Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society
CACTUS Newsletter

Volume 20, Number 7 - Juy 2004

Contents:

• June Meeting Program
• Letter from the President
• CACTUS System News
• CACTUS Officers
• CACTUS Sponsors
• Directions to Meeting Location

The CACTUS Newsletter is a monthly publication, distributed to our members and other interested people. Visit the CACTUS Newsletter on the web at http://www.cactus.org/CACTUS/Newsletter/. There you will find archives of back issues, as well as instructions on how to subscribe to the email distribution.

July Meeting Program

The next CACTUS meeting will be held on Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 7:00pm (doors open 6:30pm for pizza and informal discussion), in the auditorium of UT Applied Research Laboratories. (See end of newsletter for directions to the facility).

Randy Zagar is going to complete his presentation on Customizing Solaris Jumpstart. Rich MacKinnon (of the Austin Wireless City Project) is also scheduled to present at our August meeting.

From the Editor

by Ray Solanik

the newsletter should be on schedule and a little longer in August, Lindsay's assistance and meeting notification email is really appriciated this month.

Once again, I'd like to thank BestRegistrar of Louisville, KY for their sponsorship gift of a registration for our cactus.org domain name. BestRegistrar has been doing this for us for a number of years now, and they're listed among our sponsors, but a reminder of how and why we continue our relationship with these folks is appropriate.

Back in the Bad Old Days of the late 90's our choice of domain name registrars was pretty simple. There was NSI, and, well, then again there was NSI. Registrations were slow, service was terrible, business practices were squirrelly and registrations were expensive. With the advent of ICANN, the DN registration business was opened up to competition and one of the first companies to get involved was a small company in Kentucky called Computer Analytical Systems. I came across these folks pretty much by accident when I was looking for alternatives to NSI. Their prices were reasonable, and above and beyond that, they were extremely pleasant, quick and helpful with any domain name registration problems I might have. After struggling with NSI for so long, the difference was like night and day. I eventually transferred almost all of my domain name registrations to them, and have never looked back.

Computer Analytical Systems adopted the name BestRegistrar for their name registration business, and have been in the business longer than just about anyone except for NSI and a few other early-birds. They're CORE SRS (Shared Registration System) participants and continue to offer exceptional service to their DN registration customers. You'll find them on the 'net at http://www.bestregistrar.com. If you run a business, they'll be happy to set up an account for you. If you want to talk to them, you can call them at (800) 977-3475. Talk to Steve Locke, who's their Main Man for DN registrations. Tell 'em CACTUS sent ya :-)

Membership

CACTUS Membership

To renew your membership, please send check or money order payable to CACTUS ($30/yr for regular membership and $100/yr for corporate sponsorship):

CACTUS
PO BOX 9786
Austin, TX 78766-9786

You can also pay in person at the general meetings. Please direct any inquiries or address changes to membership [at] cactus <dot> org. -->

Periodically, the /home filesystem on linux.cactus.org runs nearly out of space. We usually get the problem cleaned up fairly quickly, however sometimes members need a reminder when their use of the very limited drive space on the box becomes excessive. No one wants to introduce hard quotas, so instead I've instituted the CACTUS County Fair, with a featured Drive Hog competition. When you log on the the box, the motd will give you the daily winners among the Drive Hogs. A fair allocation of drive space, considering the current size of our membership and the size of our drives, is about 250 megs. If your usage of drive space in your home directory exceeds this you may very well be a prize-winning Drive Hog and you'll see you name in the motd when you log on. If so, please reduce your use of drive space below 250 megs and you'll be dropped from the winners' circle.

If you're a CACTUS member, you can now reach the CACTUS officers by emailing officers (at) lists.cactus.org. This is a new list, hosted on our mailman listserver, to which all CACTUS members have posting privileges. Each member's permitted posting address is the first preference email address in our membership database, so if you try to email the officers and your email is rejected, go to , log in with your username and password for the box and make sure your first listed email address is the one from which you're trying to post. If it's not, update it and notify cactus_sysadmins (at) cactus.org so that one of us can turn the crank and make sure you have permission to post. If you don't mind waiting a bit, the nightly cron job will do this for us during the wee hours every night.

CACTUS Officers

CACTUS Sponsors

Significant Contributing Sponsors

Applied Research Laboratories/University of Texas at Austin (http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/)

(Gil Kloepfer, Computer Science Division (CSD), 835-3771, gil [at] arlut <dot> utexas <dot> edu)

CoreNAP, L.P. (http://www.corenap.com/)

(Kenneth Smith, (512) 685-0010, kenneth [at] corenap <dot> com)
"Providing Austin and central Texas businesses and power users the best choice for server colocation and high speed Internet access."

OnRamp (http://www.onr.com/)

Internet service provider.

Outserv.net (http://www.outserv.net/)

IT operations and management solutions to small and midsized businesses.

CACTUS Sponsors

Dresser Industries - Wayne Division (http://www.wayne.com/)

(Steve Cox, steve <dot> cox [at] dresser <dot> com, (512) 338-8444)
A leading supplier of integrated retail solutions to the global petroleum and convenience store industries, including point-of-sale systems, fuel dispensers, and after-sale support services.

Journyx (http://www.journyx.com/)

Provider of workforce management software and services.

Prog Corp.

(David Mallis, prog [at] cactus <dot> org, (512) 451-7191)
Develops educational materials used for in-service training, classroom teaching, and independent study. They also provides consulting services for instructional program design, development, and implementation.

VoIPing, LLC (http://www.voiping.com/)

(info [at] voiping <dot> com, (512) 698-8647 or (512) 698-8031)

A Central Texas privately owned and operated partnership specializing in IT Consulting and Services.

Friends of CACTUS

Applied Formal Methods, Inc.

(Susan Gerhart, 794-9732, gerhart [at] cactus <dot> org)

Auspex Systems (http://www.auspex.com/)

Fastest reliable network fileservers.

Austin Code Works

(Scott Guthery, 258-0785, info [at] acw <dot> com)

BestRegistrar.com (http://www.bestregistrar.com/)

(Steve Locke, (800) 977-3475), swl [at] cas-com <dot> 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 (http://www.hp.com/)

(Bill Sumrall, 338-7221)

Hounix (http://www.texascomputers.com/hounix/)

(Marilyn Harper)
Houston's Unix Users Group.

Network Appliance Corporation (http://www.netapp.com/)

(Frank Mozina, fmozina [at] netapp <dot> com)

O'Keefe Search (http://www.okeefesearch.com/)

(John O'Keefe, john [at] okeefesearch <dot> com, 512-658-9224 or 888-446-2137)
Professional recuiting.

Rocksteady Networks, Inc. (http://www.rocksteady.com)

(Eric White, 512-427-1319, ewhite [at] rocksteady <dot> com)
Dynamic bandwidth management and security enforcement.

Sailaway System Design

(Chris J Johnson, 447-5243)

Schlumberger (http://www.slb.com/)

(Kathy O'Brien, obrien [at] asc <dot> slb <dot> com)
Technical services and products in over 100 countries.

Silicon Graphics (http://www.sgi.com/)

(Don Williams, 346-9342)

Solid Systems

(Pete Farrell, 442-2222)

Starflight Corp. (http://www.the-spa.com/jon.roland/)

(Jon Roland, jon <dot> roland [at] the-spa <dot> com)
Computer consulting, management solutions, documentation, and technical writing.

Sterling Infomation Group (http://www.sterinfo.com/)

(Darrell Hanshaw, 344-1005, dhanshaw [at] sterinfo <dot> com)

Sun Microsystems (http://www.sun.com/)

(Rick Taylor)
Supplier of Unix client-server computing solutions.

Texas Internet Consulting (http://www.tic.com/)

(Smoot Carl-Mitchell, 451-6176, smoot [at] tic <dot> 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, cerda [at] uts <dot> cc <dot> utexas <dot> edu)

Directions to Meeting Location

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:

• J.J. Pickle Research Campus: http://www.utexas.edu/maps/prc/
• South East Quadrant (ARL:UT): http://www.utexas.edu/maps/prc/areas/se.html

As always, please leave the facility as you saw it when you arrived.