[CDBUG-talk] Introduction and Questions

[Patrick Muldoon]

On Sep 6, 2012, at 9:34 AM, "Stephan, Richard" <RStephan at nyiso.com> wrote:

> I have just joined the Capital District BSD Users Group mailing list.  I would like to introduce myself and ask a few questions.

>  
> Introduction:
> I have been a computer professional for many years.  Most of my time I have spent working as an Oracle database administrator on VMS, Tru64, AIX, and Solaris.  Showing my age with DEC’s (a company that hasn’t existed since 1998) VMS and Tru64 OSes.


Welcome, and thanks for the intro… 

>  
> In 2005 I was introduced to PostgreSQL.  After researching and experimenting with it, I became a fan and advocate.  I started the Capital District’s PostgreSQL Users Group (http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/NYCDPUG) and even authored a few documents for the community:
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_for_Oracle_DBAs
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Simple_Configuration_Recommendation
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Database_Schema_Recommendations_for_an_Application
> Unfortunately, those of us attending the PUG meetings decided to disband due to lack of interest.

Extremely cool, we are just in the midst of migrating over to a Postgresql for our core Databases, finally retiring the M$ Sql Server Infrastructure that we've had for the last decade or so. 

>  
> At home I run FreeBSD for my personal PostgreSQL and Tomcat servers.  ZFS may not be the highest performing file system, but its data integrity, snapshot, and integrated volume management features are very attractive to me.

at work save for the aforementioned legacy sql servers, we are pretty much all FreeBSD, save for a couple token Centos  boxes that run Cpanel.   At home FreeBSD and OpenBSD for servers/firewalls.  

I going to start playing more with ZFS once I get some better hardware at home.  At work we are all NetAPP.

>  
> Questions:
> How active is the CDBUG?  Do you still meet?  If so, when and where?

Well We're not quite dead yet.   As for meeting we used to Meet at our (INOC's) offices, and we can meet there again if we wanted something formal.  We have the normal stuff in our conference room, projector, screen, whiteboard, arcade game, etc.. :) 

>  
> Does anyone have a recommendation for commercial support for FreeBSD?  There are many listed on the FreeBSD website, but none stick out …http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/


Alas we don't make use of any commercial support, as we have found the community to be an awesome  source of support, but being a Service Provider, and both of us main geeks having years (10+) of BSD experience we haven't run into many issues that we haven't been able to solve. But I know how big companies like necks to ring :) 

-Patrick 

--
Patrick Muldoon
Network/Software Engineer
INOC (http://www.inoc.net)
PGPKEY (http://www.inoc.net/~doon)
Key ID: 0x370D752C

Don't mind me...I'm just sniffing your packets