(Or “What Adrian’s been playing with this week”)

As most of you will be aware, Intrepid Ibex, the newest update to Ubuntu, was released last week. Overall there are only minor improvements on Hardy Heron, Intrepid does come with some new versions of some interesting systems.

One of these in particular is Virt-Manager. Virt-Manager is a GUI front end for several hypervisors. Currently it supports Xen, QEMU and KVM. While possibly not suitable for large scale or server environments, Virt-Manager does make playing with virtual machines incredibly easy. I’ll be focusing on using Virt-Manager with KVM and VirtIO.

Having the flexibility of a virtual environment to play in has allowed me to try out a heap of software, systems and distributions which otherwise would have been painful and time consuming. I intend to demonstrate a couple that I’ve come across in the past week, including FreeNAS and Nexenta.

On an entirely different tack, I’ve been having a play with some games which are packaged and available in Ubuntu, namely Open Arena, Alien Arena and Tremulous. If all goes well, we should be able to have a play of these on the big-screen.

Lastly, I’d like to hold a bit of a discussion on an idea I’ve been thinking about lately; Distributed Network Monitoring. I’ll elaborate more on my idea during the presentation and will be looking for some feed back on its usefulness and viability.

(It should be noted that I haven’t actually prepared any of this, so don’t expect slides or any in-depth knowledge on any of the above topics! Patrick only approached me on tuesday to fill in.)

Adrian is a Systems Engineer at iiNet. At iiNet he deals with the email network, ADSL network and security. Adrian currently holds the title of “Most prolific PLUG presenter”, having previously presented “All the wonders of LDAP revealed!!! (Eggs and all major vegetables accepted.)”, “Samba Networking”, “Everything you ever wanted to know about VoIP, SIP and Asterisk, but didn’t know who to phone”, “Virtual Email Hosting” and “Network Monitoring”.