Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG)

SLUG's monthly meeting, featuring talks and SLUGlets. Meetings are open to the general public, and are free of charge.

Our meetings take place next to Darling Harbour, near public transport and other amenities.

Our location: Atlassian, 173-185 Sussex Street, Sydney (corner of Sussex and Market Street). Entry is via the rear on Slip Street. There are stairs going down along the outside of building from Sussex St to near the entrance. A map of the area and directions can be found here.

We start at 18:30 but we ask that people arrive 15 minutes early so we can all get into the building and start on time. Please do not arrive before 18:00, as it may hinder business activities for our host!

Appropriate signage and directions will be posted on the building.

This month's sessions are:

General Talk
Lindsay Holmwood: Practical performance monitoring with collectd

It's 3am and your boss calls asking why the server farm is down. Pages are taking ages to load, ping times are skyrocketing, and the big client is wondering why they're paying you good money for a down service. You log in and your app is running like a dog, the load average is shot, but nothing's chewing up CPU. What do you do?
Problems like this don't just happen - there are usually warning signs. Enter collectd, a lightweight statistics collection daemon for *nix. Lindsay will be covering collectd's statistic collection features, storing the results, hooking it into your monitoring system, and graphing the results.

In-Depth Talk
Peter Chubb: I Hate Spam!!!

All of us are affected by spam. I'll be giving some war stories ... hear about the time that collateral spam brought down UNSW CSE's mail servers ... how to report spammers so it doesn't happen to you! ... hear about the time that spamassassin managed to OOM and bring down an important web server ... how to configure your MTA to reject enough spam that spamassassin doesn't have to do so much work.
I'll be giving my examples for Exim configuration, but the principles (and I'll be talking more about what to do than how to do it) will apply to all mail servers.

SLUGlets

General discussion and Q&A about Linux, free software and open source.

Meeting Schedule

See here for an explanation of the segments.

• 18:15: Open Doors
• 18.30: Announcements, News, Introductions
• 18:45: General Talk
• 19:30: Intermission
• 19:45: Split into two groups for:
• In-Depth Talk
• SLUGlets
• 20:30: Dinner

Dinner is at Golden Harbour Restaurant, in Chinatown. We will be having the $24 Banquet, but we will be collecting $25 per head for ease of accounting and to cover a tip. We will be taking numbers during the break to confirm the reservation size. If you have any particular dietary requirements (e.g. vegetarian), or if you would prefer to order separately, let us know beforehand. Dinner is a great way to socialise and learn in a relaxed atmosphere :)

We hope to see you there!