Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society
CACTUS Newsletter

Contents:

• Editor's Note
• November Meeting Report
• January Meeting Program - The HP Document Router
• CACTUS System News
• Membership
• CACTUS Officers and Contacts
• CACTUS Sponsors
• Meeting Location and Map

I'd like to thank all the CACTUS officers for their contributions to the newsletter, especially Mike Rice who has (usually) contributed a "Letter From the President" with comments on everything from the state of CACTUS to the flavors of pizza at meetings. Ron Roberts, our scribe, has also been consistent in providing meeting notes laced with good cheer and good vibes (and preformatted in HTML).

Some of you may have noticed that there was no December newsletter. I had one fully prepared, and in early December, one of our neighbor's cats got into my office and came for our parrot, Sophie, who jumped off of her stand and onto my desk, running across it toward the safety of my shoulder. In the process, she ran over my keyboard, stepping on the r and m keys. I put my hand out to pick her up, and in my hurry banged the space bar a few times. About that time the cat hit the desktop with both front feet on the keyboard, simultaneously pressing the 8 key and the shift key, at which point I stood up rather quickly to protect the poor bird, who was terrified, and dropped my glasses, which landed with a bang on the Enter key. Before I could recompose the newsletter I was kidnapped by elves and taken away to work for slave wages in a toy maker's sweatshop at the North Pole and didn't get back home until after the 1st of the month. Oh well....    At least I have an excuse.

No program for November, and no word from program chair, Ray Schafer. Plenty of pizza, soda, and business. President Michael Rice, of Immortal Komat fame, opened the meeting with a presidential message: "The pizza's here!"

The Network Appliance box was moved from Mike's trunk into his machine room at home, and back into his trunk. We then discussed the disposition of the old Sparc 2. We may yet perform a forensic security post-mortem on it. Goodwill has a museum. Michael asked for volunteers to help mentor the Austin Community College (ACC) System Administration Guild (SAGE) group that is now forming.

Membership chair, and PO Box key holder, Luis Basto announced that he had paid the lease on our post office box so we won't be homeless this year. He also distributed the junk mail to various members. Some clueless credit card company is offering our scribe a $100,000 credit line on behalf of the Capital Area University TUS.

When the discussion turned to CACTUS history, which Lindsay is trying to get Luis to write, someone mentioned the O'Reilly book sales and Tom Painter. Treasurer Johnny Long mentioned that he had last heard from Tom asking for reimbursement of $300 that CACTUS owed him from the last book sale. When Johnny asked for receipts, Tom demurred, probably because they're long since history. Motion was immediately made and passed by the officers and general members to send Tom a check for $300. We're hoping that he might spearhead another book sale.

Concerning sponsors, Lindsay and several other members suggested that UT ARL deserves to be moved from "Friends of CACTUS" to "Significant Contributing Sponsors" because they provide our meeting location. Webmaster at large, MH Khan will make it so on the WEB.

MH suggested that we try again to rekindle the notion of a technical library. Perhaps choose a public library and donate CACTUS's library to it. No one is sure who has the current library. Several members had ideas for donations of CDROM collections and older hard copy. Gil immediately offered several copies of surplus Cisco documentation, which he distributed. Finally, MH mentioned an open meeting that CACTUS and CTLUG members have been invited to attend.

We reminded everybody that the December 21st meeting date for CACTUS is cancelled. Next meeting is January 18th--officer elections. We cajoled and threatened each other to try to get nominees. Before dispersing to the winds, we even got a [tentative] volunteer for a January presentation: the HP [Dazel] Output Manager.

For more information on the presentor, see http://www.dazel.com/.

JumpNet, one of our Significant Contributing Sponsors, hosting our Sparc 10, announced on January 11 that it has been acquired by Allegiance Telecom, Inc. of Dallas.

"We look forward to expanding Jump.Net with Allegiance's extensive resources and capabilities," said Kenneth Smith, co-founder of Jump.Net who becomes an Allegiance Telecom vice president. "This relationship has tremendous positive implications and mutual benefits for the growth and product diversity of both companies."

Based in Dallas, Allegiance Telecom (www.allegiancetele.com) is a facilities-based competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) that offers businesses a complete package of telecommunications services, including local, long distance, international calling, high-speed data transmission and Internet services. Allegiance is currently operational in 27 U.S. markets -- including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fort Worth, Houston, Long Island, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York, Northern New Jersey, Oakland, Orange County, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Tampa and Washington D.C. -- and is targeting a total of 36 major metropolitan areas (including Austin) with its "one-stop shopping" approach. Allegiance's common stock is traded on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol ALGX.

For more information on this merger, see http://www.jump.net/news.html#Jan112001.

Jack McKinney, our resident Security Specialist notes that SSL services are now available for POP3 and IMAP users. They are running on the standard SSL ports for these services. The certificate is a self-signed locally generated one (beware MITM attacks!). If you want a copy of the certificate to verify it on your end, it is in linux.cactus.org:/etc/stunnel.pem

• Our listserver mailing lists are hosted on lists.cactus.org. You can subscribe to the following lists by sending a blank email to...
  • cactus-news-subscribe [at] lists <dot> cactus <dot> org - The newsletter list. You're already subscribed if you're getting this newsletter.

  • jobs-subscribe [at] lists <dot> cactus <dot> org - job postings from recruiters and others needing professional Unix help. Subscribe if you are looking for a position. Post to this list of you have a position to offer.

  • members-subscribe [at] lists <dot> cactus <dot> org - a seldom-used chat list for CACTUS members to communicate publicly with one another.

If you need any utilities or services on either the Linux box or the SPARC 10 which are not already installed, please contact the system administrators at admin [at] cactus <dot> org and one of them will be glad to install the requested software for you. For utilities which might be of use to more than one member, this is much better than having everyone compile their own local versions - for obvious reasons.

A rush of year end renewals helped to brighten up the CACTUS spirit as well as the treasury. We wish to thank David Huang, M.H. Khan, Darrel Long, David Wieboldt, Michael Shaw, Michael Rice, Vijay Joglekar, and Thomas Bodine, for renewing their membership.

This is somewhat new and unique to CACTUS. Jump.Net is one of the two ISPs graciously offering co-location services for the CACTUS machines. We get a monthly bill from Jump.Net. They initially deposited some virtual(?) dollars into our account and deduct a monthly charge. Our current balance is ($489.19), which will last us till January 2001.

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

• President: Michael Rice (mrice [at] colltech <dot> com)
• Treasurer: Johnny Long (longjy [at] thecb <dot> texas <dot> gov)
• Membership: Luis Basto (membership [at] cactus <dot> org)
• Programs: Ray Schafer (schafer [at] tkg <dot> com)
• Publicity: Darrell Long (dlong [at] cactus <dot> org)
• Newsletter: Lindsay Haisley (fmouse [at] fmp <dot> com)
• Scribe: Ron Roberts (ronro [at] bga <dot> com)
• Members at Large:
• -- Jack McKinney (mckinney [at] cactus <dot> org)
• -- Gil Kloepfer (mckinney [at] cactus <dot> org)
• -- M.H. Khan (mhk [at] cactus <dot> org)

Contact Information

• officers [at] cactus <dot> org Comments to CACTUS officers comments
• admin [at] cactus <dot> org CACTUS sysadmin volunteers
• membership [at] cactus <dot> org Membership questions and suggestions
• newsletter [at] cactus <dot> org Newsletter submissions and comments

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)

                                                  | |     ^
        <---- to MOPAC                            | |     |
                                                  | |     | North
                                                  | |     | to Braker Lane
                                   ---------------+ |
                                   -+ /-----------+ |
                                    | |           | |
                                    | +--------+  | |
                                    |  Parking |  | |
                                    |    Lot   |  | |
                                    +----------+  | |
                                                  | |
                           +------------+         | |
                           |            | +-------+ |
                           |            | |   +---+ |
                           |            | |   |   | | Rutland
                           |    ARL     | |   |   | +---------
                           |            | |   |   | +---------
                           |            | |   +---+ |
                           |            | +---+---+ |
                           +------------+         | |  |
                                                  | |  | South
                                                  | |  | to US 183
                                                  | |  v