Michigan!/usr/group

There are several Free/OpenSource database management packages available, including
!MySQL, Firebird, The Berkeley Database and !PostgreSQL.

Bill has given many MUG presentations over the years, and this month, we’re happy to
have him give us a review of the !PostgreSQL Database Management System.

At our January MUG meeting, we opened the floor to nominations for the board of directors.
We have 6 board positions, and there were 6 people nominated. Those people are:

1. Jim !McQuillan
2. Jim Glutting
3. Dick Williams
4. Duane Brown
5. Dave Satwicz
6. Jorge Castro

At the February meeting, we’ll again open the floor to nominations, and then we’ll hold
the election.

One area that gets ignored by many people is a System Level Backup. That is
a backup of the operating system, that can be used to rebuild the system, in the case
of a hard drive failure.

Mondo Archive is a wonderful tool for backing up entire hard drives, or parts of a drive, and
it also includes the ability to make a bootable CDRom or boot/root floppy set that can be used
to quickly rebuild a system after the hard drive has been replaced.
Jim will go through a quick overview of using Mondo, just to give you an idea of its features.

After the meeting, everybody is invited to grab dinner at a local restaurant

Wolf has an impressive list of credits to his name. Some of you may have heard him talking at one of our previous MUG meetings on his work at Mozilla (He’s the father of XUL).
Wolf has a new job at Troll Tech as Evangelist for Qt and Ambassador to the Open Source Community.

Wolf, in his usual style, will be both informative and entertaining, as he shows us what’s new with the Qt toolkit.

Even if you aren’t interested in Qt, you should be at this meeting to hear what Wolf has to say.

After the main presentation, we need to open the floor for nominations to the MUG Board of Directors. If you are interested in being on the MUG Board, or know somebody who is, this will be your chance to nominate yourself or someone else to the board. Elections will be at the February 8th meeting.

After the nominations, we’ll open the meeting up to an information Q&A time, where people can bring up questions, and hopefully, someone will be on hand to help with the answers.

After the meeting, everybody is invited to grab dinner at a local restaurant

!OpenPGP is a non-proprietary protocol for encrypting email using public key cryptography. It is based on PGP as orginally developed by Phil Zimmermann. The !OpenPGP protocol defines standard formats for encrypted messages, signatures, and certificates for exchanging public keys.

Dr. Robert J. Meier will be showing us the fundamentals of Open-PGP.

After the meeting, everybody is invited to grab dinner at a local restaurant

Matt Benjamin, co-founder of The Linux Box Corporation, has over 10 years of
experience in Information Technology. He is a contributor to a variety of open
source software packages and tools. Matt will talk about distributed Linux file
systems including NFS v4 and AFS on the 2.6 kernel.

MUG board member Ron Colcernian will show us
some tricks he’s developed for doing programming in the Postscript printer language. If you’ve ever written
a program that needs to print more than just plain text, this is very handy information to have.

After the meeting, everybody is invited to grab dinner at a local restaurant

If you send or receive email on the Internet, chances are good that your message goes through at least one sendmail server before reaching its’ recipient.

This month, we have Michael Elliott, system adminstrator for MSEN (A large Internet service provider in the Detroit area).

Michael is prepared to tell us all we ever wanted to know about Sendmail.

If you’ve ever had to deal with sendmail’s configuration file, you’ll respect Michael and his abilities even more.

MUG member Jorge Castro will show us the new features of the just-released !SpamAssassin-3.0. !SpamAssassin is a fantastic tool for eliminating the nuisance of spam from our daily lives. You definately will want to see this presentation.

Last September, John Lodden gave us an excellent overview of IP Telephony.
At that time, he suggested a follow-up presentation on a project called
[[http://www.asterisk.org][Asterisk]]. Asterisk is a complete PBX system that you can run on a Linux machine.

Well, a year has passed, and John is back to tell us all about Asterisk.

If you are interested in running a PBX, complete with voice mail, menu, multi-lines, and VOIP, then you really don’t want to miss this presentation.

Be the first on your block with a PBX in your home :-)

A panel of ‘experts’ will discuss various methods of and strategies for remote
administration of computer systems. Anyone who administers a system is faced
with the task of doing things to it when not in the same room with it. Remote
can mean: down the hall, in the next building, from out of town, at home, on
vacation, … we have all been there. Methods discussed will include a phone
conversation with someone else sitting in front of the computer, to modem dial
up, to VNC, and more.

Please come ready to share your experiences and to ask questions regarding your
current needs

Jeff Lindholm will update the group on Novell’s Linux strategy.
Novell has recently acquired SuSE Linux and Ximian – establishing
themselves as a leading provider of solutions for the corporate Linux
community. His presentation will focus on the direction of Novell’s
full stack solution in the corporate Linux market, and an overview of
the companies point solution offerings – most of which run on Linux.
Novell will soon be releasing SuSE Linux Enterpise Server 9, the first
enterprise distribution of Linux based on the 2.6 kernel.

Jeff Lindholm is a networking and infrastructure product specialist
working for Novell out of Southfield, MI.

MUG Member Erick Tyack will be showing the CUPS printing system. CUPS is a great way to share printers among Linux, Unix and even Windows computers.

We’ll have printers and laptops at the meeting, and we’ll show how the computers can discover what printers are available on the network.

To continue our discussion that we started last month about choosing a development environment, this month we’ll begin talking about developing a simple, useful application. Dave Satwicz will begin the discussion of what the requirements of our little app will be.