Donald Neal wrote:

At some stage a formal(ish) call for presentations should be issued. Before that, could people who are likely to attend please tell me what sort of topics they'd be interested in? Volunteers to present are, of course, welcome.

I'd like to see a few practical type presentations from people, things like "How we use Oracle and BitKeeper to maintain our router configs" sort of things. A couple of people I talked to at Uniforum had some cools ways of installing and maintaining their servers for example[1] . I've seen a few technical type conferences where they have 5 or 10 minute talks on short topics. This might be a good thing for people to stand up and give a quick talk on "p2p kazaa proxy servers " or "Trends in errors in Herald IT articles" or something. So if you know something that other people might be interested in but you don't want to talk for a whole hour then you could do one of those. Maybe something about IPV6 or Multicast telling people why they should deploy it on their networks from a revenue perspective :) How about someone from Telecom giving a bit of a talk on IPnet, how it's designed, how ADSL and dialup gets from the customer to the ISP etc? Most of us have to interact with it but I've only picked up the odd bit here and there rather than a nice outline (including how each dept (NCC, Netgate, CRC etc) fits in) . [2] VOIP seems to be getting a bit more mature now so maybe a talk or two in that area. [1] One thing I noticed from Uniforum was that a lot of people run "Debian everywhere except for the Oracle Servers" , Interesting trend to see since Debian doesn't get much press. [2] Someone will probably give the URL for the uptodate document that does this now. -- Simon J. Lyall. | Very Busy | Mail: simon(a)darkmere.gen.nz "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.