Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society
CACTUS Newsletter

Volume 22, Number 3 - March 2006

Next Meeting
Open Government Online Amendment Jordan Hatcher Thursday, March 16, 7:00 PM

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 e-mail distribution. We welcome newsletter submissions by our members. Please contact newsletter [at] cactus <dot> org for more information.

March Meeting Program

We actually have two programs this month:

EFF-Austin: Open Source Government?

This May, you will have an interesting opportunity to vote for Open Source principles in our Austin City Government. The Open Government Online (OGO) Amendment will open up the City of Austin to the people of Austin by opening up more information to the public and by requiring the most important of that information to be available online.

City politics are not immune to the kind of insider lobbying that has recently plagued federal officials, and current rules allow the City to hide much of the political process behind closed doors. Essentially what this amendment does is to apply the lessons and ideas of open source to government.

Jordan Hatcher, Policy Coordinator for the OGO campaign (and EFF-Austin Boardmember), will be on hand to discuss the amendment.
Remote Backups with iSCSI

Most of us are familiar with SCSI, it's just a type of communications bus for high-performance disk drives. A few might recall that the ATAPI disk standard, which many CD-ROM drives use, is nothing more than the SCSI protocol over an IDE bus.

Marketing dweebs ^H^H^H^H^H^H professionals have taught us that anything with a lower-case "i" in front has something to do with the Internet, and iSCSI is no different; iSCSI is the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP.

Using iSCSI, you can define a virtual hard disk on one system and have it appear as a "local" SCSI disk on a remote system. Normally, iSCSI is meant to be implemented on a local network, and if you're going to do it over the long haul most people would implement IPsec to secure the iSCSI session. What most people don't realize is that iSCSI will also work over an SSH tunnel.

Our own programs chair Randy Zagar will demonstrate iSCSI, how to create a virtual disk on your home PC, mount this disk on a remote server, and make backups directly on the virtual disk.

The next CACTUS meeting will be held on Thursday, March 16, 2006 at 7:00 PM (doors open at 6:30 PM for pizza and informal discussion), in the auditorium of UT Applied Research Laboratories. (See end of newsletter for directions to the facility).

February Meeting Report

by Lindsay Haisley

No meeting report was made available at newsletter publication time

Upcoming Events

by Randy Zagar

Solaris 10 Boot Camp on March 28

Free Training on Solaris 10: Sun wants more people familiar with Solaris 10, so on March 28th they are offering a free half-day of training on Solaris 10 right here in Austin. Conrad Geiger, Sun's Academic Region HPTC Technologist (Conrad <dot> Geiger [at] Sun <dot> COM), has invited folks to join Sun for an interactive, half-day session to learn about updates in Solaris 10 OS that are helping enterprises and educational institutions reduce costs and complexity, while minimizing business risk.

Seminar registration and attendance is free of charge! Please feel free to forward this invitation to others in Austin that would be interested in attending.

The complete agenda and additional information about the seminar as well as the event registration is available at https://www.suneventreg.com//cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=767.

Membership Report

by Mark Scarborough

CACTUS would like to welcome Larry Rosenman as CACTUS' newest member. Welcome to Austin, Larry! Also, thanks to Thomas Benjamin for renewing his 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.

CACTUS Officers

President:: Ron Roberts (ronr [at] cactus <dot> org)

Treasurer:: Johnny Long (longjy [at] cactus <dot> org)

Programs Chair:: Randy Zagar (jrzagar [at] cactus <dot> org)

Membership:: Mark Scarborough (mscar-cactus [at] cactus <dot> org)

Publicity & Webmaster:: Lenny Tropiano (lenny [at] cactus <dot> org)

Newsletter:: Gil Kloepfer (kloepfer [at] cactus <dot> org)

Scribe:: Lindsay Haisley (fmouse [at] cactus <dot> org)

Members at Large:: Ian Remmler (remmler [at] cactus <dot> org); M.H. Khan (mhk [at] cactus <dot> org)

CACTUS Sponsors

Significant Contributing Sponsors

Applied Research Laboratories/University of Texas at Austin: (Gil Kloepfer, Computer Science Division (CSD), 835-3771, gilc [at] arlut <dot> utexas <dot> edu)

CoreNAP, L.P.: (Kenneth Smith, (512) 685-0010, kenneth [at] corenap <dot> com); Provides server colocation and high-speed Internet access to businesses in the Austin and central Texas area

Newisys, Inc.: (Tim Wood, (512) 340-9050, tim <dot> wood [at] newisys <dot> com); Development of enterprise-class servers

Onramp: (Chad Kissinger, president, 322-9200, info [at] onr <dot> com); Broadband Internet access, web design and colocation

Outserv.net, Inc.: (David Maynard, dpm [at] outserv <dot> net); e-Business Operations Service Provider

Friends of CACTUS

Applied Formal Methods, Inc.: (Susan Gerhart, 794-9732, gerhart [at] cactus <dot> org)

Auspex Systems: (Paul Levine, plevine [at] auspex <dot> com); Fastest reliable network fileservers

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

BestRegistrar.com: ((800) 977-3475, registrar [at] bestregistrar <dot> com); A top-level domain name registrar, CORE member

Covad/Laserlink: (Chip Rosenthal)

CTG: (Maurine Mecer, 502-0190 (FAX 502-0287)); Professional recruiting

Compaq Computer Corporation (now HP): (Ron Boerger, 432-8000); Provider of scalable, high availbility systems

EDP Contract Services: (Mark Grabenhorst, 346-1040); Professional recruiting

Hewlett Packard: (Bill Sumrall, 338-7221)

Hounix: (Marilyn Harper); Houston's Unix Users Group

Network Appliance Corporation: (Frank Mozina, fmozina [at] netapp <dot> com)

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

Rocksteady Networks, Inc.: (Eric White, 512-427-1319, ewhite [at] rocksteady <dot> com)

Sailaway System Design: (Chris J Johnson, 447-5243)

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

Silicon Graphics: (Don Williams, 346-9342)

Solid Systems: (Pete Farrell, 442-2222)

Sterling Infomation Group: (Darrell Hanshaw, 344-1005)

Sun Microsystems: (Rick Taylor); Supplier of Unix client-server computing solutions

Texas Internet Consulting: (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 Laboratories (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. 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 (but you will need to inform the guard in the booth that you are attending a meeting at ARL). 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): http://www.utexas.edu/maps/prc/areas/se.html

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

Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society CACTUS Newsletter

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