Presentation Guide

If you’d like to present what you are doing, tricks you’ve learned, or would like to practice for bigger events, we’d love to have you come and speak! Our meeting sizes vary based on the meeting topic. But, our attendence is usually 10+. Our meetings start at 7:00pm and have about 30 minutes of “gossip” time leading to the topic presentations and discussions.

So keep us in mind if you plan on being in Seattle any time soon and could spare an evening to chat with us.

Why present to SASAG?

We’re a bunch of fun-loving sysadmins that want to hear what you have to say. And, we go to a really good dinner during the meeting. We are looking for technical presentations. No sales pitches…ever.

Need a topic idea?

The key word is “technical”. Don’t hold back! Tell us about the guts of the system, bring slides with source-code, configuration files, etc. We can take it. And, inspight of what some people say, we do have a sense of humor, twisted as it is… We’re not interested in sales pitches. We’re the propeller-heads that sit in the back of the room during sales pitches making notes about how many times you mis-pronounced “FDDI”, chuckled when you mixed up the Session and Transport layers of the OSI protocol stack, and asked questions like, “Does it work behind a firewall” even before most people knew what “the Internet” is. …and we all hate the term “intranet”.

Nothing sells product to people like us like a good technical presentation.
Nothing keeps us away from your products like a salespitch. Got it?

Here’s a list of presentation ideas to help you get a clue of what we like have:

  • The ABCs of System Security (or Does anybody know why the server started talking like HAL?)
  • Plan 9 (or What happend to Plan B??)
  • OSF’s DCE, the real story (or I thought you said remote computing was going to solve the problems!)
  • PERL in ten easy steps (or What do you mean the script deleted the files BEFORE it archived them!!)
  • To firewall or not to firewall (or Don’t tell the boss that the main server is also the first host the world sees!)
  • Integrating the heterogenious environment (or If I’m at home and the boss is in Hawaii can we still do business?)
  • How To, Who To, and What To on system mailers (or Majordomo should’ve known better than to forward that message!)
  • Can we really have Novell and Unix in one subnet? (or Oh its a token ring, the token must have fallen out, quick find it!)
  • What Sys Admin’s can do for their user community (or DON’T give them your home number!)
  • Disk storage solutions with Network Appliance’s NFS server (or No, really, it doesn’t make toast!)
  • Do I have to do anything special?

    Glad you asked… We would like all of the presentations to be placed online in our meeting minutes. This would include copies of any overheads or slides presented. If you are presenting some new tools or using examples from programs the tools, scripts, etc. should also be placed on our web server as well. (Please do not present a topic that references some special scripts or programs that you have without including them in the distribution.) If you bring the files on a diskette and give it to one of our organizers, we would be extreamly grateful. Disks can be Mac, DOS, or Unix tar archives. Or you can ftp them to our site prior to, or after the meeting email an organizer for details. The basic requirements are:

  • Slides, overheads, etc. should be in (order of preference) HTML, GIF, JPEG, EPS, or PDF format
  • Programs should be in a compressed tar file (in thier appropriate directory structure, with the slides, overheads, etc. included in a directory called ‘docs/’)
  • We can provide the following for your presentation:

  • Overhead projector
  • More whiteboard space than you ever thought you’d see in one room
  • How much will I be paid?

    Nothing. We can’t afford to reemburse you for travel. However, you earn large amounts of good Karma, gain the knowledge that you helped the profession, and the spreading of your good name. It’s excellent exposure.

    When can I do it?

    Meetings are every month, on the second Thursday. Please examine the meetings page. If you will be in town on a specific date we might be able to re-arrange our schedule to accomidate (please only ask us to do this occassionally, our lives are already chaotic enough). Of course we would need to discuss if we wanted to do this so let us know well in advance please.

    GREAT! How do I sign up?

    If you are interested in speaking, please send email to the SASAG Meeting Coordinator (coordinator@sasag.org) to start the ball rolling. This page was orginally addapted from the $GROUPNAME SAGE local group serving the New Jersey area with grateful thanks. Check out thier home page too at http://www.groupname.org/.

    Seattle based special interest group for system and network administrators