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2014-11-11 meeting: Secure Server Deployments in Hostile Territory

by Allan Cecil

When: November 11th, 2014 7:30 pm Speaker: Kyle Rankin Location: O'Reilly Media at 1005 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA in the Tarsier conference room past the metal statue and to the right (http://nblug.org/locations) Title: Secure Server Deployments in Hostile Territory Description: It's easy to secure your servers when they are in the safe confines of your own data center, but deploying servers in the cloud is like dropping them from a helicopter into a jungle across enemy lines without so much as an IP address. This talk will cover how to use Puppet to harden cloud servers including certificate and key management, protecting secrets on your hosts, managing dynamic IPs, and overall security best practices. While a few tips will be specific to Puppet and Amazon AWS, most of the techniques would apply in just about any environment.

10 years, 1 month

General meeting October 14th: Open Conferences

by Allan Cecil

When: October 14th, 2014 7:30 pm Speaker: Kevin Ablett Location: O'Reilly Media at 1005 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA in the Tarsier conference room past the metal statue and to the right (http://nblug.org/locations) Description: I just spent the last 2 days at Agile Open Northern California. This talk has nothing to do with Linux directly. I intend to talk some about the sessions I attended, but more about the concept of Open Conferences in general.

10 years, 2 months

General meeting September 9th: The Raspberry Pi used to Implement a Radar Speed Sign

by Allan Cecil

When: September 9th, 2014 7:30 pm Speaker: Steve Goody Location: O'Reilly Media at 1005 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA in the Tarsier conference room past the metal statue and to the right (http://nblug.org/locations) Description: I will give a brief talk about how we used a modified Pocket Radar unit, a Raspberry Pi board, and an HDTV to implement a radar speed sign. The talk will include a brief overview of how the Pocket Radar works and what modifications were done to interface it to the Raspberry Pi. In addition, I'll explain a little about the webpage development and how it is run on the Raspberry Pi. Also, I'll cover what software was used on the Raspberry Pi, along with what configuration file changes where done. I will bring a demo system so that people can see the sign in operation.

10 years, 3 months

GENERAL MEETING Lightning Talks / Hackfest / GPG Key Signing

by E Frank Ball III

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 GENERAL MEETING Lightning Talks / Hackfest / GPG Key Signing When: Tue Aug 12, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM Coordinator: Frank Ball Location: O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol CA Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don't have enough material for a full talk? Here's your chance. Talk about anything Linux related. Hackfest: Bring your hardware to get help with it or just to show it off. GPG Key Signing Party: The point of this is to create a web of trust. By signing someone's public key, you state that you have checked that the person that uses a certain keypair, is who he says he is and really is in control of the private key. This way a complete network of people who trust each other can be created. This network is called the Strongly connected set. Information about it can be found at http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/ Before the meeting: Create a GPG keypair, upload your public key to a keyserver, print out the fingerprint, mail it to me (frank(a)nblug.org) and bring copies to the meeting. Details: 1) Generate a public/private keypair with the "ssh-keygen" command (no arguments required), see "man ssh-keygen" for more info. 2)Upload your key to a keyserver: "gpg --send-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com <Key ID>" 3) Print out the key "fingerprint" with "gpg --fingerprint <ID or eMail address>". Also include your full name, email address, and Key ID#. Bring this to the meeting, and optionally make extra copies to hand out. 4) email me at frank(a)nblug.org with the fingerprint, email, full name, and Key ID. I'll have a list of everyone's info to hand out. During the meeting: Verify your GPG key fingerprint on the list I hand out and verify your identity (with photo ID). After the meeting: Download the keys for the fingerprints verified at the meeting, add them to your keyring, sign them, and upload your key again. More info: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GnuPrivacyGuardHowto http://cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/keysigning_party/en/keysigning_party.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlPb55wACgkQXGHLcrgN+chg9wCglMrZtTEe589wfr4fwMkwmz7j vBkAn1G2sfKCH8qgM+Yado9WmsM7BqXK =HBVY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

10 years, 4 months

General Meeting July 8th: Tails

by Allan Cecil

When: July 8th, 2014 7:30 pm Speaker: Kyle Rankin Location: O'Reilly Media at 1005 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA in the Tarsier conference room past the metal statue and to the right (http://nblug.org/locations) Description: With everything we know now about spying and hacking from the hacker next to you in the coffee shop all the way to government surveillance, now's as good a time as any to learn how to protect your privacy and anonymity. The Tails project provides a live bootable disk that sets up a secure anonymous session on any computer with all traffic routed over Tor. In this talk Kyle will discuss how to download and verify the latest Tails release, and demonstrate some of the more advanced features of Tails including its persistent encrypted storage.

10 years, 5 months

June 10th general meeting - Emerge: Putting your processor to the grindstone

by Allan Cecil

When: June 10th, 2014 7:30 pm Speaker: Glenn Kerbein Location: O'Reilly Media at 1005 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA in the Tarsier conference room past the metal statue and to the right (http://nblug.org/locations) Description: Following in line with the prior talks about package managers, it seems almost natural to ponder about our other distribution choices. Gentoo GNU/Linux offers its own package manager using its own method of obtaining software: Portage. This talk will discuss what Gentoo is, how Portage works, what it does, and some nifty tools.

10 years, 6 months

May Meeting: How to build RPMs

by E Frank Ball III

When: May 13th, 2014 7:30 pm Speaker: Frank Ball Location: O'Reilly Media Building custom RPM packages and setting up a yum repo. How to build custom RPM packages for Fedora, RedHat Enterprise, CentoOS, Oracle Linux, Scientific Linux, Suse, and other RPM based linux distributions. Creating the spec file and package building. Also how to setup a yum repository to distribute your packages. Frank Ball frankb(a)frankb.us

10 years, 7 months

General meeting April 8th - SteamOS

by Allan Cecil

Start: 2014-04-08 7:30 pm End: 2014-04-08 ~9:00 pm Speaker: Allan Cecil Location: O'Reilly Media Description: I'll be firing up my SteamOS box (built from various pieces I cobbled together) and demonstrating this distribution based on Debian Wheezy that's designed for a 10-foot experience, i.e. sitting on a couch. I'll be showing how Valve configured the OS and how XBMC and even Netflix support can be added. I'm almost positive there will be some 4-player local co-op going on by the end of the meeting. In other words, expect a live demo - there's no need for slides for *this* presentation! :) If you happen to have a wired controller that you'd like to try in the form of a "plugfest" (such as an Xbox 360 controller or an old DualShock USB controller), please feel free to bring it with you. Also, if anyone has a projector that can do better than 800x600, please let me know / bring it along. See you there!

10 years, 8 months

General meeting March 11 - Linux in School: Starting Kids Early

by Allan Cecil

Start: 2014-02-11 7:30 pm End: 2014-02-11 ~9:00 pm Speaker: Jordan Erickson Location: O'Reilly Media Description: Kids are exposed to computers and other technology very early in school. What better place to demonstrate the benefits of Linux and Open Source Software than here? Speaker Jordan Erickson will talk about his experiences with helping bring Linux to several local Sonoma County schools and after school programs, and how you can do the same.

10 years, 9 months

State of the LUG

by Allan Cecil

Greetings, As President of the North Bay Linux User's Group, I would like to take an opportunity to send out a State of the LUG update which is something that hasn't happened in a long time (if ever). The goal of this E-Mail is to update all members about our current status in all areas of importance and to encourage further discussion about the future of NBLUG in the Talk list. Here are some TL;DR numerical highlights about the state of NBLUG in 2014: 460 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Announce list 273 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Talk list 436 Talk list E-Mails were sent in 2013 (down from 897 in 2008) ~12 members attend each meeting as of 2014 (down from ~30 in 2008) 6 of 6 board seats are filled now with 1 seat likely opening in July 3,466 hits were registered at http://nblug.org in the last 3 days ~10 people are in the #nblug Freenode IRC channel at any given time $145.73 is in the NBLUG cashbox secured by our treasurer 3 years have passed since a non-member not named Alison presented Important information: Please contact us at speakers(a)nblug.org if you know of someone who would be willing to present on a Linux or open-source related topic (more details below). NBLUG general meetings are held on the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 7:00 in O'Reilly's Tarsier meeting room at 1005 Gravenstein HW N. in Sebastopol, CA. O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com) additionally sponsors NBLUG by providing two raffle books at each meeting for attendees as well as a free book of of a speaker's choice if they request one. Sonic.net (http://sonic.net) sponsors NBLUG by hosting our racked http://nblug.org server in their Santa Rosa datacenter. On behalf of the board, I would like to publicly thank our sponsors for their continued support which enables us to operate without ongoing membership dues or donation drives. Mailing lists: Our mailing lists have remained fairly static for the last year, with around 460 people subscribed to the Announce list (at http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce) and around 273 people subscribed to the Talk list (at http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk). Since the Talk list was established on 1999-06-08 there have been a total of 14,370 E-Mails sent. The busiest year was 2003, when 3,511 E-Mails were sent. The slowest full year was 2011, when only 165 E-Mails were sent. A total of 436 E-Mails were sent last year. I've provided full statistics at the end of this E-Mail for those who are interested. General meetings: Attendance at the monthly general meetings has declined significantly since 2008. As an example from the logbook, on 2008-04-08 a total of 24 people signed in while on 2013-04-09 only 10 people signed in. While we encourage everyone to show up early and write their names in the logbook to be eligible for the monthly book raffles it is not uncommon for a fair number of people to bypass signing in (which is potentially influenced by the security-minded nature of our membership, to whom I would encourage signing in with an X instead). At the 2014-02-11 meeting only 8 people signed the logbook but I remember counting 13 people in the room. Based on some quick looking at the logbook and adjusting for people not signing in I estimate that attendance in 2008 likely averaged about 30 people while 2013 attendance likely averaged around 12 people per meeting. Anecdotally, it's been several months since we've had to move the tables and set up the chairs in rows. NBLUG Board: The current board as elected during the November 2013 general meeting consists of Allan Cecil (President), E. Frank Ball III (Vice-President), Michael Tucker (Scribe), Matt Da Silva (Treasurer), Tom Most (Board Member at Large), and Morio Sakaguchi (Board Member at Large). Our next scheduled elections will be during the November 2014 meetings. However, Michael Tucker indicated at the time he was elected that he would be moving away from the area around July. Per Section 3 of our bylaws (http://nblug.org/bylaws), at that time the board may choose to elect a person to fill in as an Acting Scribe until the next election. Any such action will be announced at that time. NBLUG website: The official NBLUG website at http://nblug.org has seen a continual flow of traffic, with 3,466 hits registered on the homepage in the last three days alone. However, a significant portion of this traffic appears to be bots based on other uninteresting linked pages with high hits, so the statistics are likely very skewed. At this time, the only content that is reliably accessible on nblug.org is the last few years of events and a few static pages such as our bylaws. We know that a Drupal update at some point caused a large number of pages to become unlinked and generally difficult to find, including past meeting minutes notes. The NBLUG board is discussing ways to improve the state of the website and server and at this time Tom Most is leading the investigation into how to proceed. The first priority is to ensure the information presented is up-to-date on all pages (at this time, http://nblug.org/membership/ in particular is extremely inaccurate). Other priorities include forwarding the old NBLUG mirror folder at http://mirror.nblug.org/ to point to Sonic's mirrors at http://mirrors.sonic.net/. IRC channel: NBLUG has an IRC channel at #nblug on the Freenode network (chat.freenode.net). My own logs seem to indicate that chat volume dipped to its lowest levels early last year when conversations happened less than once a week, but activity has increased substantially in the last few months. As of 2014 there are usually 10 nicks logged in to the channel at any given time, and there has been active conversation most days in the past few weeks. It should be noted that these statistics are somewhat anecdotal in the absence of reliable logs; at one point a webpage of statistics existed but I have been unable to locate it. Cash balance: The NBLUG cashbox contains exactly $145.73 as of 2014-02-25 when the balance was confirmed by our Treasurer and holder of the cashbox, Matt Da Silva. The last expenditure I am aware of from the NBLUG general fund was a hard drive for the NBLUG server in 2004 (with pledges for that effort tracked anonymously at http://nblug.org/hddpledge). Because O'Reilly generously sponsors NBLUG by providing us with a room to meet in and Sonic.net provides hosting for our website our expenditures are extremely low. There are currently no expenditures the board can foresee in the near future and thus we are not currently seeking donations. Speakers: The last time a talk was given by a non-member of NBLUG was on 2013-07-09 by Alison Chaiken, who was also the previous non-member speaker on 2011-09-13. The last talk given by a non-member not named Alison was 2011-03-08 by Same Bowne, or effectively three years ago. (As noted, if you have any leads about a potential speaker please let us know at speakers(a)nblug.org and we will promptly follow up with them.) Opinion and analysis: I, Allan, feel that the evidence above points to a potentially dwindling, but by no means dead, user group compared to the level of activity 5 years ago. Some of the statistics provided above can be explained as following the natural rhythm of Linux adoption; in 2003 when Talk volume was at its highest the number of E-Mails related to troubleshooting was much higher. As the difficulty of getting a functional Linux system going has decreased the amount of discussion has also decreased. The ease of installing Linux improved to the point that the last InstallFest held by NBLUG was in 2007 (although we've had several "Hackfest" meetings since then, usually to fill in months when we did not have a speaker). In recent years, I feel that the general decrease in attendance has likely been directly tied to the lack of fresh speakers. To that end, one of my primary goals this year is to work with the board to seek out speakers who can present on topics that would interest you, the members of NBLUG. While the board actively pursues this goal independently, I feel the best resource we have to connect with potential speakers is likely our members themselves. I encourage everyone to share their thoughts about this State of the LUG update on the talk list and I look forward to a lively discussion. Thanks, Allan Cecil President, North Bay Linux User's Group A.C. ****** - Raw talk posts per year in ,CSV format as extracted from the archives at http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/: Year, Posts 1999, 133 2000, 395 2001, 940 2002, 1,564 2003, 3,511 2004, 1,859 2005, 1,247 2006, 1,403 2007, 810 2008, 897 2009, 444 2010, 315 2011, 165 2012, 239 2013, 436

10 years, 9 months

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