We had an informative talk by Kelly on online training options based on his recent experiences. As we discussed the information, we discovered the talk could be expanded to include all of the local and online resources to provide continuous self-improvement for sysadmins who either have free time outside of work, are working part-time, may be between contracts or are looking to take some time off for training.

Kelly is looking to update the talk to include the extra items we discussed and possibly do a followup talk in the new year. When he has done the updates to the current talk, we will make it available online for anyone who be interested in the resources we talked about.

After the April meeting, I have scheduled the rest of the year. topics are picked, people scheduled, descriptions added (subject to edit), and I still have a list for next year. I’ll be talking to people over the next couple of weeks to see who wants to cover some future topics.

After our discussion, we came up with a list of topics for future meetings.

I’m going to do a talk on the environmental monitor unit I brought with me based on the Raspberry Pi and a few add-ons for May

We have the following items listed, with a couple of volunteers so far:

• Basic firewalls - re-purposing EOL gear for ongoing use (August)
• OpenVPN
• Security, an example would be the SANS Top 20
• Zabbix (maybe June)
• Coursera experiences talk  and discussion (July)
• Small NAS appliances such as Synology including:
  • Package Creation
  • encfs
  • sshfs
  • deduplication
  • NFS
  • ipkg
  • Third party software packages
• Crypto basics(using OpenSSL)
• Pen Testing with Metasploit (tentatively in November)
• Hardware simulation on different platforms
• Using the XBMC API for message and video injection
• Online learning experiences (panel type presentation)
• Diskless Raspberry Pi
• Network and Automated installs of almost everything
• Configuration management with current tools
• Screencasting/training
• Good looking documentation with open source tools
• Wordpress usage cases

For anyone interested, Bruce mentioned that Udemy has their top 1500 courses on for $10.00 each.

This is going to be more of an interactive discussion meeting. The goal is to have a list of topics and get everyone involved in sharing some knowledge. I’ll post a followup with the topic list and we will try to schedule in the right people and topics over the rest of the year.

In addition, we have a couple of items:

• A server room environmental monitor prototype
• BSDCan is next month and we will be swapping the night of our meetings
• On our regular meeting night in May, there will be a puppet meetup at the University of Ottawa. Feel free to attend. The location is on the BSDCan website.

I am trying out a different event manager and while I think it is better than the prior one, it doesn’t post an article on the site. I currently need to add an item manually and the RSS feed does not see the calendar events directly. I don’t think there are too many people who look at the RSS feed, but you never know. I’ll have to ask about it at the meeting.