[NTLUG:Discuss] Newbies meeting

[Kevin Brannen]

Dennis Rice wrote:

> Stan Gatchel wrote:
> Hey, that's really good attendance. Do these people generally attend 
> week after week or are they different people each week?
>
> Would a small wireless net do the job with a few laptops tied in?
>
> Stan
> ============================
> Good idea.  We need to work on that - it will make me do something 
> extra also (which I want to do anyways).  Anyone else have some ideas?


I think it would be far easier to bring in a general purpose switch/hub 
and just wire them together in a stand-alone LAN.  Don't forget that 
Nokia has wireless access points already in place and working.  You 
obviously won't be able to connect to them, but my concern is about the 
channels you want to use not being available.

However it's done, that would give you the opportunity to show setting 
up DNS, DHCP, mail, Apache, Tomcat, ssh, CVS, etc.; and prove they 
really work by having the server on one machine and the clients on 
another.  You can show X in client/server mode (and explain that), and 
so forth.  Don't forget to show nmap too. :-)

If you can't get that many machines, but have access to VMware, you can 
make all but the host machine virtual and do the same thing.  Chris has 
told me he does this to learn new networking things.  It will require a 
pretty beefy machine if you plan to run 3+ VMs, but it is doable.  With 
the new VMplayer product, this could be quite doable.  Since I do have 
VMware, I could create the images for you if need be and give them to 
you on a DVD (or at least it sounds good in theory. :-)

HTH,
Kevin