Matt Hargett, Director of Security Product Development at LogicLibrary, will talk about common patterns that lead to exploitable vulnerabilities. He will also demonstrate how LogicLibrary’s tool, BugScan, can detect these vulnerabilities in application binaries, without any source code.

Please note that this InstallFest is at Sonoma State, not at O’Reilly. Please see below for information on the exact location and directions. This is our usual installfest location.

WHEN: Saturday, February 5 - 10:30AM - 4:30PM PDT
WHERE: SSU Schulz 1121; https://nblug.org/ifloc
WHO: Anyone wanting help in installing Linux onto their computer
URL: https://nblug.org/installfest/
WHAT DO I DO: Go to http://www.nblug.org/installfest/ to sign up!!!!

What is an InstallFest and who can come?

Instead of putting all of the usual “what is an InstallFest” info in this and future announcements, we have a link up on our website as to what a NBLUG InstallFest entails and how to participate. If you point your browser of choice to http://www.nblug.org/installfest/ , you’ll be presented with all the info you ever wanted to know about what goes on at an InstallFest, and how you can get the most out of attending one.

Anyone is more than welcome to attend. If you need help or just want to hang out and talk, you are more than welcome to show up. They are always totally free; you might want to bring a few dollars for pizza, however.

How do I sign up?

We will again be taking signups for this InstallFest, so please be sure to visit that URL if you plan on attending. Those who signup and reserve a time slot, are first in line. We’ve found that by taking signups, we can help more people in a timely fashion. We can also make sure that enough helpers are available for those wanting help. If you need help at the last minute, you can still just show up and we’ll probably be able to help you, but it really helps us if you register first, preferably a week or more in advance so we have a chance to beg for more helpers if we need them.

What if I want to offer help?

If you’re interested in helping out, please contact installfest@nblug.org; if you’ve successfully installed Fedora (or RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE or Debian or FreeBSD or OpenBSD or YellowDog or …) before, you can probably help out. We can even use a bit of help from somebody helping people bring their heavy equipment in. Besides, it’s fun to come hang out with all the geeks. ;)

For helpers, the schedule is a little different:

8:30AM - Breakfast (optional) at an undecided location.
10:00AM - Room open to helpers for setup
10:30AM - Installs begin (event start)
4:00PM - Installs should be done by now.
4:30PM - Installs must be done by now.
5:00PM - Room closed; alarms go off, doors lock, police show up.

We always need helpers, and we can usually use more helpers than we get. It’s a good way to “give back” to NBLUG and it’s a geeky good time. (If you’re interested in helping out but can’t do an InstallFest, please consider giving a presentation, contact speakers@nblug.org )

We will show you a bunch of Firefox extensions that we think are super duper rad!

A recap on the verified voting foundations EIRS system. An overview of what worked and did not work for the architecture and security of the EIRS system.

Discussion of different technology used to perform tasks, problems that were solved and events along the way.

Also note: elections for NBLUG board positions will be held at this meeting.

This month we’ll have a talk about how to get Linux installed on a Sun Microsystems box with a SPARC CPU in it. What’s different from a PC? Why on earth would you want to do this? Those questions and more. Oh - and we’ll possibly even have a box that you can get your hands on.

The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is a web-based software application designed to help voter protection organizations identify and respond to situations preventing voters from voting or from having their votes recorded as intended. Taking back our democracy with grass root actions!

This talk will cover the issues at stake, identify the problems that needed to be solved, provide solutions and tips for these issues as well as a live demonstration of the EIRS system.

The technology up for discussion will focus on how we designed, created, and maintain the EIRS back end systems. Including (buzzwords abound!): Distributed Denial of Service/Denial Of Service protection, SSL session key load balancing/distribution, high availability database clustering/replication/load balancing/fail-over, round robin DNS, geographically distinct server locations, centralized monitoring/management, managed firewall policies, hardware RAID, revision controlled/synchronized configuration files, off-site backup systems, custom benchmarking tools, disaster planning, safe semi-automatic system updating, host integrity checking software and discussions of how to compartmentalize security. All of this is achieved with a standard common platform of Debian Gnu/Linux.

Key system elements included: Debian Gnu/Linux with the 2.6 Linux kernel series, Apache2, PHP, MySQL, perl, dist-cache, shorewall, stunnel, sshd, samhain, cvs, djbdns, hardware RAID and many others.

All of these technologies power our EIRS system. It’s built with custom modifications to existing GPL software. Our changes are released back to or by working with each community (of course).

Knoppix is a complete Linux distribution that runs directly from a bootable “live CD” allowing you to run Linux on any PC you happen to be in front of.

Kyle has recently finished a book for O’Reilly, Knoppix Hacks, and his talk will provide an introduction for people who are new to the Knoppix live CD distribution, as well as talk a bit about the features in the new Knoppix installer, and how to use Knoppix to repair other Linux systems.

Matt will be talking about using Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) on Yellow Dog Linux, TerraSoft’s Fedora-like Linux distribution for the Mac architecture.

When the opportunity arose for me to borrow some old hardware from my office, I jumped at it in hopes of running my own webserver from home. I was allowed to use a Mac PowerPC. Naturally, I looked into Linux on the Mac architecture and, fearing Debian, decided to try out Terrasoft’s Yellow Dog Linux. I plan to speak on how it was I came to install YDL on decade-old machine and my experiences with running LAMP on it.

1. ipod on linux
2. General overview of ipod on linux
3. Cover connecting the ipod to linux (ieee1394/scsi interfaces)
4. Interface programs available for use with an ipod on linux
5. Other options provided for the ipod and linux.
6. linux on the ipod.
7. General overview of linux on the ipod
8. How to not void your warranty
9. Step through backing up the ipod and factory settings
10. Do an install and compile of ucLinux kernel
11. Cover different options now available on your ipod
12. Show how to restore the factory ipod software incase of servicing.

This month we have a really awesome and informative talk from Paul Stagnoli; who will be telling is about Drupal, an open source content management system.

I am planning on talking about wireless tools.

I plan on covering Kismet and if I have time, I will also cover some bluetooth stuff.

So if you have ever wanted to map your local wireless networks to a vector map with street names, or you want to superimpose SSIDs on a photo of your state from space, feel free to join us.

Autofs is a kernel option that lets you automatically mount filesystems on your computer when you access them, and then automatically umount them when they are no longer used.

When I was trying to figure out the best way to set up my removable usb drive, I ended up stumbling upon autofs as an excellent solution. After realizing the potential of it, and how configurable it is, I started setting it up to manage other mountpoints on my system. In this talk, I will discuss everything I set up, and how, including dynamically mounted cdroms, usb drives (including cameras), smb, ftp, and ssh mountpoints.