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

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

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.).

Google's Native Client project seeks to provide high-performance, cross-platform, browser-based applications yet allow them to be "untrusted". Performance is in the form of x86 binary code while Security comes from a dual layer sandbox. In this talk I'll overview the goals of the project, how it works, why you might care plus give a demo of a few Native Client applications.

A panel of NBLUG members will discuss cool shell tools. We will delve into tools like screen, mutt, vim, and others.

In the beginning there were only the mainframes. Administration only
required configuration of one system. Users accessed the mainframe from
dumb terminals. Everyone had access to the same resources and had the same
software, because everyone was on the same system. Then came the personal
computer. Users all got their own systems, and system administration
became exponentially more difficult. LTSP gives us a way to get the
terminal server, singular administration and control we admins want and

OpenVPN - Adding Trust to Untrusted Networks

Virtual Private Networks allow you to connect two networks securely.

A traveler with a laptop frequently uses a random internet connection but
wants to connect securely to a home or office network.

Traditional solutions are not well suited to the random connections of the
traveler with a laptop.

OpenVPN is a versatile cross-platform open source solution that's easy to set up.

This presentation will have an overview of the lingo and components of VPN and
a how-to demonstration of an OpenVPN server and laptop client.