OpenVPN at ManLUG

I gave my “Adventures with OpenVPN” talk at ManLUG today, after a re-jigging of the timetable and several rewrites of my slides in S5. I’d been meaning to give a talk at some point because we haven’t had many speakers recently and I felt it was about time that I chipped in having been a member of the group for over four years, plus several people had expressed an interest in the topic.

I was a bit nervous initially as most people at ManLUG far more about most aspects of system administration than I do, but I think I managed to answer the majority of the questions without too much trouble. Thankfully no one asked about the low level details of VPN implementations, which is the one area where my knowledge is almost non-existent. Most impressively, I actually managed to run to time, which is unusual as I generally finish talks far too quickly. There was a good turnout, which was encouraging, and I got some positive feedback afterwards, plus I learnt quite a bit from the questions and points raised by the audience.

Elsewhere, things are moving along reasonably well. I’ve helped to organise and publicise a talk by Richard Stallman of Free Software Foundation fame at the University of Manchester on the 1st May. Full details at Manchester Free Software, where I have been nominated as “minute taker, for life” (I’m not sure this is a good thing). Provided the BCS manage to book a large enough lecture theatre, it should be a successful event, with people coming from Leeds, York and other areas outside of Manchester. Finding a place for Stallman to stay had been giving me some sleepless nights, but thankfully Paul Robinson stepped into the breach, for which I am eternally grateful. I’m now looking forward to the event, hopefully it should be an interesting evening as well as an opportunity to catch up with people I haven’t seen for a while.