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I for one found day one of LinuxExpo a tad disappointing. Still all clouds have a silver lining, and I bumped into various Devon and Cornwall LUG members. Although it may have been quicker not to go to London for this. A few highlights from day one did catch my attention..... Fortress firewall, a packet filtering firewall, using IPTables. Whilst nothing unusual about that, they had organised to have per port bandwidth limiting (Apparently it is in iproute2 somewhere), and had some PC's crammed with LOTS of 4 port Ethernet cards.... Okay it doesn't fit my idea of a firewall for the corporate LAN - but I can imagine some ISPs liking this kind of device. Did not pick their brains on performance of the box, but filed the business card for future use. IBM has a rather dull exhibit - but a wonderful video of a wristwatch running Linux and X Windows... The IBM Research logo was very prominent, so It may be a while before this one hits Dixons. Kyzo an embedded Linux vendor gave me a CD with their distros to try. They were into the software aspects of embedding, apparently on the hardware side it is really easy, just plug a compact flash into your IDE port (Amongst other solutions). Will have a play and let you know how I get on. Debian had a busy stand, and were flogging CD's (and t-shirts) like hot potatoes *8-) Lot of talk about clustering. I'd still be a tad wary of using PC hardware for high availability clustering but clearly it is beginning to happen. Call me conservative, but hey your suppose to be conservative when building highly available systems. The High Availability talk by Denver was a bit basic for my tastes, and spent a long time explaining what a "cluster" was, and very little explaining what "High Availability" means (Questions like "how do I upgrade without downtime" never got reached). When quizzed at the end, the guy clearly knew his stuff, so maybe it was my expectations. It was hot, and Olympia doesn't have (or it wasn't working) air con, nor does the underground, if George Bush is junking Kyoto we need to start spending money to cope - first we need air-con to keep cool, and then we'll need heaters for when the Artic melts completely (It's already shrunk enormously) and the gulf stream breaks down. The Expo registration seems to have gone to pot. Getting home I found an e-mail to "Mr Osbourne"<sic> saying "We hope you can attend LinuxExpo", which was sent 2 hours after I got there and found my registration details weren't on the computer, despite having a print out showing them!? But then the registration webserver, and the e-mail server for LinuxExpo both appear to be running Microsoft operating systems...... Simon -- Are you using the Internet to best effect ? www.eighth-layer.com Tel: +44(0)1395 232769 ICQ: 116952768 Moderated discussion of teleworking at news:uk.business.telework -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.