Members  attending the meeting included:   Richard Foerster,  Alan Shoemaker, Don Evinger, Dave Reisz,  Kandy Phan,  Ken Howells, and  Forrest Sherman.   New members, Ossil Macavinta, Dana Rodden Dick Mathews, Mark DiNicolai and Karl Pomroy  were unable to make the meeting.  Hopefully they will be able attend our February meeting.  Also missing at this meeting were Tad Peters, and Craig Carignan.

Ken Howells told us his latest project has been to set up a discussion board at:  http://www.crestlinesoaring.org  
using Cyphor v: 1.6.

Cyphor is a configurable Usenet-style threaded forum, which uses PHP4's session capabilities to authenticate users, the MySQL database system to store all its data in, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to configure the "Look and Feel" of the forum. Only registered users can post messages, registered users are split up into normal users, moderators and administrators. Moderators and admins can delete threads, admins can change board settings, create new forums.   If you want to see an example of Ken's other work on his Linux based weather station project check out: http://www.crestlinesoaring.org/wx/index2.php3

Ken is also working on a Fortran program called xfoil, a version of which is available under GPL.

Alan pointed out an interesting new technology in monitors from www.candescent.com which produces a flat thin screen CRT display, in what may be described as an array or CRT's in a single display unit.  

Forrest Sherman has been busy on a couple of new projects.   He installed a new Linux distribution - Gentoo Linux - on his Celeron 500.   To learn more about this distribution check out:  Making the distribution, Part 1
Birth of the Gentoo Linux distribution   and visit Gentoo Penguin

Forrest has also created a router/firewall on his 486DX 100mhz using the single floppy EigerStein2BETA LRP release.  This system has no hard drive and runs
headless.  Access is through SSH.  Forrest told members, "I'm running three 3com 10mb ethernet cards (3c509) which I picked up for five bucks each.  Eth0 goes to my DSL modem.  Eth1 goes to an 8 port switch with my internal masq'ed network on it (one NT machine on it so far).  Eth2 goes to my DMZ network with one Gentoo
linux machine on it.  This machine will be my public www/ftp etc. server."  For more information on the Linux Router Project visit  Charles Steinkuehler's LRP Website
http://lrp.steinkuehler.net  or check out the Linux Router Project (LRP)  at  http://www.lrp.c0wz.com

While researching these current projects, Forrest found a couple of articles on security that may be of interest, and which point out the need for a router/firewall.    Check out -  Security portal; Cautionary Tales: Stealth Coordinated Attack HOWTO by Dragos Ruiu,  and Lessons from a Security Breach By Homer Wilson Smith for starters.

The meeting was a great success, and we are all looking forward to our next session on April  14th, 2001