Official Publication of the STL!/unix/usr/group

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Online version: http://www.sluug.org/cronicle/

Table of Contents

• Next Meeting Details
• Presentation - Fiber Channel Data Storage Systems by Andrew Parsons et al., TRITEK
• Demonstration - Data Replication System by Andrew Parsons et al., TRITEK
• Upcoming Meetings
• Meeting Directions
• Special Interest Groups (SIGS)
  • Linux SIG (SLUUGLS)
  • Computer Telephony Integration SIG (SLUUG CiTI)
  • Digital Alpha SIG
• Steering Committee
• At last month's meeting... by Gary Meyer
• Volunteers Needed!
• BBS Getting Lotus Notes & Domino
• ITEC Expo, May 13-14
• Sponsors
• SLUUG on the World Wide Web
• /usr/groups/other
  • St. Louis Java SIG
• Contacts
• Submitting Articles to the SLUUG CRONicle
• SLUUG PO Box

Wednesday, April 8, 1998 at 6:30 PM
Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester

Fiber Channel Data Storage Systems by Andrew Parsons et al., TRITEK

A fiber channel allows you to have up to 500 Meters between your processor and data storage system. Usually the data storage system will support multiple processors at SCSI speeds. Neat stuff.

Data Replication System

In place of the tutorial will be a showing of a replication product that works as middleware. Most replication products work only in connection with a data base system. This one will replicate a data base system, but will also replicate non-data base files as well. Interesting.

Both presentations will be given by Andrew Parsons and others from TRITEK. Andrew presented high-availability storage systems for us a couple of years ago and it was a very good presentation.

The STL!/unix/usr/group meets the 2nd Wednesday of every month at Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester Blvd, just east of Hanley on Manchester.

Directions From Downtown

1. Take 40 West to the Hanley exit.
2. Turn left (south) onto Hanley.
3. Turn left (east) onto Manchester, then turn right ASAP into the Sunnen Products driveway.

(NOTE: A security guard from Sunnen is scheduled to be at the door from 6:20 PM to 7:20 PM to allow entry. After 7:20, the door will be unattended and attendees may not be able to enter.)

The SLUUG Steering Committee meets the Tuesday following the general 2nd Wednesday meeting at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor training room of Daugherty Systems, One City Place in Creve Coeur.

The SLUUG Linux SIG (SLUUGLS) meets the 3rd Thursday of every month at the Indian Trails Public Library.

The SLUUG CTI SIG (SLUUG CiTI) meets the 1st Wednesday of every month at the Bridgeton Trails Public Library.

As our membership grows, we have had some inquiries about the possibility of having Special Interest Groups in several areas. If you are interested in starting or participating in a SIG for System Administration, Networking, C, Object Oriented Programming, a specific vendor, etc., please call Dave Mills at 230-5151, extension 103, or contact any officer of the group.

Presentation: Sharing Filesystems between Windows and UNIX using Samba by Kevin Lafata, Lead Software Engineer, Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Kevin will discuss sharing filesystems between Windows and UNIX using Samba. Most of Kevin's work involves Windows programming with a focus on Intranet and Internet applications (not HTML). Kevin is a Computer Science graduate from the UM-St. Louis and has been attending the St. Louis Linux Users Group for the past eight months.

Kevin's presentation will cover several aspects of Samba, a utility that allows Windows clients to connect to directories on Unix servers. The presentation will cover system requirements, a brief overview of the binaries included with the package, how to configure Samba to share directories and security at share and user levels. Time permitting, Kevin will also cover using Samba to validate Windows 95 domain logins.

Visit the Linux SIG home page (http://www.stllinux.org/) for the latest meeting details.

LOCATION DIRECTIONS:
Indian Trails Public Library
8400 Delport Drive
(at Midland)
(314)-428-5424

For more information on SLUUGLS refer to the WWW home page for the group at http://www.stllinux.org/ or contact Matthew Feldt at linux@www.feldt.com.

CTI User Group Manager Tony Zafirpoulos Discussed the OpenActs Database Connector

The April meeting featured a discussion of OpenActs, a tool for viewing MS Access®database information. The connector functions as an ActiveX control in a container that interfaces with Outlook Tasks, E-mail, Journal, and Appointments, This enables the user to have Access capabilities without installing or running Access. The Connector allows a company-wide contact list to interface with Outlook and lends itself to be a future plug-in to CT-based phone systems.

[The Editor apologizes for not getting the newsletter out in time to let people know about the CTI SIG meeting.]

The Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Users Group is a non-profit organization open to developers, end-users, sales people, and others who share the common interest of melding the telecommunications and computing worlds.

For more information on SLUUG CiTI contact Tony Zafiropoulos at tonyz@ctitek.com or (314)878-9855.

The Digital Alpha SIG is for those interested in Digital UNIX and the DEC Alpha architecture. Visit the Digital Alpha SIG's home at http://www.sluug.org/~newton/asighome.html for more information.

The SLUUG Steering Committee meets the Tuesday following the general 2nd Wednesday meeting at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor training room of Daugherty Systems, One City Place in Creve Coeur. The guard can direct you to the meeting location. Anyone is welcome to attend. If you would like to become more involved in the planning of SLUUG, feel free to join us at the next Steering Committee meeting. Meetings usually last 1.5 to 2 hours.

If you missed last month's general meeting, you missed an excellent talk on RCS, the Revision Control System. The talk highlighted some excellent organization options, pointed out some distinctions from SCCS, and got my interest up to look at some more aspects after the talk.

Also last month, the tutorial on sockets sparked some great discussion with the audience. A number of people drew out the distinction of "ports" being a feature of "protocols" while "sockets" is a feature of "interfaces." Rich Seibel corrected me as to the Transport Layer Interface (TLI). I thought it was a dead Sys V feature having lost to BSD's sockets. But Rich says that both MUST be supported in current implementations and that TLI is actually needed for non-IP applications like talking to those dreaded excuses for OSs from Washington state.

For those interested in pursuing the subject further, let us know. If you just want to read up on your own, I have two references. I'm reading Chapter 12 of Practical Unix Programming by Kay & Steven Robbins. Rich Siebel is recommending "the bible," W.R. Steven's UNIX Network Programming.

We still need more folks to keep the organization running. See the web page at http://www.sluug.org/ for details.

Specifically, we'd like someone to fill the roles of:

Public Relations Coordinator

Send notices to trade rags, Post-Dispatch, etc. It is not extremely technical but will help our group.

Presentation Committee Member

Work with the Presenations Manager to come up with ideas and make some contacts to plan the monthly presentations.

There will also be a number of technical projects that need be done on the BBS soon.

IBM has donated these software products to the group. We are currently installing them and hope to have them available this month for use by members.

This year's ITEC Expo will be at the America's Center downtown, May 13-14.

We hope to have tickets to give out at the April 8 meeting and subsequent SIG meetings. Our group has had a booth and provided presenations at ITEC for 4 or 5 years now.

Due to ITEC's organization this year, we have a VERY short time window to get ready for this event. We are still looking for one or two presenations.

Also, we need YOU! Our booth is staffed by US. If you can come down to the show, try to plan at least an hour to work our booth. You can scout the other exhibits as well during that morning or afternoon but it would sure help if you could give someone in the booth a break.

And, as usual, we need those REAL STALWARTS! Each year, there have been people who have devoted an entire afternoon, morning, day, or even BOTH days to working our booth, getting it set up, etc. We really need a few more of you to volunteer at this late hour. If you can, contact Christine Wanta , cfw1@mail.sluug.org. She is our booth manager again this year. Also, Tom Parsons, parsons@mail.sluug.org, is managing our presentations at the show. Thanks to both of them.

Last year we let a lot of people know of our existence through our participation at ITEC. It is amazing how people just walk up to the booth and learn that our group is a resource here in town. (And it doesn't hurt to be the one in the booth talking to them.) ;-)

We also have our O'Reilly & Associates books there to sell. Last year, our O'Reilly & Associates representative had us to her house where our group held a little "wind-down" BBQ after the event.

• Analysts International
• Andersen Consulting
• Arbor Consulting
• Ask/Ingress Software
• AT&T Global Information Solutions
• The Charron Law Firm
• CIBER, Inc.
• Computer Task Group
• Cyborg Consulting Enterprise
• Cypress Systems, Ltd.
• Daugherty Systems
• Ferguson Consulting, Inc.
• Gundaker Realtors Better Homes & Gardens
• Hewlett-Packard
• IBM
• Informix Corporation
• Lindenberg & Associates
• Maryville Data Systems, Inc.
• Mastercard International
• Nascote Industries
• O'Reilly & Associates
• Pyramid Technology Corporation
• Rave Computer
• SEI
• Shamrock Computer Resources Ltd.
• Software Systems Specialists, Inc.
• Sun Microsystems
• Sunnen Products
• Sybase
• Unisys
• Venmar Systems, Inc.
• WTI Systems, Ltd.

For more information about sponsoring the St. Louis UNIX Users Group, contact Ed Wehner wehner@mail.sluug.org.

The St. Louis UNIX Users Group maintains a WWW page at http://www.sluug.org/. Visit us to learn more about who we are and what we do, visit other UNIX user groups' WWW pages, sign up for a SIG, or just to browse.

We publish other user group meeting schedules on a reciprocal basis. If you are a member of another non-profit group, please inform them of our policy and invite them to exchange meeting information with editor@mail.sluug.org, or call any of the SLUUG officers.

Next meeting details:

  When:     Thursday, April 9, 1998, 6:30 PM
  Where:    Novell, Inc., 600 Emerson Road, Suite 203
  Speaker:  Rick Grubin, Applications Engineer, Rogue Wave Software

Rick Grubin, Applications Engineer for Rogue Wave Software, will be demonstrating the company's upcoming Java Application Framework currently known as Pathfinder. Pathfinder is an object oriented application framework which provides the foundation for building scaleable, n-tiered Java applications. Customers can create custom business objects and weave them together with business rules resulting in an application that can be deployed via web browsers or as a fully functioning distributed application. The object oriented architecture allows for easy extensions, derivations, and substitution of functionality while encapsulating the complex technologies necessary for scaleable distributed object computing. Furthermore, Pathfinder is built using open-standards such as JDBC, TCP/IP, and SQL.

Jeff Brown, of Object Computing, Inc., will give a 15 minute presentation on Java Internationalization prior to our feature presentation.

Be sure to visit the Java SIG's Web site at http://www.ociweb.com/javasig/ for the latest news about the Java SIG and an updated schedule of events. The Web site also includes presentation slides from previous meetings, a form for subscribing to the Java SIG mailing list, and a map to the meeting location. You may direct any questions about the Java SIG to javasig@ociweb.com.

If you would like to submit an article to the CRONicle of general interest to the members of the St. Louis UNIX Users Group, email it to editor@mail.sluug.org The deadline for article submissions is two weeks before the next main meeting.

The St. Louis UNIX Users Group has a P.O. box. All official correspondence with SLUUG should now be sent to:

    St. Louis UNIX Users Group
    P.O. Box 1184
    Fenton, MO  63026-1184