[clug] Installfest / Install-off

Alex Satrapa grail at goldweb.com.au
Fri Oct 3 02:10:01 GMT 2008


On 02/10/2008, at 17:53 , steve jenkin wrote:

> Isn't this spec much like 'E-smith' which became Mitel SME Server, now
> 'contribs.org'??

SOHO server aside, the main idea I was suggesting was, "pick some  
nifty thing to do, and all get together to learn how everyone else  
does it."

SME and e-box look really cool - but they're pre-boxed products and  
installing them by following some instructions *teaches* you nothing.  
Nor do you *learn* anything other than how to follow instructions.

What I want is to get people together for a technical discussion  
while trying to achieve some goal. Preferably from bare metal with no  
scaffolding. In fact, I wouldn't care too much if a 6 hour install- 
off was 5 hours of discussion accompanied by 1 hour of actually  
achieving anything, if that 5 hours meant that three more people in  
the world were capable of understanding the security issues of using  
the one DNS server for both authoritative serving of your domain's  
records as well as recursive lookups.

That being said, getting an out-of-the-box product means the 1 hour  
of install can be cut to 20 minutes, leaving more time to discuss  
security issues and tweaks to the out-of-the-box product, which is  
still a good thing. As long as someone can learn something about why  
the out-of-the-box is set up the way it is.

I'm starting to rant again =(

Will go research those two out-of-the-box products and try preparing  
at least a presentation to CLUG about what they are, and what they  
*don't* do. Then we can work on the next step for an install-off  
which is to get people interested in coming to a technical BBQ :)

Alex




More information about the linux mailing list