Tuesday, July 28, 2009

July Meeting Recap

I want to thank everyone who took time out on Saturday to join us for our meeting. We had a decent turnout, but we are always looking to expand our group. We discussed some flash drive utilities that will come in handy for a network administrator. The tools we spoke about can be downloaded at CodySafe. There is an Admin Swiss Knife Suite that has tons of useful features that will certainly come in handy for the network admin. There are all sorts of net tools and password recovery tools that make up part of this suite. I am sure the geek in all of us will love this little download. It runs completely from a flash drive. The best part is how small it is. I think CodySafe is around 2Mb and the Admin Suite is a mere 62Mb unpacked. That is pretty impressive since there are 62 apps in the Suite.

We also took a look at a program called SpaceSniffer. SpaceSniffer can be downloaded at PCWorld. This program doesn't really do much more than give you a graphical impression of what is on your hard drive. It can be useful to show you what is taking up all the space on your hard drive. The larger the file, the larger the box to represent it will be. So it is really easy to locate the large files.

Mr Johnson gave an interesting demonstration on how it is possible to boot up and run a laptop even if it has no hard drive. He used an IBM ThinkPad, flash drive, and a Ubuntu liveCD. He was able to boot the laptop from the cd and use the flash drive as a hard drive. Very Cool.

Finally, as with most meetings, we had pizza. We almost always have food at the meetings.

A note for August's meeting:
I am in the works with First National Bank to get a field trip to the Data Center for a tour. Hopefully it will be a done deal for that meeting but there is a lot of security concerns to overcome to make this happen.

That pretty well wraps up this meeting. Again, I would like to thank everyone who was able to attend.

Next meeting: August 22, 2009 1pm Lab 3