Ottawa Valley SAGE

The first thing I’d like to do here is to apologize for those who arrived and discovered that the location was closed. I could have sent an email to the list or tweeted, but did not, thinking that anyone who came would think to try across the street at the Tim Horton’s  located there. One person did and I believe two did not. I’ll have to specify alternate locations for future meetings. This was unexpected and I still do not know why they were closed. I will find out if they will be open before  the next meeting of course and post an alternate location, just in case.

Having said that, back to the meeting. We had a discussion on the LISA conference in December. I’d urge anyone interested in professional system administration (as in making a living from it) to check out the videos on the Usenix web site. They are quite informative on current trends in the profession.

Three talks that came up during the discussion were the opening keynote by Ben Rockwood on the DevOps transformation, Luke Kanies talk on Building IronMan, not programming and Wade Minter on Customer Service for SysAdmins. If you have a couple of hours to spare, these are worth listening to.

I had brought a small PBX with me to show everybody. It measures about 6″ by 4″ by 1.5″ and has two analog line ports and a LAN port. It is capable of supporting a small business, supports about 20 simultaneous phone calls, 30 extensions (softphone, VOIP hardware and analog), supports SIP and IAX trunks, PSTN analog lines, SKYPE trunks and has IVR, follow me ringing and voicemail. It’s a complete embeded asterisk system. I have it for testing before I do some work for a local company that includes a phone system. This particular unit appears to be based on the open source IP04 PBX from Rowetel.

I have been having a problem with the unit and will be posting the debugging steps I have taken, as well as how I discovered what the problem is and everything else involved in doing a virtual tear-down and reconfiguration of the box to get it working (which is not fully completed yet, just need to get a couple of configuration items fixed now). That will probably be several days out before I get it finished. For the curious, they retail for about $275US on eBay. I will be including a few photos and screenshots, just for completeness.

It’s been a while since we had a technical project or item to discuss, so this is an attempt to get back to it. Future discussion topics are always welcome.

Here are a few shots from the conference. As expected, the conference was a lot of fun.

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Title: January Meeting
Location: The Second Cup, Bells Corners
Link out: Click here
Description: First meeting of the new year. LISA’11 would be a topic, along with any ideas for a proper meeting location. We’ve been stuck on that for a while and I don’t see any resolution in the near future.
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2012-01-19
End Time: 21:30

LISA’11 is now over. As the conference was in December, I’ll hold off on the full commentary until the January meeting. There will be a proper post sometime this week on some of the highlights, including the LOPSA community meeting.

Title: December Meeting: Annual Social
Location: Wild Wing in Kanata
Link out: Click here
Description:

This is our annual social.

This year we will be at Wild Wing in Kanata, Eagleson @ Stonehaven in the mall with the Harvey’s and Starbucks. 19:00 as per usual. The reservation is under my name.

If you could respond and let me know you are coming and if you are bringing an additional person, I can adjust the numbers. Don’t forget that significant others are invited.

Topics include:

• How many wing choices should there be?
• What goes best with wings?
• Should wings be sold by the pound or kilogram?
• Should we lobby for ostrich wings?
• What part of the buffalo is the wing?
• etc.

Possible special appearance by Ed.

Come out and join the discussion.

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-12-15
End Time: 21:30