This January, FOSUG offered 2 topics for demonstration. First, Andrew Baker, a long time Linux enthusiast, gave a demonstration on a basic install of SPLUNK. Splunk is a very powerful tool used to sort, search and navigate all the millions of logs that your average system administrator will deal with on a daily basis. The program automatically indexes logs and assigns them search variables based on repeating patterns in the logs.  Splunk has various methods for accepting the log data. Files, streams, syslogs, direct serial, etc. Although splunk is NOT an open source application, it is built on a lot of OSS technology, and worthy of consideration. Splunk also offers a free license that will fit the needs of MOST small/medium architectures.

The second part of our FOSUG meeting was a demonstration by Chad Godfirnon on setting up software RAID using directories to simulate hard drives. Wikipedia describes RAID: "The main aims of using RAID are to improve reliability, important for protecting information that is critical to a business, for example a database of customer orders; or where speed is important", and Chad showed us how to use this option.

In December, Dan Zahlis and Mattias Thorslund gave FOSUG a presentation on the Active Agenda Project. The presentation of the history of the project and Dan and Mattias' migration towards Open Source has been recorded and is available at:

http://tinyurl.com/2jj33f.

In addition, the slide presentation itself that Dan and Mattias used can be had at:

http://fosug.org/presentations/FOSUG12_15_17.odp (18mb)