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IdaNAG - Idaho Network Administrators Group

The Idaho Network Administrators Group meets on the second Tuesday evening, in the Boise City Library Auditorium from 6 to 8 PM. No meeting is scheduled for November. Worthy of mention here though, is the upcoming VMware User Group meeting on Friday, November 17th, from 10:00am - 1:00pm, at Blue Cross of Idaho, 3000 E. Pine Ave, Meridian, ID. On the Agenda: A Recap of VMworld conference sessions and highlights,Old BMHC wants a farm, E I E I O - A discussion of potential VI3 server and farm configuration for BMHC, Lunch - sponsored by Vizioncore, A Presentation on virtual machine backup/restore and migrations by Azeem Mohamed from Vizioncore, Open Q&A. The event is open and free but you must pre-register for the Boise meeting..

Our meetings are open to all computer Network Administrators and those interested in computer network administration. We are not platform specific but presentations and discussions will focus on Windows, Open Source (Linux), and Novell. Membership is free as are the meetings. The meetings will also provide the opportunity to network with other Network Administrators in the Treasure Valley Area.

IdaNAG - Meeting Summary, October 10th, 2006. Our presenter for the evening was Ted Haeger of Novell, who might be best described as evangelist for opensource and Novell SuSE Linux as well as an avid blogger known as "Reverend Ted" and pod-caster. He brought us up to state on the state of Novell's new products including Access Manager 3 that takes user access security beyond the firewall, a new Security audit program that makes log file auditing friendly, and Zenworks, particularly recent improvements in asset management. He then took us on the tour of the SuSE 10 Enterprise Desktop Linux which included showing the VB scripting macro support now in OpenOffice as delivered by Novell, the Xgl cube and graphical eye candy of morphing windows and raindrop effects on the desktop. Ted's comment was after you have experienced the "morphing" windows on SuSE, windows are "dead" on Windows! He also demonstrated the plug and play capabilities in SuSE 10 Desktop by plugging in 2 different iPod devices and having them recognized correctly as well as automatically connecting to a digital camera and downloading photo's the desktop, all automatically, no user intervention was needed or required. Lastly, we took a look at Novell/OpenAudio, a recently added feature of the Novell website that Ted is managing, which contains pod casts of 30 minutes or more (typically) about current news, features and tools available in the Novell community including Opensource Linux.

Meeting attendance was a little light so it was unfortunate that more could have not been there for Ted's both informative and entertaining presentation that was concluded in a give-away of SuSE media and an OpenAudio T-shirt!. The question was posed as to meeting time and day. The plan is to stick to Tuesday evening but the question raised as to go early or later for the starting time. It was reported that about 13 people on the mailing list had responded that they could not attend due to a conflict even though the meeting notice had been posted for over 2 weeks. We are open to your suggestions on this.

Ted, at tonights meeting, also recommended getting involved in a local Linux Group. The Idaho PC User Group has a very active Linux Group that meets twice a month at the Library; Meeting details of current and past meetings of be found here.

Organizational Note: We are organizing... We are collectively gathering forces... We want to be heard... We want to be noticed... We are the Idaho Network Administrators Group, IdaNAG.

A number of companies have said they want to work with us as a group. We will have more meetings in the future but we need all of your help. We need to show the software and hardware groups that we are available to meet with them. I can't speak for you, but I make better choices of what I purchase or recommend when I know what is available. We can get those groups to come to us if we are organized.

For more information, please contact James Johnatakis, group organizer.

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