[ILUG] Intersocs99/LAID

[Kenn Humborg]

Here's a excerpt from a message I sent in response to
Owen Kelly's call for input on LAID/Intersocs99.

       ==================================================

I should be able to put together a talk or two between now and then.
However, there's no point in putting effort into something that
nobody's interested in.  So I think it would be a good idea to start
a thread (on the main ILUG list to get the widest audience) soliciting
ideas for talks/Birds-Of-Feather sessions.

For example, take home networking.  I could do:

   Masquerading (just like last year :-)
   Using UUCP to feed mail to your home network
   Caching name server

Someone else could cover basic ethernet, Samba, NFS.  None of these
topics on their own would be big enough to fill an hour-long slot.
But throw a few together and it becomes much more interesting.

Other ideas for sessions are:

   Introduction to the GNU textutils and fileutils (grep, find,
   sed, awk, and all those other commands you never knew about
   but keep cropping up in those neat little scripts you see
   posted to the list).

   Dynamic web pages with Apache/modPerl/php (something I know
   _very_ little about).

   Databases on Linux.  Getting started with mySQL, Postgres,
   Oracle, DB/2, whatever...

   How does the Internet actually work?  How does the DNS work?
   How does mail get routed?  How does IP get routed?
   Pick a random acronym and we'll tell you what it means :-)

   Linux/Windows integration.  Samba, email, authentication (pam_smb)
   Maybe get two machines and walk through the process.

   Linux troubleshooting.  Emergency recovery.  Using tcpdump.

   LDAP.

I'd love to see stuff involving some really deep magic:

   Handling SMP efficiently in kernel file system code
   or device drivers.

   How are interrupts handled and routed with these new-fangled
   busses (like PCI, AGP).

   Live kernel debugging (I hear it's possible somehow).

   Basic/advanced assembler.  Reading/writing GNU assembler.
   What kind of code does GCC generate?  (Every compiler has
   its own style of code generation.  Knowing how a compiler/
   architecture deals with function arguments, function returns,
   exceptions, etc helps when reverse engineering code or stepping
   through assembler when no source is available.)  And GNU
   assembler (on Intel) is completely different from anything I've
   seen while using MS's dev tools.  What's the deal?

With each of these topics, it's perfectly feasible to get up to
speed on your own, but the learning curve can be daunting.
A brief introduction can be just the thing to start someone
off on something they'd never have done otherwise.

Let's throw this out to the list and see what topics generate
interest.  And let's try and encourage people to put together
some short talks/presentations on those topics.

       ==================================================

So, what do people want to hear about and/or discuss?  Obviously,
the possibilities are not limited to the above...

Some of us think that a less formal format than last year would be 
better.  There will be a couple of straight talks targetted at
non-geeks, but I'd like a more interactive format for the technical
side.  Something like birds-of-a-feather sessions.

I imagine that we'll have enough time to hold two or three sessions.
(Owen, how soon will you know how much time and space we'll have?)

So, what do you all think?

Later,
Kenn