On 1/17/06, Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@thenilgiris.com wrote:
i suggest making a brochure showing the huge amounts of money that can be made and are being made configuring clusters, farms, mail servers and whatnot - rope in a few of the lug members with strings of degrees after their names, or ceos of companies and offer a one/two day program to teach hardware ppl how to do all this. I dont know going rates in mumbai, but charge them enough so it hurts a bit. The money could be used to pay the speakers/trainers and defray the expenditure
Will not work. Most people will not configure clusters and mailservers everyday. Besides it is not easy to teach this. Most of these activities are not trivial and require specialised knowledge which is diffcult to impart in a few days. Musch of the knowledge comes through years of experience in these fields. Unleashing a group of experts on clueless h/w vendors is a really bad idea. They are hardware vendors and not cluster/farm consultants for a reason. They deal with h/w only. The target group could be a sysadmins/academic people (basically students/RA who maintain their internal college networks).
There are a number of conferences dedicated to these fields. An example of this is SANOG which is directed towards people who work in ISPs or USENIX and LISA which is directed towards people who do large scale and enterprise scale deployments or WWWcon ...etc . Also organising a conference/workshop is a lot more work than you imagine.
--> Vinayak H