It was Saturday morning and I found myself rushing to be at Flying Dodo just in time. Oh, to be precise «not in time» but like 15 mins later than I expected to be, that is 09h45. The night before I got busy preparing the box of openSUSE goodies, sorted the stickers, pamphlets, DVDs and cheat sheets. Little I knew that folks would like those so much. I would tweet as I got the pack ready.

Shelly and I were the first geeks to reach Flying Dodo. While I would setup my laptop with the projector, she prepared the tables with the stickers and cheat sheets.

The first few geeks came shortly afterwards. Ronny and Ajay from the Linux User Group of Mauritius came along with their gear. Oh, this little gang from the University of Mauritius hopped in and yes we were under attack. We also received the visit of folks from the PHP Mauritius User Group.

The morning session was great. Ajay, Pritvi, Ronny and Avish helped people getting their laptop Tux’ed either with Ubuntu or with openSUSE. Meanwhile I got to run an interactive session with the university folks with a command-line walk-through.

There was a question about email headers. I showed email headers from my Gmail account and also from Thunderbird. We talked a little bit about IETF RFC 2822 and together we looked at some of those colon-separated field values. Ajay gave us a simple yet clear explanation on SPF and DKIM. We did a ‘dig’ on a couple few domains to read the TXT records. Ajay explained about hard-fail and soft-fail in the SPF records and how they affect delivery of email.

I tried answering other questions that popped up; covering various topics like SSH, file permissions, etc, and we had real fun during that interactive session.

Jeshan joined us later after his AWS Lambda presentation at Voilà Hotel and offered a little support to Ashmita who tried installing openSUSE (dual boot) on her laptop. Mission was successful! It was great to meet Bernard who got an Ubuntu dual-boot on his laptop and Nirvan Mahadooa who wanted to meet the Linux geeks. I really hope we can continue the geek chat at a later time folks.

I attended the presentation of the day. Loïc talked about the technology & media trends, about his trip to Austin and the SXSW event, and he explained how La Sentinelle Digital Ltd is opening its data with media.lasentinelle.mu.

Some of us stayed till dinner-time at Flying Dodo sharing «samousa», pizza and beer. Oh, Shelly and I had non-alcoholic drinks. :D