April 2003 CACTUS Newsletter
CACTUS Newsletter
http://www.cactus.org/CACTUS/cn042003.html)
Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society
CACTUS Newsletter
Volume 19, Number 4 - April 2003
Contents:
* April Meeting: (Topic To Be Announced)
* Letter From the President
* March Meeting Report
* Announcement: Open Source Across Texas
* April CACTUS System News
* Membership Report
* CACTUS Officers and Contacts
* CACTUS Sponsors
* Meeting Location and Map
_________________________________________________________________
April Meeting
The April CACTUS meeting will be held at 7:00pm (6:30pm for pizza and
lively discussion) on Thursday, April 17, 2003 in the auditorium of UT
Applied Research Laboratories (see below for directions to the
facility).
The meeting topic and speaker was not finialized by newsletter
publication time. The meeting's topic will likely include another
installment in the operating system installation tutorial series.
_________________________________________________________________
Letter From the President
by Lindsay Haisley
I'd like to encourage everyone to help us come up with CACTUS events
for the coming year. Ray Schafer is once again our programs
chairperson, and as always, the job is one of the most challenging and
important since our membership numbers depend on offering interesting
and well-publicised programs at our monthly meetings. So far we've
been doing well, and have revived the old CACTUS tradition of having
short software tutorials prior to our main presentation. Turnout at
our last meeting was good, and I'm hopeful that it will continue to
increase.
As I've said before, I'd also like to see CACTUS become more involved
in the activities of the Austin technical community. Along this line,
I'd like some input from our membership. Please email me
(pres...@cactus.org) with information on events such as technical
shows, "dog and pony" shows or any other event at which it might be
possible for CACTUS to set up a booth, either on our own or in
cooperation with other groups in town such as the Linux users groups
(ALUG and CTLUG). In particular, the names of organizers and others
whom we might contact in this regard will be most helpful.
BTW, over the years, our pres...@cactus.org address has made its way
onto the spam-list circuit. When I was elected to the office, I set
this alias to redirect email to me at my home email address
(fmo...@fmp.com) using a private address that bypassed my spam
filters, however due to the volume of spam I was getting through the
alias, I've relented. If you send email to pres...@cactus.org you'll
receive a confirmation request before your email will be delivered to
me. A simple reply to the confirmation request (content is irrelevant -
the magic is in the reply address) will cause your original email to
be delivered to me and will "whitelist" your address so you'll be able
to send email to me in the future without having to confirm it.
_________________________________________________________________
March Meeting Report
by Ron Roberts
The parking lot was almost full, but attendance was only about twenty
despite the timely arrival of the newsletter advertising an excellent
program. The meeting coincided with the start of the latest Iraqi war,
and at least two of the leadership were attending a peace rally
earlier in the day. Our illustrious president, Lindsay Haisley, warned
us that he might not be on time, but his cell phone skills ensured
that the pizza was on time. Are we in Kirkut yet?
There may have been officers reports, but the reporting officer didn't
hear them. They've been the same for some months. Luis Basto spoke
about an interesting offer from NT Computers (phone 250-0001, location
indeterminate). They are offering a $99 complete "all-in-one" Portable
Computer. Dimensions are 12"x12"x2" weighing in at 6 pounds. It runs
Linux.
Next, Gil Kloepfer lead a discussion about Hosting.Com user migration.
Years ago JumpNet, bought Zilker.Net, which sold out to Hosting.Com.
Hosting has been sending DSL users cancellation notices lately. A show
of hands, indicated that four of the membership present still used
Hosting. Gil recommends that if you want to keep DSL, go with SBC.
Static IP users with a routed subnet can use their old equipment, but
must work out some special provisioning (the magic word when dealing
with SBC support is, "tier two support." This apparently will get you
connected to someone who can spell TCP/IP). Static address blocks with
the SBC equipment works in a "bridged mode" that traditional routers
find difficult to deal with.
The discussion with the membership rambled on about how DHCP users can
just use Time Warner Road Runner. Gil doesn't like Time Warner
particularly, since they do not allow servers to be run on their
service (and block some ports to guarantee that). Another member
mentioned that they throttle the pipe and it could be faster. Yet
another member pointed out that Time Warner no longer requires you to
have cable TV service in order to get Road Runner. SBC service is
[probably] much better if you have a business phone. Metered business
phone costs only two dollars a month, plus usage. SBC requires that
you have a phone number that they can associate with the DSL line.
Another tip: don't tell the service people that you use anything but
MS Windows.
Gil concluded by admitting that SBC knows networks. He contrasted this
with the Hosting.Com web site, where if you click on "Cancel
Contract," you get a 404 error. Scott Davis is the head of Time Warner
Support in Austin. He's also on the Central Texas Linux User's Group
(CTLUG) mailing list. He's quoted as saying, "We know people run
servers." They don't bother as long as the bandwidth isn't
significantly affected.
This went on for some time, so our featured presentation was allocated
only an hour. Long time members Lenny Tropiano and Brian Sinclair had
thirty nine slides and a demo about Voice over IP. Lenny did the
premier ISDN presentation about fifteen years ago for us. IP telephony
is packet switched connections for voice and FAX.
All of the slides are on their web site (see www.voiping.com/cactus).
Lenny got our attention by promising a door prize to whoever answered
the trivia question. He described the standards organizations involved
in the enterprise: ITU and IETF produce such documents as H.323 and
H.248 (see web page for details). Cisco has an offering called Skinny.
The basic reason for voice over IP is cost reduction. There are also
add-on packages available, such as PBX software. Lenny went into the
technical details about how it is done. He asked a question about the
algorithm used by the CODEC for digitizing voice. This went over
everybody's head. Multimedia uses UDP, which has inherit problem with
packet loss--lost packets are not retransmitted. In development, a
problem was identified during periods of silence. Listeners were
discomforted by the dead air. So they invented "comfort noise
generation" (CNG), which is essential white noise you hear on a land
line connection. This is done on the receiving end, in order not to
waste bandwidth.
One of the more interesting utility applications was Voice Over
Misconfigured Internet Telephony (VOMIT), which enables eavesdropping.
The more powerful application is a full function open source(tm) PBX
available at: http://www.asteriskpbx.com/).
Lenny mentioned that a commercial implementation of VOIP is available
from vonage.com for about forty dollars per month.
He awarded the door prize to the member who answered his second trivia
question--a caller ID callout. Then Lenny and Brian performed a highly
scripted demonstration of the open source PBX, Asterisk. Finally,
though we were running late, they offered the membership to step up to
one of the phones they had brought to make a long distance call.
They did ask that we didn't call Iraq. Just as well, since no one knew
the national and area code for Tikrit. Some time during this, our
president, Lindsay Haisley showed up. This quashed the earlier rumor
that he'd been arrested during the anti-war demonstration. (This
geography lesson is brought to you by the letter W.)
_________________________________________________________________
Announcement: Open Source Across Texas
The following announcement has been forwarded to the CACTUS Newsletter
by Chip Rosenthal (ch...@unicom.com): (for the full announcement,
please see http://www.effaustin.org/event_041503.html)
Open Source across Texas: Helping the Taxpayer in Troubled Times
From the analysis of Senate Bill 1579, assigned to the State Affairs
Committee: Currently, most state agencies rely on proprietary
software, which incurs a considerable cost through licensing fees and
maintenance. Copyright laws on the software restrict its use and
modification, preventing agencies from adapting the software to their
needs. As proposed, S.B. 1579 allows state agencies to choose software
products on a "value-for-money" basis, rather than being limited to
traditional products on the market.
Tuesday, April 15, 7:00 p.m. ACTLab, The University of Texas at Austin
CMB, 4th floor http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/cmb.html
Speaker: Dr. Peter H. Salus Former Executive Director of the USENIX
Association, Sun User Group, and the Free Software Foundation, author
of Casting the Net (Addison-Wesley UNIX and Open Systems Series) and
managing editor of Computing Systems (MIT Press). Editor-in-chief of
the Handbook of Programming Languages (MTP Press).
*** LATE ADDITION!! Mr. Paul Reyes, Legislative Aid to Senator
*** John J. Carona, will be joining us to discuss why Sen. Carona
*** introduced SB 1579.
Sponsored By: EFF-Austin Quarterman Creations ACTLab at the University
of Texas, Austin (Part of the ACTLab International Lecture and
Performance Series)
Email: in...@effaustin.org
Subscribe to EFF-Austin's email list for tracking SB1579: send a blank
email to sb1579-s...@effaustin.org
_________________________________________________________________
April CACTUS System News
by Lindsay Haisley
A couple of issues have cropped up during the past month on both our
Linux box and our Sparc 10 which deserve some mention, and also some
attention from our membership.
On April 3, Luis Basto reported to the system administrators that the
"disk is 100% full" on our Linux box, and he deleted material in /tmp.
I checked in on the box and found that the /home filesystem, which is
a separate partition, was nearly full. Gil ran usage stats on the
drive, and it seems that the #1 disk-hog was one of our officers (who
shall here remain nameless :-) with a drive usage of close to 1.3
gigs. The #2 disk-hog is an expired member, using over 800 megs of
space, more than twice the amount of space used by any one other than
the aforementioned officer. A note to disk-hog #1 resulted in quick
action, and our /home filesystem is currently at 68% of capacity.
A brief review of our filesystem layout is in order here for everyone
who uses the Linux box.
# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use % Mounted on
/dev/sda1 295474 35656 244558 13% /
/dev/md0 1018232 800931 164693 83% /usr
/dev/md1 1018232 217157 748467 23% /var
/dev/md2 1018232 91656 873968 10% /usr/local
/dev/md3 5011977 3213719 1538815 68% /home
One important thing to note here is that although our hard drives were
state-of-the-art when the system was assembled in the '90s, they've
become small by today's standards. Everyone's home directory is on the
/dev/md3 RAID1 partition, which is mounted on /home. The total size of
this partition is 5 gigabytes. We have around 90 member home
directories here. This works out to a about 55 megs per user. Of
course some of these 90 user accounts belong to lapsed CACTUS members,
and there are plenty of members who only use the system for email
redirection and whose usage is minimal, so strict apportionment and
quotas on drive space aren't essential, but due diligence is certainly
appropriate. We currently have a dozen accounts on the system
(including that of yours truly) which are over 55 megs. As long as the
total usage of our /home system is under 75% of the total drive
capacity we're in good shape as far as I'm concerned, but please do
run df from time to time, and du on your home directory to help keep
us from hitting the ceiling. In particular, please don't use
linux.cactus.org for storage of large files such as ISO images of CDs
or large numbers of sound or image files just because you don't have
space for them on your home or office system. Invest in a new hard
drive! You can buy close to 100 gigs of hard drive for a little over
$100 these days. the CACTUS home directory fileystem is on more
expensive SCSI drives, and mirrored across two of them, so we've
exchanged economy for reliability. You might consider the CACTUS
system as a suitable repository for smaller, more valuable data files
rather than larger expendable files.
On another front, Michael Shaw emailed us on March 30 noting that our
Sparc 10 was down. Ray Solanik went over to OnRamp and discovered that
OnRamp has moved, and they brought the Sparc with them to their new
location on Montopolis (next to Time Warner) but hadn't started it up
again. He brought the box back up with no problems, with the generous
help of Don West at OnRamp. Ray notes that their new location is much
bigger. A lot of people have noted with regret the demise of
tech-friendly hosting in Austin. OnRamp is holding the fort here.
They're a sponsor with a great facility and service, and we should
send them business when we have the opportunity to do so.
_________________________________________________________________
March CACTUS Membership Report
by Luis Basto
We wish to thank the following individuals for renewing their
membership -- William Dodd and Michael Shaw.
We received an interesting mail this month - sent from the U. S.
Bankruptcy Court in Arizona and addressed to CACTUS COLL. The P. O.
Box was correct but CACTUS COLL must mean something else. Since two of
these notices were sent and I'm returning one anyway, I opened the
other to see what's up.
It turned out to be an individual in Arizona filing for Chapter 7
bankruptcy and the Bankruptcy Court is notifying all creditors. CACTUS
COLL must be one such creditor. I checked our membership database and
cannot find that individual. Darn! We might have gotten a windfall.
Membership
To renew your membership, please send check or money order payable to
CACTUS ($25/yr for regular membership and $96/yr for corporate
sponsorship):
CACTUS
PO BOX 9786
AUSTIN, TX 78766-9786
You may also pay in person at the general meetings. Please direct any
inquiries or address changes to membe...@cactus.org.
_________________________________________________________________
CACTUS Officers
* President: Lindsay Haisley
* Treasurer: Johny Long
* Membership: Luis Basto
* Programs: Ray Schafer
* Publicity: M. H. Kahn
* Newsletter: Gil Kloepfer
* Scribe: Ron Roberts
* Members at Large: M. H. Kahn, Randy Zagar, Michael Rice
_________________________________________________________________
CACTUS Sponsors
Significant Contributing Sponsors
Applied Research Laboratories/University of Texas at Austin
www.arlut.utexas.edu
(Gil Kloepfer, Computer Science Division (CSD), 835-3771,
g...@arlut.utexas.edu)
OnRamp www.onr.com
Internet service provider.
Outserv.net www.outserv.net
IT operations and management solutions to small and midsized
businesses.
CACTUS Sponsors
Journyx http://www.journyx.com
Provider of workforce management software and services
Auspex Systems www.auspex.com
Fastest reliable network fileservers.
Covad/Laserlink www.laserlink.net
(Chip Rosenthal)
Multi Media Arts (MMA)
(Lee Williams, 451-7191)
Publisher of instructional materials for classroom and
independent study.
VoIPing, LLC http://www.voiping.com
A Central Texas privately owned and operated partnership
specializing in IT Consulting and Services. (Email
in...@voiping.com. Phone 512-698-VOIP (8647) or 512-698-8031)
Friends of CACTUS
Applied Formal Methods, Inc.
(Susan Gerhart, 794-9732, ger...@cactus.org)
Austin Code Works
(Scott Guthery, 258-0785, in...@acw.com)
BestRegistrar.com. www.bestregistrar.com
(Steve Locke, (800) 977-3475), s...@cas-com.net)
A top-level domain name registrar, CORE member.
CTG
(Maurine Mecer, 502-0190 [FAX 502-0287])
Professional recruiting.
EDP Contract Services
(Mark Grabenhorst, 346-1040) Professional recruiting.
Hewlett Packard www.hp.com
(Bill Sumrall, 338-7221)
Hounix http://www.texascomputers.com/hounix/
(Marilyn Harper)
Houston's Unix Users Group.
Network Appliance Corporation www.netapp.com
(Frank Mozina, fmo...@netapp.com)
O'Keefe Search www.okeefesearch.com
Professional recuiting. (John OKeefe, jo...@okeefesearch.com,
512-658-9224 or 888-446-2137)
Sailaway System Design
(Chris J Johnson, 447-5243)
Schlumberger www.slb.com
(Kathy O'Brien, obr...@asc.slb.com)
Technical services and products in over 100 countries.
Silicon Graphics www.sgi.com
(Don Williams, 346-9342)
Solid Systems
(Pete Farrell, 442-2222)
Sterling Infomation Group www.sterinfo.com
(Darrell Hanshaw, 344-1005, dhan...@sterinfo.com)
Sun Microsystems www.sun.com
(Rick Taylor)
Supplier of Unix client-server computing solutions.
Texas Internet Consulting www.tic.com
(Smoot Carl-Mitchell, 451-6176, sm...@tic.com)
TCP/IP networking, Unix, and open systems standards.
Technow
A Sun Authorized Training Center and a Hardware Reseller.
Unison Software
(Shelley St. John, 478-0611)
Supplier of networked systems management solutions.
UT Computer Science Department
(Patti Spencer)
UT Computation Center
(Mike Cerda, 471-3241, ce...@uts.cc.utexas.edu)
_________________________________________________________________
CACTUS Meeting Location:
Applied Research Labs
CACTUS meets on the third Thursday of each month at the Applied
Research Labs (ARL) in the JJ Pickle Research Campus (JJ PRC). We'll
meet in the main auditorium located directly behind the guard's desk
and main lobby.
Please do not show up earlier than 6:20 pm on the specified day. Enter
through the main entrance at 10000 Burnet Road for ARL:UT. Tell the
guard that you are here for the CACTUS meeting. You will be required
to sign a log book, but not required to wear a badge. The guards will
direct you to the auditorium entrance. Limited parking in the front of
the building is available, but more extensive parking is available in
the large parking lot just north of the ARL building. After 6:30 pm,
all entrances to JJ PRC, except for the Burnet Road entrance, are
closed and locked. You can still enter the parking lot in front of the
ARL building. No parking tags are necessary after 6:00 pm. See map for
further details.
Online maps are available at:
* http://www.utexas.edu/maps/prc/ -- J.J. Pickle Research Campus
* http://www.utexas.edu/maps/prc/areas/se.html -- South East
Quadrant (ARL:UT)
As always, please leave the facility as you saw it when you arrived.