Notes from MonadLUG, 9-July-2009, Charlie Farinella and FreeBSD

[Ted Roche]

Seven people made it to the July meeting of the Monadnock Linux User 
Group, MonadLUG, held as usual on the second Thursday of the month at 
the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough. (Note that there will be no August 
meeting.)

Charlie talked about his job and the many uses they have for some legacy 
machines (older PowerPC Macs, Pentium-150 boxes) that could be useful as 
single-task machines running mail server, router, firewall or other 
similar tasks. CentOS or other modern distros are too complex and demand 
too many resources, especially for older machines or VMs within a 
machine. OpenBSD[1] has low resource requirements, a strong reputation 
for security and 'correctness,' ease of use and configuration. He showed 
a couple of virtual machines (VMs) running inside of VirtualBox on his 
ArchLinux ThinkPad. Charlie walked us through a basic installation, 
using an .iso of OpenBSD that appears as a CD to a new VM. He talked 
about network configuration, package management, ports, pf 
configuration, runlevels, service configuration and more. There were 
slides; I'll post a URL if Charlie's willing to send them along. OpenBSD 
looks like an ideal, minimal OS for a dedicated-function machine.

Finishing a little early, Charlie talked about his company's move to 
Zimbra [2] and the kinds of collaboration they plan to do with it. 
Audience participation about other competing packages like eGroupware 
[3] and LifeRay [4] was quite interesting. A replacement for Exchange 
and/or Sharepoint is needed in a lot of companies, and this seems to be 
a popular FAQ.

Note there is no August meeting, as MonadLUG takes a summer break.

September 10th will have the MonadLUG host a presentation by Patrick 
Galbraith. Pat blew us away with his first presentation on MySQL. This 
is a not-to-be-missed meeting for anyone using MySQL.

Thanks to Charlie for the great presentation and to Ken and SAU for the 
fine facilities.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/
[2] http://www.zimbra.com/community/downloads.html
[3] http://www.egroupware.org/
[4] http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/home

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche&  Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com