Just a friendly reminder that this Thursday is the second Thursday of the month and we will be meeting at Cafe Colonnade downtown.

Cafe Colonnade is located at the corner of Metcalfe and Gilmore. If you need better directions, click on the “Meeting Information” link under the top graphic.

Official start time: 18:00 (unofficial – whenever you get there)
Official end time: 20:00 (people usually start drifting at 19:00 unless they are engaged in a conversation)

Topics:

• Anyone read the boingboing article about Cisco locking customers out of consumer routers? lots of alternative firmware out there for consumer grade devices. Anyone know if pfsense runs on that class device? M0n0wall? Other options?
• T-shirts! Well, I’ll hopefully be wearing one. I had a test shirt done while I was ordering polo shirts. I’m hoping it comes out OK. If so, I can get a small run done for anyone who is interested. For the do-it-yourself types, I can provide a SVG or large PNG image of the logo.
• Anything else!
  • We are still considering that install fest at the science fiction convention.
  • Better writeup on creating a boot stick
  • fully automated network installs

Just a friendly reminder that this Thursday is the second Thursday of the month and we will be meeting at Cafe Colonnade downtown.

Cafe Colonnade is located at the corner of Metcalfe and Gilmore. If you need better directions, click on the “Meeting Information” link under the top graphic.

Official start time: 18:00 (unofficial – whenever you get there)
Official end time: 20:00 (people usually start drifting at 19:00 unless they are engaged in a conversation)

Topics:

• Commentary on BSDCan 2012? I know a number of us were there. Anything we really liked/disliked about the conference? I’m sure Dan would like some feedback from the local group.
• I’ll be bringing along a stack of DVDs for the x86-64 bit versions of PC-BSD 9.0, FreeNAS 8.04 -p1 (release), and FreeNAS 8.2 beta to hand out if anyone is interested. These were provided by iX systems (the sponsors of PC-BSD and FreeNAS)
• I’ll be talking about an upcoming open source festival in October, the venue of which is not decided yet, but the planning is underway. More details at the meeting.
• We should have another install fest. I’m thinking we could use it to write up some easy to follow HOWTOs on creating a bootable USB stick without using windows, network based installs (local LAN repository vs. internet connection), etc. a cookbook approach vs. a long winded article. Perhaps a FreeBSD installation for the impatient article?
• NetBSD – is anyone using it in the group? I’m sure a number of us have oddball hardware sitting around and probably would benefit from installing it. I know I have an old Cobalt Raq2 MIPS based machine and a couple of arm based netwinders. Are these machines even relevant any more?
• How about OpenBSD? I’m considering revamping one of my web servers to use OpenBSD. I haven’t actually run it on anything other than a test install. Any hidden gotchas like the extra config you need to do with selinux to make it useful and secure?

We will be mixing our meeting with the Ottawa Science Fiction Society (http://www.ottawasfs.ca), so there will be some new faces at the table. This could bring about some interesting topics.

Just a reminder that we will be having our monthly meeting on Thursday, April 12. This will be in our usual location. Check the “Meeting Information” link at the top for location details.

Reminder: BSDCan 2012 next month. You can view the BSDCan 2012 schedule. I have five confirmed volunteers for the conference setup so far and will be collecting a name or two more to make sure we have sufficient people.

There is no designated topic for this meeting, so bring yourselves, questions, and a thirst for knowledge and other liquids.

Just a reminder that we will be having our monthly meeting on Thursday, March 8. This will be in our usual location. Check the “Meeting Information” link at the top for location details.

For those who have not noticed, the BSDCan 2012 schedule has been posted. I’ll be collecting volunteer names for the conference bag stuffing event at our meeting. I need approximately six people for this and have managed to collect three so far. It would be nice to have a few alternates just in case.

I posted to the mailing list that VoIP on BSD would be a nice topic for the meeting. I’m guessing it has been done somewhere in the past and I have a number of little appliance boxes running ucLinux that are embedded phone systems. I’d like to see if it is possible to build out one with nanoBSD and try it out. I’ll bring along one of the boxes with me, one specifically designed to be an open platform. If there is sufficient interest and discussion, I’ll post a list of references and places to obtain parts. I’m guessing it is possible, as pfsense runs on any number of embedded systems and it’s just a case of discovering the hardware, package and storage requirements and then building it and testing. It could be an interesting project and you can learn as much as you want about VoIP/SIP/IAX/etc.