First off, I’d like to thank Yanick for the great presentation. It’s been a while since I looked at new features in perl and I’m inspired to install 5.12 and start utilizing all of the stuff that’s now available. Who knows, might be some good thinks for the $DAYJOB hiding in there. I did ask for a copy of the slides and as soon as I get them, I’ll post them to the download section.

Title: April Meeting Location: Pythian Link out: Click here Description: Perl talk from Yanick Champoux, one of the Pythian SysAdmins Perl Hackers. Synopsis: One of Perls’ original raisons d’ętre was to be a sysadmin’s best friend. Come and find out how to to leverage Perl for everyday administrative tasks. We’ll cover Perl’s command-line arguments Well-known idioms for common situations Perl as ‘sed’ Perl as ‘awk’ Perl as ‘find’ From one-liner to small script and back Leveraging TAP as a system monitoring tool Must-have modules And much more.

Well, it’s been off to a slow start, mostly my fault, due to tax filings, getting up to speed and that stupid cold that has been affecting people in the $DAYJOB arena. It feels like someone is randonly stuffing cotton balls into my head and then pulling them out. Foggy… Clear… (repeat). Did I ever mention that I hate colds? You are not ill enough to be unable to work, just slow and stupid - and they linger!

Just so we have some notes fro the meeting, I have to provide the following presentations before our next meeting: The finished Secure FTP Server presentation The SSL Certificate and useful commands presentation A short piece on care and feeding of an Apache based Secure file downloading service I mentioned BSDCan 2011 again. http://www.bsdcan.org - the site appears to be working now, so it must have been an anomaly. I meant to pass out DVDs for PCBSD to everyone, but only managed to give out a few after the meeting.

Back in November or December I told the group about the LOPSA mentoring project and the call for volunteers at the community meeting at LISA. I believe that I had also stated that I had volunteered to be a mentor and I’m happy to announce that a project came up and that I have been matched up with someone who requires assistance with a backup system. While we haven’t really started yet (this only just happened) I’m hoping that it will be a pleasant experience for both of us.