VLUG Meeting Minutes 1999.02.09
Sadly inaccurate attendance figures
| Total | 35
| | VLUG members | 21
| | First-timers | 5
|
Installfest
Another successful event. We filled up the room at UVic and spilled out
into the breakout rooms. All in all 22 machines successfully installed, 2
failed. Discussion: should we have installfests oftener? Then they could
be smaller and more convenient (wouldn't have to tell people to wait so
long) but on the other hand, it'd be more work.
New business
Shaw DNS problem
Shaw's DNS is screwed up; the problem appears to be that when you send a
request out to the server, the response comes back labelled as from a
different address than the one you sent the query to. Linux doesn't like
this. Windows, interestingly enough, doesn't care, and so could be
vulnerable to spoofing. Anyway, as of the meeting Chris Halsall had email
out to Shaw, trying to get them to fix it.
Crass commercialism
Still a few Tux dolls left in the medium and small sizes; also CDs are
available, as usual.
Nanaimo group
Linux users in Nanaimo are trying to organize; some discussion of what
kind of support we can offer them.
Presentation
Matthew Skala, on Perl. Slides from this presentation are available
online as a gzipped
Postscript file (generated by Linux Wordperfect).
BREAK
Q&A
Security of systems connected to Shaw: yes, it's a significant concern.
The "script kiddies" are out in force, and a badly configured machine is
wide open. Recommendations from the group include: find and read the
security HOWTO, disable network services that you aren't using, apply all
available security patches for your distribution (RedHat, for instance,
maintains an up-to-date errata page). Discussion eventually spun off onto
the topic of single-diskette firewall packages.
Dual booting with Windows 95: Windows will stomp on LILO if you give it
a chance. The solution is to install Linux after you install Windows; also,
keep a Linux boot floppy around in case LILO gets stomped later. When it
does, you can boot from the floppy, and re-run the lilo executable to
reinstall it.
Has anyone used Linux with a voice modem? Yes, there are a number of
software packages for this. mgetty in particular comes with basic telephone
answering machine software.
Linux in POS (point-of-sale) systems: check Linux Journal, they have a
page of links about it.
Adjourned
For pizza and beer.
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