As a list lurker and as yet, non-attender at meetings I would just like to add my voice to this and say that I think it's an excellent idea.
"Ashley T. Howes" wrote:
I was thinking that to draw more people into the ALUG meetings it would be a good idea to have 1 or 2 structured talks at each event for a duration of 30 mins each (20-25 min talk, 5-10 mins Q&A). If members of the group talk about stuff they have expertise in doing on Linux, the talks will require very little preparation and probably done on the fly.
I think that the talks would probably end up being longer than this but each speaker would probably find their own natural duration to deliver the talk, and the Q&A would probably vary depending on who was present and the level of interest in the subject matter.
An initial list of talks could be:
Building a Linux cluster - Mark?
I would be very interested in this.
Building a very popular website - Gareth?
And this.
PHP - James?
This would also be of great interest as I recently had to write a password change page for LDAP based on PHP3.
Load Balancing - Adam?
DNS based or cluster based? Either would be good, but especially cluster based with redundancy/failover if the functionality is there.
Recompiling the linux kernel
I wouldn't mind contributing to this.
Installing using Redhat package manager
Or this.
What do you think? What other topics would begineers and experienced people like to see presented? We all have experience in different areas and this would be a great way for each of us to expand our knowledge.
I've recently spent a good deal of time working with IMAP (Cyrus), OpenLDAP, EXIM, SaMBa, NetAtalk, SSL, NSSLDAP and loads of other bits in order to build an alternative to Netware and NT servers so if there was any interest...
The reason I haven't attended to date is that I like to spend Sundays with my family but I think that if there were people speaking on things like clustering then I would probably be swayed.
Best regards,
Joe Frost IS Engineer Omnis Software Ltd