A talk presented by Anthony Johnston on PHP and it's use in building dynamic data-driven web sites. Topics covered included the use of databases (MySQL and Access) and different methods for connecting to and building sites with databases were discussed.

A talk presented by Justin Moore and Philip Varner on Legion and Centurion.

Legion is an object-based, meta-systems software project at UVA. From the project's beginning in late 1993, the Legion Research Group's goal has been a highly usable, efficient, and scalable system founded on solid principles. The system addresses key issues such as scalability, programming ease, fault tolerance, security, site autonomy, etc. Legion is designed to support large degrees of parallelism in application code and manage the complexities of the physical system for the user.

Centurion is the Legion Project's testbed at UVa. It currently consists of 128 533 MHz DEC Alphas and 128 Dual 400 MHz Pentium2 boxes, altogether providing 240 +GFlops of peak computing power, 64 GB of RAM (total), and over 1.7 TB of disk space (total). Needless to say, such an impressive collection of equipment presents its own unusual challenges for administration, security, upgrade issues, and hardware problems.

A talk presented by Phil Scarr on DNS and NIS. This short talk described the history and structure of each as well as gave examples of how to configure and maintain them.

DNS and NIS are both name services which perform similar but different roles in the Unix realm. DNS, the Domain Name System/Service is the glue which holds the Internet namespace together. Without it, Sun would have no dot com ad campaign and Bill Gates wouldn't have an acronym to steal. (DNS = Digital Nervous System at Microsoft!) NIS (Network Information System), on the other hand, provides a comprehensive set of database tables with critical system information for Unix systems to draw upon and share.

A talk presented by Edgar F. Hilton on the Real Time Controls Laboratory and its present application towards the suspension of a flexible rotor in a magnetic bearing. The Real Time Controls Laboratory is a controller implementation platform which gives controls engineers real time access to plant and controller information, as well as to all controller parameters. The cost of this system is limited to the cost of a personal computer and the I/O boards as this system and the underlying operating system is completely open source. Furthermore, this system is distributed and organic, so that it can be ported to the latest hardware.

A talk presented by Brian Mays (from Daniel Quinlan's slides) on version 2.0 of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which is a set of requirements and guidelines for file and directory placement under UNIX-like operating systems. Topics covered included the history and purpose of the FHS, the Unix filesystem, and recent changes in the standard.

A PDF file of the slides (150k) is available.

A talk presented by Sean Michael Whipkey (with Patrick Reynolds) on tips for building a local area network (LAN) at home. This was a nuts-and-bolts talk listing the requirements for building the network and getting it up and running and highlighting several common pitfalls that should be avoided.

A talk presented by Craig Metz on the history, strengths, and weaknesses of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, and Linux.

A talk presented by Adrian Filipi-Martin on the web server. Topics covered included Server Side Includes (SSI), Virtual Hosts, and Performance Monitoring.

A PDF file of the slides (95k) is available.