It’s possible to lease a virtual private server (VPS) for as little as $10/year. I’ll talk about what you get, what to look out for, and how to find a good deal when shopping for a budget server. Also a discussion about the OpenVZ virtualization technology.

What would you do if you had to securely decommission a remote server without remote console or power access? How would you securely erase all the hard drives over an ssh session and halt the machine when you are logged into the machine itself? Kyle has recently done just this and in this (mostly live demo) talk, Kyle will walk you through the process of how to securely erase your server remotely.

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfests we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

“Anonymous, Wikileaks, and DoS” — Part of the talk is non-technical, about the exploits of Anonymous, Wikileaks, th3j35t3r, HB Gary, B of A, etc., and then some demos, testing the common DoS tools against Apache, IIS, and nginx. Sam’s webpage: http://samsclass.info/contact.html

OpenSSL is an open source security library providing the underlying cryptographic algorithms for many applications. This talk will focus on the steps necessary to enhance OpenSSL to make use of application specific hardware for cryptographic processing. The OpenSSL command line and kernel crypto interfaces will be discussed.

For this meeting we will revisit a time-honored (but recently neglected) NBLUG tradition: Stump the Geek. We’ll open up the floor for questions about Linux and we’ll try our best to answer them. Be gentle…

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfests we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

During this meeting we will also conduct our annual NBLUG elections. You can find out more about the open positions at https://nblug.org/bylaws

When a server is used in production, you want every possible level of fault tolerance. Ethernet bonding allows you to create redundant NICs on a server so that you can lose a NIC, a ethernet cable, or even potentially a switch, without downtime.

In this talk Kyle will introduce the concept of ethernet bonding, discuss the different bonding modes, and describe how to set up bonding on Red Hat and Debian-based systems.

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfest we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

SSH is one of the most widely used network protocols. Much more than a replacement for telnet, SSH has many tricks up its encrypted sleeve and harnessing them is a rite of passage for any keyboard cowboy. In this talk, Aaron will discuss the core protocol itself, the history of development and how you can use OpenSSH to better secure your packets through the tubes.

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 configured, how they are used, and particular tools that get heavy use (including Python, rsync, NX, rsnapshot,geany, Ksplice, and Postgres). A Q&A session will follow.

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.