Ottawa Valley SAGE

Providing a forum since 1998

Dec 18, 2008 - 3 minute read - Comments

Items from the December Meeting

Well, I don’t know about everybody else, but I had a good time, at least after I made it inside. We had a good meal, several amusing conversations, notable example keywords and phrases would be: Palindrome, Penny Lane and “dislocated my leg”. For Bruce: I do hope he’s OK and that was some manner of overreaction to something equally odd but less disasterous. On to my little offering for the interested who followed my sporadic phone calls and emails:

Nov 26, 2008 - 1 minute read - Comments

It seems IBM has decided to make Lotus Notes available for all OS major platforms and free

The Internet Journal has an article on this at: http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200811/ij_11_24_08a.html It would appear to want Microsoft to lose it’s position at the top of the Office Suite chart. I’m not sure about it yet, but I have decided to download it and try it out. After all, if it performs as advertised, then it’s usable on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. To make it even more interesting, it uses Open Document Format by default and while it can’t handle the Office 2007 extensions yet, that will be a plugin at some point.

Nov 22, 2008 - 1 minute read - Comments

Items from the November 2008 Meeting

We had a number of odd discussions, one of which referred to password policies. I promised to provide a list of links that contain general password policy guidelines. Here are several: http://riit.smeal.psu.edu/privacy-and-security-policies/pwdpolicy.pdf http://www.psc.edu/general/policies/passwords/ http://policies.lakeheadu.ca/policy.php?pid=168 http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/computing/security/password/passwordpolicy.htm http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v2r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.itame.doc_6.0/rev/am60_cmdref194.htm http://www.pueblo.us/documents/Policies/PasswordPolicy0106.pdf http://www.securitydocs.com/pdf/3410.PDF http://www.usm.edu/infosec/pw-policy.php I suspect that if you look through these, you will find that there is a common core of items that make the most sense. I was to also provide a link to that video I showed.

Oct 14, 2008 - 3 minute read - Comments

It has been a while

It looks like I have not bothered with a blog entry since March. A lot can happen in 6 months… Data center closure Legacy migrations to a new datacenter Server consolidation Learning more than I wanted to about VMware NetApp configuration and testing Taking on a management role Having input in setting portions of corporate direction Hiring staff (all one so far) Vacation Family crisis (yeah, the fun never ends) and lots more… It’s been a roller coaster.

Oct 14, 2008 - 1 minute read - Comments

October Meeting - 2008-10-16

That’s election week for those who can’t count, as well as Thanksgiving week. Topics: RT and interfacing to exchange and procmail Ontario Linux Fest HTCIA case study What to do with old computers Maybe some switches avaialable for those who show up? Other groups in the region