Linux Journal Magazine was founded in 1994 and coincided with the release
of Linux 1.0. It has been around for most of the history of Linux and has
seen the FOSS community grow and change from that point up to now. The
Linux and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community is not the same as
it was in 1994 and this change contributed to Linux Journal’s death in
December 2017 and the overall loss of momentum in the Free Software
movement. This talk will tell the story of Linux Journal’s death and
resurrection and what it says about the changes in the FOSS community and
what those changes mean for the future of Free Software.
Please stick around after the talk for the yearly NBLUG elections.
Nominations are now open and can be made on the talk list.
Most of us are familiar with interactive image editors like Paint and Photoshop. Fewer people are familiar with the batch tools that can be used from the command line.
These non-interactive tools allow images to be processed in bulk from scripts, or converted automatically in a server. In classic Unix tradition, many can be chained together to create complex workflows.
This talk will include a high-level introduction to the ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick tool suites, and a brief overview of several tools with complimentary functionality.
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 or software project to get help with it or just to show it off. A mix of free tech support, show-and-tell, and idle chat.
The systemd system manager has been adopted by most popular Linux distributions, but it can be a difficult system to understand without any background. This talk will provide a practical introduction aimed at users and system administrators. We will discuss how systemd models the world, teach it how to run a service, and take a look at everyday tasks like customizing existing services and inspecting logs.
The community is rallying around Kubernetes — it is quickly becoming the de-facto standard of container orchestration.
But what is Kubernetes and why has it gained so much traction?
In this talk Hunter Fernandes will deep-dive running Kubernetes on the cloud: the problems which lead to choosing Kubernetes, Kubernetes primitives, and Kubernetes in practice.
Linux (and Unix generally) is known for being far more secure than Windows. But is this true? Is there such a thing as Linux Malware? There is, and in this talk I’ll present a brief overview of the history of Linux/Unix malware, worms, trojans and viruses. I’ll cover how they spread, what the current outbreak landscape looks like today, where it’s likely to head in the future and what you can do to keep yourself safe.
Don’t assume that just because you’re not running Windows that you’ve done everything you need to do! If you’ve got a machine on the net, you could be contributing CPU cycles and bandwidth to a botnet. Get informed, take some simple precautions and ensure that you’re not part of the problem.
Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off.
A mix of free tech support, show-and-tell, and idle chat.
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.
Having a trustworthy boot process is the foundation of the rest of your
system’s security. If your BIOS, kernel, or initrd have been tampered with,
an attacker can hide their backdoor from the rest of the system. This talk
will discuss the security threats against the boot process and briefly
cover some other approaches to protect against boot-time attacks but the
talk will primarily focus on Heads, an open source project that provides
tamper-evident boot. I will discuss how Heads works, how it differs from
other secure boot approaches, and demonstrate how it protects against tampering.
Unless there are security concerns Allan Cecil will stream the
talk at https://twitch.tv/dwangoAC — see you there either in person or virtually!
Are you frustrated with the model/router/switch your ISP provides? Curious what your options are to improve performance or regain control? NBLUG will be holding a panel discussion about home networking, focusing on the humble router. We have representatives of several options:
Improving existing hardware by flashing OpenWRT or similar
Building your own router from an old PC or single-board computer
Commercial products aimed at IT professionals
We expect a wide-ranging discussion of the pros and cons of each of these approaches, touching on the effort required, security implications, and flexibility of each option. Questions from the audience are welcome.
It’s time for another GPG key signing. We had one in May 2003 & August 2014.
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:
Generate a public/private keypair with the gpg --gen-key
command (accept the defaults), see man gpg for more info.
Upload your key to a keyserver:
gpg--send-keys--keyserverkeyserver.ubuntu.com
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.
Email me at frank@nblug.org with the fingerprint, email address, 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 all of the keys for the fingerprints verified at the meeting
With more and more information coming out about how insecure nearly
every computer is, come find out how to make your computer use just a
bit more secure…
In this presentation, Robert will go over how to setup and use a Yubikey
to store PGP keys and PKI certs such that without physical access theft
of the keys is just about impossible, and even difficult with physical access.
Other security enhancements like hardware password stores (Mooltipass)
and air-gapped machines will be covered. Further, I’m sure there will be
discussion of the recently disclosed Meltdown and Specter attacks.
Chromebooks and Chromeboxes are cheap, easy to use, and pretty secure; but after a while the shortcomings of Chrome OS get annoying and I want my Linux.
Crouton is a script which installs Debian, Kali, or Ubuntu Linux into a chroot container that runs under Chrome OS.
It’s easy to install, and it works great.
