync it with one of the rsync servers having the ISO
to get your pristine ISO back.
Eswar explaining sed and awk.
Eswar explained the benefits of sed and awk compared to "badly coded"
Perl(yes slurp the whole file into the memory and then operate on it
instead of line by line) and their historical roots from ed the command
line editor which he recalled nostalgically. Eshwar explained the basic
stream oriented nature of sed and awk. And the way awk is used to process
text through its implicit loop which acts on each line of the input.
Again Eswar was interrupted by Raj Mathur (who seemed to be in a very
helpful mood) on how regular expressions are used with some of the quirks
and tricks using a freshly installed vim('for wimps' *yours truly uses
vim+eclipse these days for writing perl*) highlighting matched expressions.
Since it became quite late and people had had enough grub courtsey eSys and
enough talks it was decided to call it a day and the last speaker Goldwyn
Rodrigues kindly agreed to postpone his insight into the SCTP protocol as
the first speaker of the ILUGD June meet. Sometime during the meet Rahul
(An editor of a Linux oriented magazine) distributed an article by Sudev on
how Nuchem created a Low TCO and high TBO(Total Benefit of Ownership) IT
infrastructure environment using OpenSource Software(Including Linux) which
on a much higher budget wouldn't even have come close to the wishlist items
Nuchem fulfilled using OpenSource.
-Tarun
PS: Please append to this thread anything I missed and your comments on the
meet. Please start separate threads for the other discussions left
incomplete during the meet.
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