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April 2001 Newsletter of the
Front Range UNIX Users Group


Cndnsd Vrsn: 4 PM Thursday May 10th ACS Room 123- XML Update

Contents:


XML Update and Alphabet Soup Cook-Off-- Call for Participation

The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group (FRUUG) will be held at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday May 10th. In the three years since its definition, XML itself has not changed at all. However, there is an ongoing deluge of XML applications and related technologies. Our May 10 meeting will present an overview of several topics, like XSLT, XSLFO, SOAP, XP, Schema, XPointer, XPath, RDF, DOM1,2,3, SAX1,2, JDOM, XHTML, etc.

The speaker? You, hopefully! We are soliciting speakers to give short, five-minute presentations on their practical experience using XML or other XML-related technologies. Mark Carlson and Tom Cargill, FRUUG Executive Committee members, are preparing brief presentations and are coordinating volunteers.

So far, we have four additional speakers signed up to present their work at this meeting:

  • Uche Ogbuji, from FourThought: RDF
  • Jim Morgan, Freshwater Software: Crimson/Xalan
  • Tom Poindexter, Talus Technologies: XML/RPC
  • Mike Olsen, FourThought: SOAP

To participate, please send an e-mail to mac at fruug.org or cargill at fruug.org (at signs removed to prevent spamming)


Meeting Location

This meeting will be in room 123 of the CU Academic Computing Center building at Arapahoe and Marine Streets in Boulder. Marine St intersects Arapahoe at 38th St; the Computing Center is on the southwest corner.

See <http://www.fruug.org/announcement/index.html> for map

Happy 20th Birthday FRUUG!

This month marks the 20th anniversary of FRUUG's first meeting in April 1981. Now that FRUUG is no longer a teen-ager, we prepared a little writeup that talks about some of our history and where we've been right on top of new technical innovations-- and some embarrassing places where we weren't. Have a look at http://www.fruug.org/about/birthday.html and see what meetings you remember.

During our 20th birthday year, we'd like to get all of our old meeting announcements converted from old formats and put into our meeting archive. Please contact us if you'd like to volunteer to help.


Our Last Meeting

At our March meeting, Evi Nemeth of the University of Colorado, XOR, and the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) presented her most recent work measuring traffic to the Internet's DNS root servers, their performance, and problems in the DNS structure.

Evi's work involved two sets of measurements. At the University of California, San Diego, she was able to use an optical splitter to monitor all DNS client traffic from the university to the various root servers. Her optical splitter "takes only five percent of the light and 100 percent of the data." From this perspective, she was able to monitor performance of all the root servers queried from anywhere in the university, easily finding out which servers have problems, and in some cases helping the root server administrators to improve their performance. Evi shared with us her observations of "who's been naughty and who's been nice."

At the F root server, Evi managed to spend some time collecting 6 GB per hour of trace data and gaining a perspective on performance from the root server's perspective. More interesting than the performance information she presented was the shocking fact that 25 percent of the queries the servers received were bogus, highlighting the magnitude of the problem with software bugs and DNS server mis-configurations. She spent a significant amount of time categorizing the bogus queries, and showing how the bogus queries increased when a new version of Microsoft Windows were released-- and even tracking down a missing 'else' in their code that prevented their DNS server from ever caching responses to their queries. Some of the queries included ones with unroutable source addresses (like 10.1.1.1), queries asking for reverse lookups of private addresses, queries asking: "what's the IP address of 192.168.10.1," and queries with spoofed source addresses that were used as part of the denial-of-service attacks last winter. Evi tracked down many of these problems to bad default configurations in Windows; but to be fair she tracked down quite a few to UNIX operating system-hosted DNS servers as well.

Evi presented lots of interesting information that we hope to have on our site soon-- her work is currently submitted for publication and cannot be published by us before it is accepted. Stay tuned.

Notes and resources from our past meetings are available at http://www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.


Our Next Meeting

We're still working on our future meetings schedule, and may have a June meeting lined up on the ins and outs of the UNICODE standard.


FRUUG Library Notes

The search engines have been busily crawling through the new FRUUG site, and if you have an overdue book your name may be part of the information indexed. If you have a book from the FRUUG library, please return it to the next meeting or make arrangements to return it to us. We don't like to update our overdue books page, but if we must, we will.

New books from our publisher friends this month include:

From Addison Wesley:

  • Applying Use Cases, Second Edition, by Geri Schneider and Jason P. Winters
  • Building Parsers with Java, by Steven John Metsker
  • Effective Requirements Practices, by Ralph R. Young
  • Perl Debugged, by Peter Scott and Ed Wright
  • Writing CGI Applications with Perl, by Kevin Meltzer and Brent Michalski

From The USENIX Association:

  • Proceedings from the 6th USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'01), San Antonio, February 2001.

You may check out books using your business card as your library card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books are due at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out.

Remember that your FRUUG membership entitles you to discounts on your book orders from both New Riders Publishing and O'Reilly & Associates; refer to the FRUUG Web site for details.

Site Map Recruiter Info
February 15, 2009

February 2008: FRUUG Enters Quiescent Phase
After 27 years running, we're suspending operations.

Future Meetings:
None planned

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