[glug-t] Minutes of Meeting on 10th August 2003

The meeting on the 10th of August was more of a surprise. 
The earlier date had to be preponed due to certain decisions 
like the idea to celebrate GNU's 20th Anniversary etc. 
   So only  the  people who were watching the mailing  
lists were able to come.Even SASTRA guys had a problem with  
the  date's and confided that they were surprised at the sudden 
change of date. 
 
     The meeting must have started off in time.I reached there 
late,10.am to hear Mr. Deepak Barua in full flow on System Admin' 
tools in GNU/Linux.He was on song,thoroughly enjoying himself 
as he spoke about the various options that each offered and how  
life was much much easier ,even with security to bother around too. 
With a presentation & slides he introduced the tools like finger, 
w,top,ps,at,ls and a lot of other predominantly command line utilities. 
He spoke of file permissions and groups.The highlight of his talk was 
the automatic scripts and how they worked from the /etc/ directory. 
He also explained the .bash_profile file and how to configure it. 
His explanation of useradd,grpadd ,rpm,tar,gzip was  in depth. 
That was a highpoint of his talk. 
     On his completion,the much awaited "GNU/Linux clusters"  
was presented by Mr.Balaji.The presentation was a visual guide to 
the explanation of abstract concepts Mr.Balaji was talking about. 
He introduced the concepts of MIMD,and SIMD ,which he said GNU/Linux 
was capable of supporting.Then the history of clusters was related. 
In a fairy tale like beginning ,the concept of clusters was brought 
to GNU/Linux by an Engineer at NASA who made a cluster ,and called it 
the Beowulf clusters.Cluster computing was born.Mr.Balaji then introduced  
the necessity of cluster computing and listed the various entities; 
High Availability Clusters,High Performance Clusters and many more. 
Then he dived into the concept of IP multiplexing ,and using several machines 
to run under various sub-net IP addresses,but on the whole to work as a single  
machine with a universally known IP,to give a fault tolerant performance, 
and continuous network uptime.Questions were raised about the use of  
Clusters and their capability to replace SAN's.Mr.Balaji replied that 
SAN's were way too costly for the college's and institutes to purchase 
and use.He said that RAID was also difficult to manage.Hence clusters 
were very successful in their aim of data redundancy & provided enough  
security.OSCAR implementation of Beowulf was also explained.The big  
presentation was finally over. 
          Now the was the question hour.there wasn't any queries, 
but for the one on using IO ports under GNU/Linux.Then Vijay spoke 
about the importance of celebrating GNU's 20th anniversary. 
We all agreed to call it the GNUcleus! What a nice name.Mr.Balaji  
agreed to bring personnel from RedHat India Inc,for the event, 
and Vijay said Mr.Anand Babu ,a Hurd Hacker might also agree to come 
if we could afford enough money.The GNucleus would be held on September. 
Then the idea of having sister GLUG's in the respective college's was also 
mooted by Vijay.Deepak of SASTRA and Manickam of NITT came forward to take 
responsibilities to setup the same in their respective schools.The meeting 
ended with the same 26 people it had begun with,and the hungry people left 
for a well deserved meal. 
 
Cheers 
Muthu 
 
 
 
 

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