Pythian Group

On June 17th, Pythian hosted the June of meeting of OVSAGE. This month, there was a presentation by Bill Stuart, CEO and VP Engineering , Karoly Molnar of Eseri. Eseri is a local Ottawa company that has integrated a full organization IT solution from the best of the world’s open source, from hosted Intranet to desktops to applications, and host it in the cloud for access on virtual desktops.

Essentially, Eseri provides an “office in a cloud”. Within the organizational cloud, clients have access to a wide range of tools, like wiki, documentation management and e-mail. All of the software used is proven open source products such as Ubuntu for the operating system, Evolution as the e-mail client and Mediawiki for the wiki.

The meeting focused on the technical aspects of Eseri’s offering. Eseri uses Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as the basis for its architechture. Access is provide using NoMachine client software.

There was much discussion about security, with Eseri emphasizing that each organization is a completely separate entity, with all data being kept with the organizational cloud. Access to the cloud is protected by multiple firewalls. In addition each server/desktop has it’s own firewall enabled.

There was also a great deal of discussion about the tools Eseri applications and how these applications are upgraded. There was much interest in this area since some of the applications that Eseri provides (i.e. Drupal) have complex upgrade paths.

OVSAGE’s next meeting is scheduled for July 17th.

Pythian is hosting the February meeting of the Ottawa Valley System Admistrators Guild (OVSAGE). This free event is open to all those interested in System Administration.

Date

Thursday February 18, 2010

Time

Start: 19:00
End: 21:30

Location

Pythian Headquarters
Suite 261
1200 St. Laurent Blvd.
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada

Directions

From the Queensway, take the St. Laurent exit and proceed north. Read the rest of this entry . . .

On Thursday, January 21, Pythian hosted the Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE) Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE).

The highlight of the meeting was an interesting presentation on security by the founder of OVSAGE, Scott Murphy. The focus was on the fact that security is a mindset, not a product. Scott’s presentation looked at a large number of security issues and explained in detail while technology alone cannot fix security issues. The presentation was a response to the Amrit Williams Blog post Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It.

Scott’s presentation can be viewed here: security-quagmire-pdf. I hope you find it useful.