LUGFest II
LUG Fest II Wrapup
By Orv Beach
In anticipation of a bigger crowd than LUGFest I, we set up 3 rows of tables in the Nortel cafeteria, each row forty feet long. We swiped all the folding tables we could find, moved the round tables out of the way, and even swiped errr borrowed some more tables from one of the training rooms. Power strips and LAN cables were laid out underneath them. All that was done Friday night. Saturday morning tablecloths were put on the tables and we finished up the network cabling. We had to go the overhead route to get network services to the center table row, but it worked fine. By about 11:30 we were mostly ready to go; most of the vendors and demo'ers had already set up.
Some people had no problems with DHCP; others couldn't make it work at all, and others wound up with an address of 0.0.0.0. Since we have no problem in the building with it with Windows and Solaris, I assume that having various dhcp clients may be the reason. Those who had problems were assigned static IP addresses.
At noon, the official opening time, we already had forty two people in the cafeteria. Many Linux vendors donated stuff for giveway and raffles. Vendors who came with their wares were Corel, eLinux.com, VMware, Loki Entertainment, and Magic Software. All the demo'ers showed up except Craig, who was stricken by the flu. As penance for not coming, Craig will do his firewall presentation at the next FOUR SCLUG meetings :-)
Luke Leighton, one of the principal coders of Samba-TNG, came in from the east coast. Darryl Strauss, an XFree86 4.0 driver coders came out to do demos and talk about XFree86 in general. Michael Elkins, the author of Mutt was there too, and members of various local LUGs gave cool demos on various Linux subjects. LILAX, SGVLUG, LULA, and SCLUG were represented but that's probably an incomplete list.
The crowd grew slowly until about three p.m. when it peaked. At that point the cafeteria was close to maxxed out for the tables as we had them laid out. I left the ladder at one end of the cafeteria, and climbed it in an attempt to do a head count. I got about 90, but with that many people milling around, I easily could have missed a half dozen or so!
The crowd slowly shrunk after that and at six p.m. when the LUGfest ended, there were about two dozen people left. Over the course of the afternoon, I estimate that 140-150 different people came through the LUGFest. That's about double LUGFest I.
We had people come to the LUGFest from Orange County, Santa Barbara, Santa Clarita, the South Bay area, and all points in between.
Lessons learned.
- Get more help setting up!
- Buy more pizza! We made two pizza orders from Poppa Johns, one at noon and one in the mid-afternoon, totalling 22 pizzas, which were scarfed in almost zero time. Poppa Johns no longer has trouble finding Nortel Networks :-)
- Bring paper plates for the pizza; napkins don't really cut it.
- Split out the power strips better; we poppped one thermal overload on the head power strip in a string of four supporting forty feet worth of computers and big monitors.\
- Six hours is too long for the LUGFest; four to five would be better.
- It was suggested that next time we gather a bit of info from visitors to see where they're coming from, what their interests are, etc.
Everyone agreed that it was an excellent show. I queried the vendors and they all told me that there was more than enough attendance to make it worth their time to come. The question most frequently asked was "When's the next one?" It'll probably be in October, but if the attendance doubles again, we're in trouble :-)
I took a couple dozen photos during the LUGFest. I'll get them to Gareth in the next couple of days and have him post them on the web page.
Thanks to all who participated in making LUGFest II a roaring success!
- Orv -