The Seattle SAGE Group (SSG)
Seattle based special interest group for system and network administrators.

Meeting Minutes August 8, 1996

What happened?

Well, our second meeting was better than our first. Again, there were a few bugs. The largest was the 'Oops I forgot' bug.

Known Bugs

  • A number of people who were going to attend forgot. Those of us with better memories (or at least semi-up-to-date day timers) all agreed that a meeting reminder via the news list should fix this small problem. So we will begin sending reminders out to members about up coming meetings.
  • The MBT building doors still lock up at 6pm. This must be. So we will make sure that someone will check the doors regularly (at least every 10 mins) for new attendees.
  • The MBT conference room was locked up by the secretaries on their way out. No key was provided to the SSG to get in. The short term solution was to ask janitor to let us in (security folks take note!). The long term solution is that the MBT has made a conference room key available for check out for after hours meetings. So this should not happen again.

    • Meeting Highlites

    1) Opening comments and introductions
    We had a 50% increase in attendence in spite of the 'forgetful ones.' We had a good chance to socialize and get to know each other better.
    2) Presentation by Leeland Artra
    "Data collection via WEB pages with CGI (or When can I stop manually updating these databases?!)"
    This presentation was well received. A number of modifications were suggested by attendees. It was a very interactive presentation. We all hope that future presentations will be as good.

    The presentation was built in HTML and will be online shortly (as soon as the suggested changes are edited in) as a tutorial with all the example scripts. We hope that this may be used by all those who need the introduction.

    3) Open forum
    A number of questions were raised about the possible sponsorship by Pencom of the SSG. Pencom will be preparing a formal proposal sheet to be presented to the UW for approval of acceptable use (the UW has stringent usage limits on their hardware which is being used to support the SSG). This proposal is to be presented at the next meeting for SSG approval. We hope to have the UW blessing by this time as well.
    We also had some small discussions of other issues involving interviewing new SA's applying for jobs. The Pencom attendees had some excellent insights that were well received. Hopefully they can provide some of these for a future presentation on the interviewing process.
    4) Closing
    We really had no formal closing. We all just left and either went to the diner or home (or the office.... ;^)
    5) Dinner
    We enjoyed a Mexican Fiesta at the Las Margaritas in Shoreline. For some reason everyone only ordered appetizers of one flavor or another... Topics again ranged all over the place. The highlights: everyone present had some RPG background; everyone had some kind of personal grudge against MS (hmm...); interconnecting hosts was a short and sharp topic; and the food was great.

    The Next Meeting

    The next meeting is scheduled for September 12th. The topic to be presented is "Pretty Good Privacy (or I can't change my passphrase without remembering my old one!?)" by Bruce Alan Wynn of Pencom System Administration

    NOTE: Bruce seemed pretty vague on what specifically he is really going to be presenting about PGP. He just smiled whenever we asked for more details. (You know that spine tingling "you'll see" kinda smile...)

    Bruce should be following our presentations guide in any case.

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