Members  attending the meeting included:   Richard Foerster, Ken Howells, Isaac Saldana, and Alan Shoemaker.  Two special guests included: M. E. Shaver {Mac}, Systems Administrator, Network Operations Center South, of Pacific Bell and Gary Taylor, Owner of World Wide Classified, who drove up to visit our meeting from Oceanside.

Both Don Evinger and Tad Peters had intended to be present but had conflicts before the meeting. 

Mac told members about some of his responsibilities as a Network Systems Administrator and explained a little about how his shop is set-up.  He also talked about how DNS Servers are configured.   Mac explained that with a large number of workstations on a network {like even fifty or more}, the big problem of relying on the /etc/hosts file for name look up is the fact that this file must be replicated on each system on your network.  Setting–up a DNS Server on your network  simplifies administration if there are more than just a few workstations.   Isaac suggested that we might have a DNS Server configuration workshop at our next meeting.   He will demonstrate how to set one up using our demo network.

Gary Taylor is considering consolidating his web-host services with “Cyber-Café” type operation… “except for the coffee”.  He explained he is considering perhaps fifty local workstations supported at the rental location by a server also providing web-hosting services out to the internet.   A spirited discussion followed as Isaac and Mac helped the group to think through some of the possibilities and options.   Gary is still carefully considering his options and will continue to gather information, but it was perhaps one of the best brainstorming sessions we have had as a group.

Richard Foerster provided a brief demo of a simple database application using PHP3 and mySQL, that allowed 4 basic operations: Add Record, Select Record(s), Update Record and Delete Record.  PHP  {see - http://www.php.net  } is a Server-side embedded scripting language that can be thought of as a Hyper-Text Preprocessor.  It has lots of similarities with ‘C’ language constructs, so that it seems familiar, but is embedded in an HTML document much like JavaScript.  PHP can be used to generate HTML, JavaScript, XML, and other code, and it has a set of special commands that work specifically with a number of common database packages such as mySQL {see: http://www.mysql.com. }

The group also had the opportunity to take a look at Bluefish,  {see -  http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/ }, an HTML Editor that is compatible with Mandrake 7.0.  While it is not WYSIWYG, it is a big improvement over Netscape Composer.   Alan donated a CD-ROM of Mandrake 7.0 compiled for 486 computers to the LUGIE Library.   This version may be useful to those who experience difficulties due to timing with some of the new hard drives, who have an older system and want to experiment with Mandrake.

The next meeting is scheduled for June 10^th, so mark your calendar.

The meeting adjourned at 12:20.