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
still give users the warm fuzzy interface, speed and freedom they want.
One system, one set of updates, one place to make changes. We’re going to
look in to some of the history of LTSP, overview the technology involved,
and some of the many potential applications. Finally we’ll look at the
best way to implement LTSP, and how its working in production in our
corporate environment.
Still using ssh in a for loop to manage server clusters? Rewriting the entire hard drive of hundreds of workstations just to tweak one setting? Managing your systems by hand? Having trouble keeping up with all the changes to all the systems? Maybe it’s time to try something new.
Puppet is a system for automating system administration tasks. Puppet is also a declarative language for expressing system configuration, a client and server for distributing it, and a library for realizing the configuration.
Huh? In other words, you edit files in a nice readable language and magically the right things change in the right order on all the right systems. It’s like your systems configure themselves.
CTL is a new open source project for enterprise management, written
in Java, but with bindings to Python, Perl, Ruby, shell, Javascript,
and more. CTL is not an acronym; think of what ‘apachectl’ does for
the Apache webserver, and imagine what such a tool might do for your
entire enterprise and you’ve got CTL.
About the Speaker:
Alex Honor is open source project lead and principle architect at
ControlTier. Formerly, he was head of E*trade system engineering, and
carried them from dot boom to dot bomb and has been specializing in
cradle to grave distributed enterprise software management ever since.
Haiku is an open source operating system inspired by the BeOS that is
specifically focused on personal computing. The intent of this
presentation is to give a general introduction to both the Haiku
project and operating system. The talk will cover among other things
the history of the project, some of its most important milestones,
recent developments, the code base, as well as the global community
that supports it. We will also introduce some of the aspects that make
the Haiku operating system unique both from a technical as well as end
user perspective. We will wrap up the talk with an interactive live
demo/QA session.
That’s right, 10 years ago (almost to the day) NBLUG held its first
meeting. Come hear the founders discuss NBLUG, what the group was like
then, and how it has changed through the years. We’ll also be providing cake!
The Asus EeePC and the One Laptop Per Child XO are two small laptops with very
little in common. This month we have two presenters, Allan Cecil and Brandon Williams.
Allan will talk about the One Laptop Per Child Project XO laptop, which
is technologically very unusual and supports some exciting educational and
networking applications. A mesh networking demo of multiple XOs is planned, so
if you are one of the lucky ones to already have an XO, bring it along and join
in the demo.
Brandon will be discussing the EeePC, its hardware specifications,
capabilities, the default operating system, and its great suite of open
source software. He’ll discuss some of the niche distros popping up
specifically for the EeePC, some of the popular hardware hacks floating
around the web, and discuss some available options to the potential
buyer. We’ll also hear about upcoming Ultra-Mobile Pc’s, why their popularity
will continue to grow, and upcoming technology that are going to keep making
them cheaper, smaller, and more portable.
In this talk Kyle Rankin will provide an introduction to performing forensics analysis on Linux machines using the popular Sleuthkit tools with their easy-to-use Autopsy web-based front-end. The talk will cover initial installation and configuration of Sleuthkit and Autopsy, basic concepts and considerations for a forensics investigation, and at the end there will be a demo with a compromised Linux image.
Paul Stagnoli and Brian Davidson, of Exchange Bank, will be discussing
hacking the Advantech FWA-660 network appliance. The FWA-660 specs
include four Ethernet ports, a Celeron processor, up to 512 meg of ram,
on-board USB and printer support, compact flash support, and a 30 gig
hard drive.
Paul will demonstrate how to install Ubuntu server onto the box via PXE.
Brian will discuss case mods he made to add USB and Printer support to
the box.
The takeaway will be that beyond the pre-packaged solutions hitting the
market, there are other viable options for creating a home “appliance”
that can act as a router, firewall, and file server all in one small,
yet reasonably powerful box.
Curious about virtualization? In this talk a panel of NBLUG members will highlight a number of different virtualization technologies including but not limited to VMware, OpenVZ, Solaris zones, and more!
This talk covers storage and backup in a home or small office where files
are stored on a single server running Linux or on a Network Attached
Storage device. Files are shared to Windows, Linux, and OSX using Samba.
Every day all files are backed up to an external USB hard drive using Rsync.
Network Attached Storage drives can save space and electricity by serving
files to multiple clients without the need for a computer. The Western
Digital MyBook World is a NAS with gigabit ethernet, a USB host port, and
500GB to 2TB of storage. It runs Linux internally and has a full system
and GNU development environment preinstalled.
There will be a demonstration and also a look at some RAID controllers and
a NAS drive, with performance critiques.
