LXNY General Meeting:

Tuesday 3 April 2001

Vagn Scott
on
state, time, client-sysadmin systems,
and disaster recovery of whole lans

LXNY will have a general meeting Tuesday 3 April 2001.

This meeting is free and open to the public.

In particular, all members of the Linux Society, FBUNY, NYLUG, LUNY!, AnyNIX, the Brooklyn Bunch, the Upstate Alliance, and all other Free Software Groups are welcome!

The meeting starts at 6:30 pm and runs until 9:00 pm.
Enter the IBM building, 590 Madison Avenue, on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue and ask at the front desk for the room number.

At exactly 9:00 pm many members will repair to our traditional place of refreshment.

Both source secret and free software local area networks today suffer from a general failure to grasp that the LAN is but a single device meant to provide a well defined traditional bundle of services, at a decent level of ease and reliability. Instead lans are thought of as ad hoc collections of hardware and software. Often the very specifications of the lan are treated as being too insignificant to even record. Naturally in such circumstance, costs are high, performance uncertain, and client satisfaction low, except for those few clients willing to pay the going price for very good custom systems administration.

Free software is transforming every sector of the computer industry and in most cases, a big part of the change is a move to a more open and hence more competitive market. The free software forces now stand before every gate of the huge walled empire called "The Desktop". Our agents have already seized some of the internal lines of communication of The Desktop, such as some mail systems, print and file daemon systems, etc., but the final battle has not yet been joined. One of the several secret weapons of our side, now being developed in plain view, of course, is the single device lan. The single device lan still needs several standardized parts, which remain to be placed in mass production. The way-back program is one such critical part. Sometimes called a "disaster recovery system", the uses of such a flexible instrument of state recording, preservation, and impressment extend beyond insurance against the day of gross hardware/software failure.

Vagn Scott will speak, in general, about his approach to systems administration, and, in particular, about his latest disaster recovery tool, which uses one or more CD(s) as the medium of state preservation. On defined hardware, this tool makes possible three stroke installs of whole working free *n*x systems.