North Bay Linux Users’ Group

general meeting

Secure Server Deployments in Hostile Territory

When: Tue November 11, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Kyle Rankin

Location: O'Reilly Media

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.

Update: Kyle’s slides can be found on his web site.

Published Tue 04 November 2014 by Tom Most

general meeting

Open Conferences

When: Tue October 14, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Kevin Ablett

Location: O'Reilly Media

Our speaker writes:

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.

The presentation will be followed by nominations for NBLUG’s upcoming elections and discussion of this month’s developments: shellshock, etc. All positions are up for election and are listed in the bylaws.

Published Sat 11 October 2014 by Tom Most

general meeting

The Raspberry Pi used to Implement a Radar Speed Sign

When: Tue September 09, 2014 07:39 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Steve Goody

Location: O'Reilly Media

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.

Published Tue 02 September 2014 by Tom Most

general meeting

Lightning Talks / Hackfest / GPG Key Signing

When: Tue August 12, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Frank Ball et al.

Location: O'Reilly Media

Coordinator: Frank Ball

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@nblug.org) and bring copies to the meeting.

Details:

  1. Generate a public/private keypair with the gpg --gen-key command (accept the defaults), see man gpg for more info.
  2. Upload your key to a keyserver: gpg --send-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com
  3. Print out the key “fingerprint” with gpg --fingerprint 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@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:

Published Tue 12 August 2014 by Glenn Kerbein

general meeting

Tails

When: Tue July 08, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Kyle Rankin

Location: O'Reilly Media

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.

Published Fri 04 July 2014 by Glenn Kerbein

general meeting

emerge world: Putting Your Processor to the Grindstone

When: Tue June 10, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Glenn Kerbein

Location: O'Reilly Media's Tarsier conference room

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; the program and process of emerge and ebuilds; and some nifty utilities.

Published Tue 20 May 2014 by Allan Cecil

general meeting

How to Build RPMs

When: Tue May 13, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 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.

Published Wed 16 April 2014 by Glenn Kerbein

general meeting

SteamOS

When: Tue April 08, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Allan Cecil

Location: O'Reilly Media

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! :)

Published Mon 07 April 2014 by Glenn Kerbein

general meeting

Linux in School: Starting Kids Early

When: Tue March 11, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Jordan Erickson

Location: O'Reilly Media

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.

Published Mon 17 February 2014 by Tom Most

general meeting

An Introduction to Debian Packaging

When: Tue February 11, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Tom Most

Location: O'Reilly Media

Tom Most will be presenting “An Introduction to Debian Packaging”. This talk is aimed at developers and system administrators who wish to deploy applications to Debian and Ubuntu systems. Topics include the structure of a .deb, writing debian/control files, and use of debhelper and dh_make.

Comment from Allan: This should be of interest to anyone who uses a distribution that relies on .deb package management. See you there!

Update: Slides available.

Published Mon 10 February 2014 by Glenn Kerbein

general meeting

Lightning talks

When: Tue January 14, 2014 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: None

Location: O'Reilly Media

According to Wikipedia: A Lightning talk is a short presentation given at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks last only a few minutes and several will usually be delivered in a single period by different speakers.

Everyone is invited and encouraged to talk about Linux. - Which distro or window manager are you running? - What hardware are you running Linux on? - What projects are you working on? - We want to hear about it.

Published Sun 12 January 2014 by E Frank Ball III

general meeting

Pi to Game Console Tool-Assisted Speedruns

When: Tue December 10, 2013 07:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Speaker: Allan Cecil

Location: O'Reilly Media

A Raspberry Pi, connected to a custom PCB with a PIC microcontroller, connected to… a game console’s controller port? In this presentation, Allan will talk about the Tool-Assisted Speedrun community from http://tasvideos.org, game console emulators in Linux, Raspberry Pi GPIO serial interface capabilities, PCB design, reverse-engineering, and how a TAS can be an artform.

There will be plenty of technical details but the presentation should be enjoyable by all, with demonstrations of games being played perfectly using tools to overcome the limitations of human reflexes and a finale of taking complete control of an unmodified Super Nintendo using only the controller input.

Published Mon 25 November 2013 by Glenn Kerbein

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