The U.C.S.C Long Marine lab includes the 'costalab', where I work
taking care of 4 servers, mostly Ubuntu, and a few windows desktops.

The costalab studies marine mammals and birds all over the world.
Google on 'costalab' to find out more about what we do.

About half of the talk will be specific to the costalab work - what
information the researchers collect, how it is stored and analyzed,
the benefits to the world from this research, etc. This should be of
interest to a much wider audience than linux gurus.

The rest of the talk will be about our Ubuntu servers, how they are

This month we are going to do something a little different. Instead of having a formal presentation, we are going to experiment with a "Hackfest." What this means is that we will have free-form lightning talks for up to the first half of the meeting, and then reserve the last half of the meeting so everyone can hack on things or just sit around and chat about Linux. The lightning talks are open to anyone so if you have something interesting you have been working on and could present on it for 5-10 minutes, we will have a sign-up sheet for you at the beginning of the meeting.

Just when you had gotten used to using GRUB instead of LILO, Ubuntu goes and changes GRUB to GRUB2. It turns out that the similarities between the two boot loaders end at the name. In this talk Kyle will go over the differences between GRUB and GRUB2 and discuss the new configuration files, which files you should and shouldn't touch, and why the Esc key no longer works at boot time. There will be a group counseling session at the end of the meeting for disaffected users.

Joomla is a content management system (CMS), which enables you to build multi-user Web sites quickly. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular free and open source Web site software available. Joomla, which operates on top of a LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP-perl), is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes.

Second Life (SL) is like a MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role
Playing Game), although many of the people hanging out there will be
offended if you called it a “game”. It is a 3D virtual environment
created between a database on a huge farm of Linux servers and viewer
programs running on home PCs. But besides the bare simulated ground,
everything in SL is created by one of the “residents” there. Objects
in SL can have snippets of code inserted in them to add behavior. I
have found this to be a fascinating environment to program in. I'll

Every year or so you hear about how the Internet is about to run out of IPv4 addresses. When that happens we will all need to be able to migrate to IPv6. In this talk Owen will discuss what IPv6 is and cover how to use IPv6 from a sysadmin perspective.

This talk is a continuation of my previous talk on localhost
troubleshooting. In this talk, however, I will discuss common methods
to troubleshoot networking problems on Linux. I will work from Layer 1
(physical connection) all the way up to routing and if time permits,
some DNS troubleshooting as well.

At 23 years, gnuplot is one of the oldest free and open
source programs out in the wild world. It runs anywhere and
everywhere. It's an interactive, text-based plotting program that's
quite easy to use, and yet can produce surprisingly complex plots.
Many features of gnuplot are shown in a live demo.

Slides and notes available at http://nblug.org/presentations/gnuplotTalk/

Cross Site Scripting is the #1 form of attack used in the web world
today. The attack vector usually comes in the form of some sort of
enticement in a forum posting with a bogus link, or a bogus email which
fools the victim into thinking they're doing something to protect
themselves (i.e. changing their online banking password, etc.).

Many Websites mix secure and insecure content on the same page, like
Facebook. This makes it possible to steal all the data entered on such a
page easily, using Moxie Marlinspike's SSLstrip tool. I will explain and
demonstrate this attack.

Slowloris is a very new layer 7 denial-of-service attack created by RSnake
that stops Apache web servers completely with very low bandwidth--one packet
every 2 seconds. The Apache developers were notified of this vulnerability
and decided it was unimportant and not worth patching. I will explain and