Feb 27, 2003

The theme for this meeting was "Free and Open Source Software and the MultiValue World."

We also had reports on the recent International Spectrum show from both user and vendor perspectives.

The meeting format was slightly different: instead of having one speaker, we followed a Panel format, encouraging feedback and questions about how we can take advantage of Free Software such as Linux, Apache, Samba, Perl, and PHP.

The Panelists:

  Scott Ballinger of Pareto Corporation has been using Pick/D3/Universe on Linux since Red Hat 5.1, with installations ranging in size from 4 to 100 users. He talked about some Intel hardware/peripheral issues, IDE vs SCSI RAID, Linux system administration, Sendmail, SSH, NFS, and Samba.

  Connie Eaton of GM Nameplate talked about how they use 'freeware' in their jBASE environment. GM Nameplate has been using jBASE On Linux for several of it's distributed data servers. They also use SendMail, Apache, Perl, CGI and Samba.

  Ross Morrissey of PhotoWorks talked about Perl, Apache, and how they saved $40,000 by using Samba. Ross has been using Apache with UniVerse since 1996. PhotoWorks has UniVerse applications responding to several thousand http requests a day across several platforms.

Once again, we offered an optional, free, in-depth technical seminar from 3:00PM till 5:00PM that day:

  Ross Morrissey presented "Using Apache to leverage your MultiValue Database" - a distillation of presentations he's given over the past five years to groups in Seattle, Portland, Tampa, and Toronto. Notes from these presentations are at http://www.rossmorrissey.com/uv/apachemv.htm. This presentation included installing the Apache webserver, generating web reports, exporting to Excel, interacting with the database, and generating graphics on the fly.