Members  attending the meeting included:   Richard Foerster,  Alan Shoemaker, Don Evinger, , Mac Shaver, Klaus Herzog, Jim Lucha, .   

New members, Ossil Macavinta, Dana Rodden Dick Mathews, Mark DiNicolai and Karl Pomroy  were unable to make the meeting.    Also missing at this meeting were Dave Reisz, Hung Nguyen, Forrest Sherman, Kandy Phan,  Ken Howells, Tad Peters, Isaac Saldana, and Craig Carignan.

Mac provided an update on  Project Pronto.   Through Project Pronto,  SBC is equipping additional central offices, pushing fiber deep into neighborhoods and placing neighborhood broadband gateways at the end of the fiber to push the capabilities now housed in central offices closer to customers. This will make virtually all customers in targeted markets eligible for DSL service.

Mac also shared some information about a system he is building based on a Microstar K7T Turbo R.  The K7T Turbo-R is a VIA Chipset Socket A motherboard, featuring a 6/1/1 PCI/AGP/AMR layout.   The board also includes a Promise RAID controller.

Allan suggested that members take a look at Steve Gibson's website  for an interesting and fact filled examination of a recent DDoS attacks that occurred at his web site.   "IRC Bots" are among the newer breed of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) agents deployed by the Internet's most active hackers.   The article also suggests steps you can perform to make sure you are 'hosting' one of these agents.  The article is available in 'pdf' and is interesting reading.

In other discussion, Jim shared some information about useful software he is using to replace more costly commercial packages.  One to look into is: TradeClient, which may be a good replacement for Microsoft Exchange client.  TradeClient 0.9.0  is a UNIX mail client and personal information manager for X. It uses GTK+ and includes support for multiple accounts, both POP3 and IMAP, SMTP, and LDAP. It includes an address book that can interact fully with an LDAP server, and a personal calendaring system.  Originally TradeClient was sponsored by Bynari Inc., but it was realized that the effects of commercial support had a limiting effect on the direction and development of the project. Now Bynari has given this project to the open source community.

Jim also 'pitched' VNC as a reasonable substitute for Citrix.  VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.   For example, you can use a VNC viewer running on a PC on your desk to display your Unix environments which are running on a large server in the machine room. 

Alan provided copies of the Mandrake 8.0 GPL {2-CD-ROMS} for members attending.  He also discussed the features and displayed package contents in the Standard, PowerPack, and Pro Suite versions.

In a couple of quickies, Mac provided the origins of the term SPAM, which originally meant "simultaneous posting across messageboards".   Since we are in vacation season, Mac also suggested mailstart.com for anyone who wants universal email with send and receive, specifically for times when they are not at their home base.   MailStart is the technology demo for WebBox.  While MailStart can provide you with instant access to virtually any email account, WebBox makes it possible for you to organize your online life. With a WebBox as your online companion you can consolidate up to 5 different email accounts (you can even get one from us), store up to 20MB of files, maintain an address book, your calendar and bookmarks all in one place.  You can even share items in your WebBox on your very own WebBox Public Page.  WebBox is simple and affordable at only $6 per year. 

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