[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: iSCSI

[Paul Nijjar]

Congruatulations! If you're reading this, you probably survived
winter. Now you get to take on spring cleaning. Whee! Beat those rugs!
Air out those rooms! Clear those overwintered garden beds! Tune up
that bicycle! 

Or you could consolidate all of the data storage across the 27
machines that make up your home network. That counts as spring
cleaning, too. You can centralize all those home videos and accounting
records and music and revolutionary manifestos into a centralized
storage cabinet, allowing you to manage backups and redundancy in one
location. In addition to being cleverly palindromic, iSCSI allows you
to transmit hard drive commands over your local network, so your 27
computers can all treat your central storage similarly to local disk.
In this month's KWLUG presentation, John van Ostrand will reveal the
secrets of using iSCSI for your own nefarious purposes. This
presentation will start at 7pm.

Speaking of spring cleaning, there is a bargeload of announcements to
share before they start collecting dust: 

First of all is our FLOSS Fund nominee for the month, which is none
other than the lightweight distribution Puppy Linux. Puppy is a
homebrewed Linux distribution that runs off of CDs, USB keys or hard
drives. It is designed for ease of use, and boasts a vibrant user
community. Visit http://puppylinux.org to learn more, and contact one
of our secretive FLOSS Fund Cabal members (acant at
alumni.uwaterloo.ca should work) if you would like to contribute but
can't attend this month's meeting. 

Secondly, John Kerr will tell us about an interesting user interface
contest for an embedded router device. For a sneak preview visit
http://www.ubnt.com/challenge/ . 

Third, the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commissions
(aka the CRTC) is holding some consultations on Internet Traffic
Management.  If you care about net neutrality issues you might want to
check the consultations out: http://isppractices.econsultation.ca/ 

Fourth, the KW Drupal User's Group wanted to let you know that its
April presentation topic is all about jQuery, which is useful in
Drupal but potentially of interest to many other web developers. See
http://groups.drupal.org/node/20521 for more info. 

Fifth, there's a neat new group (which may be called GigaWat, but
right now lives at http://hackw.net ) which is busy organizing a
HackerSpace -- a shared workshop where people build stuff. They
describe it as a "YMCA for geeks and artists". They're holding weekly
organizational meetings, so you can visit their page to get involved. 

Once again, our meeting will be held at our usual meeting space:

The Working Centre
43 Queen Street South
Kitchener
(Between King and Charles Streets)

Car parking remains awkward, although I discovered that the small lot
across the street at Charles (near the Games Exchange plaza) has free
parking after 6pm. There is another parking lot at Charles and Ontario
streets, but it is a pay lot.

Bike parking is also awkward. There is some space to park bikes behind
58 Queen (the other Working Centre building across the street). There
is a railing behind the building that people use for bike parking, but
this may not be the most secure solution. 

Transit parking is easy. The transportation station is still just a
couple of blocks away. 

- Paul



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