May 3, 2007 is a memorable day already in NLOSUGs short history. On this day, we organized our 3d meeting. The theme was "Network virtualization with Crossbow". Here are some impressions. They can also be found on the NLOSUG website.
Executive summary: we had another successful meeting! But things didn't go as smooth as before...
The first challenge we had was finding a speaker. We talked to virtuallly everyone in Sun who might even remotely be able to deliver a preso, In the end, thanks to the persistence and personal charme of Joep Vesseur, Sunay Tripathi, one of the main architects for Crossbow, personally promised that either he or a member of his team would deliver the talk.
This third NLOSUG meeting also was the first meeting ever that was NOT held at a SUN office. SNOW UNIX Specialists BV was so kind to facilitate this meeting, offering us a meeting room, facilities like Internet and a phoneline, and welcome drinks. And boy... did we learn a lot from "being remote"!
Second challenge became how to deliver a presentation while not at a SUN location and with the speakers being at Menlo Park, California. Thanks to Joep again, we came up with a beautiful solution that can be summarized as 'meeting.central'. If you are with SUN you might know this site. It's an experimental website created and run by SunLabs that essentially brings together all kinds of communication vehicles: Internet, VNC, phonelines, remote presentation capabilities... all we'd need is an Internet connection and a phone line. Which were precisely the two items included in the SNOW offering.
So, after half a day of SUN-internal testing with meeting.central (which resulted in a VNC client for Solaris being installed on my laptop) we happily drove to the remote location, had a beer or two and arrived one hour before the meeting was scheduled.
Turned out that SNOW went as far as renting a room for us at a restaurant, unfortunately with no phoneline available. Famous words of Joep: "Ah, so we'll just use VoIP then, meeting.central can do that".
Then we discovered the connection to the Internet was dead. Well, not entirely, but without getting an IP address through DHCP there's only so much you can do...
After some tweaking by the staff of the restaurant -all they knew what to do was to try and fix things the Microsoft way by turning off and on the internet router repeatedly, which did not fix a single thing- SNOW decided to move the meeting to their office which happened to be right next door.
I won't describe the complete struggle we then had, which involved missing and misspelled wepkeys, patching cables, booting Windows to encode a Secret Sentence into a hex representation of the needed wepkey, bashing desks and simultanously being on the phone with the US (remember, the speaker would deliver the presentation remotely!)... I missed most of all that fun because I was delivering the program we scheduled before the break, which thank God needed no Internet.
When I finally could not stretch things any longer and called it a break, I saw Joep with a red head and a grin on his face, handing me his laptop and saying: "punched-in, connected to meeting.central, with Kais Belgaid on the phone, and the presentation ready". He's such a great guy!
I also won't describe the trouble of connecting that setup to the beamer, which came next. It's enough to mention that we ended with *my* laptop being punched-in and everything, connected to the beamer.
So, what more could happen? Well, after the first half of the first sentence of Kaid, meeting.central crashed. And we couldn't reset or reconnect because of some freakin' Java thing I still don't understand.
So, in the end, starting 45 minutes late but still very calm and professionally, Kaid started his preso. We called him using a mobile phone, put the microphone for the in-room audio amplifier next to it, and I changed slides locally on my laptop when Kaid told me to do so.
You know what the greatest thing of all tis was? WE DID IT!!! No-one became really upset or impatient, everyone was thinking with us, people started chatting amongst eachother... and all in all it became a great event!
Next time we'll try and prepare better.