When: June 9th, 2015 7:30 pm
Speaker: Nick Bolton, Founder and CEO
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: Synergy
Description:
In this talk, Nick Bolton will describe how he took a largely abandoned open source project (Synergy) and grew a stable and profitable business around the software. The talk will cover the impact that money had on the technology, the users, and the developer community.
When: June 9th, 2015 7:30 pm
Speaker: Everyone
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: systemd roundtable
Description:
There is general concensus that systemd is an important topic but we haven’t found a speaker to specifically present on systemd so instead we’ll be doing a systemd roundtable. The format will be a friendly discussion about the pros and cons of systemd and its political and technical impact on distributions that have migrated to it for the enlightenment of all. I’ll bring the projector along just in case someone needs it.
Greetings,
This is a rare announce post that isn't a meeting announcement - there is a general consensus in the IRC #nblug channel that we should do a talk on systemd but so far no one with experience has been able to come up with the free time to create a talk. Instead, I'd like to propose a friendly panel or roundtable discussion about the pros and cons of systemd for the June 9th meeting this coming Tuesday. If you'd be willing to participate on the panel, please send an E-Mail to speakers(a)nblug.org. We can even bribe panel participants with a free O'Reilly book if it helps.
Thanks for considering participating in a friendly discussion on systemd,
A.C.
******
President, NBLUG
When: Tuesday May 12th, 2015 7:30 pm
Speaker: Allan Cecil
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:
OpenStack is a set of tools to create a "cloud" infrastructure similar to Amazon's cloud services to manage virtual machines (called instances) across multiple Compute servers in a cluster managed by one or more Controllers. In this talk I'll introduce the general concepts of what OpenStack can be used for in an approachable way. I'll provide an overview OpenStack's Controller and Compute node model, how instances work, block and image storage, and a general overview of bridged networking into virtual machines. The majority of the talk will be devoted to a live demo of spinning up instances with plenty of time for interactive Q and A.
When: Tuesday April 14th, 2015 7:30 pm
Speaker: Open to all
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)
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.
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 for 2015, covering calendar
year 2014 (you can find the 2014 update covering calendar year 2013 in the
archives). 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 as of 2015-04-03 compared to the last
update:
463 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Announce list (+3)
261 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Talk list (-12)
205 Talk list E-Mails (in 53 conversations) were sent in 2014 (-231)
On average, 14 members attend each meeting as of 2015 (+2)
6 of 6 board seats are filled through November 2015
http://nblug.org has been migrated to a new CMS (Pelican)
~12 people are in the #nblug Freenode IRC channel at any given time (+2)
$145.73 is in the NBLUG cashbox secured by our treasurer (unchanged)
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 463 people subscribed to the Announce list (at
http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce) and around 261 people subscribed
to the Talk list (at http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk). Talk volume is
down from last year, with 205 posts in 53 threads in 2014.
General meetings: Attendance at the monthly general meetings has stayed the
same or increased slightly since last year, averaging around 14 people per
meeting with some meetings with poular topics or outside speakers getting into
the 30-40 range. I should note that the number I've presented here is a bit
higher than what's in the logbook, because the actual logbook entries are
typically 2-3 people short of the number of people physically present based on
my personal headcount. 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).
NBLUG Board: The current board as elected during the November 2014 general
meeting consists of Allan Cecil (President), E. Frank Ball III
(Vice-President), Glenn Kerbein (Scribe), Matt Da Silva (Treasurer), Tom Most
(Board Member at Large), and John Morio Sakaguchi (Board Member at Large).
Our next scheduled elections will be during the November 2015 meetings, where
all 6 seats will be open for nominations (all board members serve 1-year
terms). Glenn has indicated that he will not be seeking re-election as
Scribe (all other board members have not indicated whether they would or would
not seek nominations).
NBLUG website: The official NBLUG website at http://nblug.org has been
substantially overhauled over the last year by Tom Most with many articles
migrated by Glenn and a few changes made by NBLUG member Zack Gold. The new
web site is entirely static, generated by a tool called Pelican (the same tool
used by http://kernel.org). The motivation for that choice was to make
maintenance easier, since anyone who knows HTML and CSS could figure out how
to tweak things pretty quickly, but the other advantage is that there's no
security attack surface aside from Apache and SSH. The site is now impossible
to spam, unlike Drupal.
There are a few unresolved, albeit minor, issues. We have not yet set up
forwarding the old NBLUG mirror folder at http://mirror.nblug.org/ to point to
Sonic's mirrors at http://mirrors.sonic.net/. Many old meeting notes are
unlinked; while they exist on the server, they are impossible (literally) to
find, but given that the sands of time have made most of these updates
irrelevant they are of less concern. If this is an area you'd like to see
improved and you're willing to lend a hand, please let us know. Overall
traffic is similar to last year, with an average of 360 hits a day. I have
full statistics generated with goaccess I can share on request.
IRC channel: NBLUG has an IRC channel at #nblug on the Freenode network
(chat.freenode.net). Activity has if anything incrased since 2014, with a
dozen logins and conversation most days of the week happening at various
points. 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
it has not been reliably keeping track. Also, our beloved bot, Erratica,
seems to have gone AWOL again, and the channel has been a bit more quiet (and,
might I say, less erratic) without her.
Cash balance: The NBLUG cashbox contains exactly $145.73 as of November of
2014 when the balance was confirmed by our Treasurer and holder of the
cashbox, Matt Da Silva, around the time of the elections. There have been no
new expenditures in recent months (or years). 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 effectively non-existant. There
are currently no expenditures the board can foresee in the near future and
thus we are not currently seeking donations, although the projector we use now
is standard definition VGA only at 800x600 resolution and we would not turn
down a newer projector if one came our way.
Speakers: At the time of the previous State of the LUG, the last time a talk
had been 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, and the last talk
given by a non-member not named Alison was 2011-03-08 by Same Bowne. Over the
past several months we've been fortunate to have a couple of talks from
outside of the group from people not named Alison. To help this trend
continue, please let us know about potential speakers at speakers(a)nblug.org
and we will promptly follow up with them.
Additional opinion and analysis: I, Allan, feel that the evidence above
points to a viable, albeit somewhat stagnant, user group. Our best attendance
occurs when we have outside speakrs, so for the second year in a row my one of
my primary goals 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.
******
When: March 10th, 2015 7:30 pm
Speaker: Tom Most
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: Tiling Window Managers for X
Description:
Window management: it's one of the places where desktop Linux shines,
with an almost overwhelming amount of choice for a newcomer. For those
wishing to improve their day-to-day productivity or stop reaching for
the mouse all the time, however, venturing into this world is well
worthwhile. This talk will provide an overview of the landscape,
details on the tiling window manager i3, and some tips on setting up a
comfortable environment.
When: February 10th, 2015 7:30 pm
Speaker: Jordan Erickson
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: Icecast: Building an Open Source Online Radio Station
Description:
In this talk, Jordan Erickson will show you how to build your own online radio station using the open source software Icecast. The talk will include installation and configuration of Icecast and compatible source clients, as well as examples of different listening clients. There will also be discussion around Jordan's efforts in creating a new Android source client that focuses on open codecs and a Creative Commons broadcast network called Echonet.
When: January 13th, 2015 7:30 pm
Speaker: Robert Harker
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: Linux Bridging In A Virtualized Environment
Description:
Linux bridging is one of the seven mysteries of Linux. What is the br0 device and how does it use the NIC? What is virbr0? The answers to these and many other questions will be answered including how virtual instance use bridges and how they interact with the hosts IPtables. The goal of this talk is to give the Linux Sysadmin the understanding needed to configure, use and trouble-shoot Linux bridges.
Robert Harker is a [Linux|UNIX] greybeard sysadmin and one of the first Sun sysadmins. His interests include OS/application configuration management of scaling of server farms with a particular interest in verification of deployments: "How do you know it is correct and running?"
When: December 9th, 2014 7:30 pm
Speaker: Allan Cecil
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: Anatomy of an Arbitrary Code Execution Exploit
Description:
This talk is all about dissecting exactly what happens when a program stops doing what the designers designed it to do and starts doing what an attacker (or in this case, the presenter) wants it to do. I'll cover using a virtual machine environment of a simple system under Linux to step through all phases of an arbitrary code execution (ACE) exploit, including corrupting a data structure, out-of-bounds memory manipulation, pointer manipulation, and ultimately execution of arbitrary code. I'll be demonstrating memory viewer and disassembly tools to show the exact instructions being processed as they happen.
The simple system in question? A Zilog Z80 processor, running inside of a Super Game Boy. Come for the dissection, stay for some entertaining abuse of a live SNES console. This will largely be a no slides, full demo presentation and should have something of interest for everyone. See you there!
