Eighteen attendees braved the downpours to attend the August meeting of the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held as usual on the Dartmouth campus on the first Thursday of the month. Coordinator Bill McGonigle noted that several past presenters had new books published:
Jeff Dwyer: Pro Web 2.0 Development with GWT
Barrie North: Joomla! A User’s Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website
James Fogg was the main presenter, talking about high-end administration of many machines, and how the adminstration tools are both growing out of the grassroots and migrating downward from the large mainframe/mini management systems. These systems configure, monitor, test, audit, report and manage large numbers of computers, network devices (routers, switches, etc.) and enable a small number of administrators to keep a large plant running, manage changes in fractions of the time and effort that a manual process would require, and provide in-depth information on the state of the plant. He talked about, and demonstrated, the high-end products from HP and BMC.
We talked about many related FOSS tools which served some or all of the functions of the high-end tools, though perhaps not yet with their polish, breadth, depth or integration. Products mentioned included:
- RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ)
- OpenNMS
- OpenQRM
- Pentaho
- Puppet
- ZenOSS
- Big Sister
- Nagios
Upcoming meetings include “How to Write a Compiler” in October and “High Availability Linux” in November. Stay tuned for more details.
Thanks to Bill McGonigle for arranging and running the meeting, to Heidi Strohl (http://www.heidistrohl.com) for providing the awesome brownies, and to James for the presentation.