Minutes 1999-03-23

The March 23, 1999 meeting was a smashing success! Much was learned by all. It was held at the offices of Spectra.Net in Johnson City. Much thanks to Spectra.Net and Rick DuBrava for their generous donation of time and space. ("time and space", the two fundamentals of nature....)

Attendees
Present at this joyous occasion were:


 * Rick "Du Man" DuBrava
 * Michael W. Lurie
 * Joel Tleon
 * Jeremy "Late again, but not as bad as last time" Impson
 * Jeff Kavanaugh
 * Steve Herndon
 * Mark Lenihan
 * Clayton Duffek
 * Mongo
 * Stephen Paine

Discussion
Hey! I took notes. How 'bout that....

Jeff Kavanaugh mentioned that he works with an astronomy organization (sorry, my notes aren't _that_ detailed) and he is interested in either finding or developing Linux/UNIX software than can drive the various astronomical equipment they use.

We spent a great deal of time venting our frustration with the RoadRunner service. We are aware of the difficulties involved with major infrastructure transitions and a rapidly growing user base (perhaps uniquely so as we tend to come from highly technical, computer and network oriented backgrounds). But the consensus was that we are exasperated with the lack of communication from the RR Management. Will logins be required or optional? What will the login protocol be and will it work with Linux/Unix?

We talked a bit about various other network connectivity options such as ISDN.

We talked about IBM and its ups and downs, and why (perhaps) they didn't forsee the uses of the PC product line.

The topic of the night was Window managers and X Windows. Jeremy Impson gave a brief talk on how X windows worked, ably assisted by those in-the-know in the audience. He then described how the recent kill Linux apps, KDE and GNOME, work, and how they are so much more than window managers.

As we were heading out, someone asked how to interpret network traces, and "libpcap", a library for dealing with network traces, and "ethereal", a GUI network analyzer, were mentioned (by me :). More information can be found here:


 * http://ethereal.boehm.org
 * ftp://ftp.ee.lnl.gov/libpcap.tar.Z