February 26th was the day. On the evening of that day we organized the 7th meeting of the Netherlands OpenSolaris User Group. We were sort of on the rebound since originally this meeting was planned for January 29th. We had to postpone at the very latest moment though because both our speakers got sick.
This time however everything went well. More than well actually since Competa IT, who hosted us this time, really went out of their way to make this a perfect evening. Things that made this a near-perfect meeting were in my opinion:
- It was hosted at a non-SUN site, which
- attracted 20 (out of 40) people who had never been at an NLOSUG meeting before, and
- two non-SUN speakers presented on
- two non-really-technical subjects
I kicked-off the meeting (a tradition is developing here 
). After this, Rudi van Drunen of Competa IT did some explanation of the CACert Assurance Party we planned for the break. While people were digesting his info on certificates, SSL-for-your-own-domain and the way assurance points are assigned, Jacco van Achterberg of Inprove IT Infrastructure Solutions talked on the ZFS Scalable Enterprise Disk Storage solution developed by Inprove; his talk in its own peculiar way showed us not only the actual solution but also the power that comes from making stuff available as Open Source (like Sun did with OpenSolaris and ZFS) which in turn enables others to base solutions on that.
After the break, in which about 10 people got CACert Assured, Rudi delivered his second talk of the evening titled OpenSolaris for Everyday Use. Again, not deeply technical but very interesting because Rudi explained what happened to him when he tried to minimize OpenSolaris for embedded use in the nodes of the Wireless Leiden network.
We concluded the evening with drinks and snacks and lots of vivid conversations on, well, everything UNIX and OpenSolaris.
Here's a first impression (picture taken by Mike Hulsman, Competa IT):
