[svlug] Donations for Speaker in January or February 2013

[Mehma Sarja]

Hi All,

We have the opportunity to get a speaker who is a founder of the pfSense 
firewall, Chris Buechler. Since he is not local, he is asking if we can 
come up with a part of his expenses for a flight and hotel totaling 
around $600. We have pledges of 120 - thanks to the volunteers of this 
group, and am wondering if the greater SVLUG community can come up with 
180 to make an offer of covering half his expenses.

We can call the fundraising "Chris Buechler's day off".... or not.

Here are a few words from Chris:

"I can get to SJC direct on Southwest for about $375 round trip from here.
Add in 1 hotel night and probably looking at roughly $550-600 for me
to get there. On its own, that's more than I could pay to speak at a
LUG (money for such marketing events is money we can't spend on open
source development), and I know you generally have no budget to bring
in speakers. So I'm thinking one of two things, if you either happen
to have some source of funding to help reduce the cost I could make it
happen then, or otherwise I can get in touch the next time I'm going
to be out there anyway for something else, a customer visit or
conference or similar, and schedule it into such a trip where I'll
already be there. I believe meetBSD will happen in November 2013
again."


According to an astute member, thank you astute member, of SVLUG, 
pfSense is...

It's a specialised BSD distribution (based on FreeBSD) for firewall /
router duty, with a built-in slick Web-based configurator.  The string
'pf' in the name 'pfSense' is the name of a BSD-kernel-specific
low-level packet-filter (thus 'pf') tool that was developed originally
by the OpenBSD Project.  The name specific 'pfSense' is intended to
suggest that the distribution 'makes sense of' (makes user-accessible)
the functionality of pf's rule-mechanism.

Here's a good article about it:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/diy-pfsense-firewall-system-beats-others-for-features-reliability-and-security/1110


-- 
Yudhvir
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