To understand how Qubes secures your desktop, look to your pantry. The same security by compartmentalization concept that makes Qubes resilient against attack was conceived of over two hundred years ago to protect food against infection. In this talk Kyle will discuss how to jam strawberries, can green beans, and isolate desktop workflows into a combination of netVMs, proxyVMs, and appVMs. He’ll cover some common threats against your food and data and describe how Mason jars and Qubes can mitigate them.

A follow-on talk to a previous talk Mike Higgins gave here at NBLUG in the past about programming in the video game Second Life. This time he’ll talk about Life After Second Life. There is a larger world, a Metaverse, of open source MMORPGs based on the open source Second Life Viewer projects and the Open Simulator project. There are hundreds of small companies trying to make a living doing what Second Life did. There are thousands of crazy artists creating 3D environments and inviting you to walk through them, there are tens of thousands of people setting up virtual environments on their own PCs and all of these are starting to link up to each other. My plan is to not have many slides for this talk, but log onto several different virtual worlds and put them up on the Big Screen while I talk. Eventually taking us to my private world run off the server in my barn.

In this presentation, we’ll get to know Git intimately enough to anticipate its every move. We’ll develop a visual mental model for a Git repository. Then we’ll explore how every-day Git commands manipulate that model. Along the way, we’ll find ways to peek into Git’s inner world to confirm our understanding. This is not an introduction to Git; it targets a developer who can commit, branch, and merge with Git. Although I’ll show example commands and output, consider bringing a laptop with Git installed so you can type along.

Update: Marcel’s slides are now available online

Have you ever been asked to provide feedback on beta software? If so, you’ve been put in the role of a tester, and effectively communicating what you see when things aren’t working the way you expect them to can be challenging. In this talk Allan will cover the context-driven approach to testing with an emphasis on how to troubleshoot problems, how to report what you see in the most effective manner, and how to know when it’s time to stop testing an area and focus your time elsewhere.

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.

Server security is more important now than ever, yet many of the hardening guides out there read like they were written a decade ago (probably because they were!) Modern server hardening can be an obscure and complicated subject but it doesn’t have to be. There are a number of simple and fast-to-implement steps you can take to dramatically increase the security of your infrastructure. In this talk Kyle will start with an overview of security best practices and provide a series of current yet simple hardening examples effective for securing everything from traditional bare-metal networks, cloud infrastructure, and even your home network.

Midokura released Midonet under the Apache license in 2014. This talk will explain why Midokura released the software under an open source license and why it picked Apache. In order to understand the options, the business models used with GPL and Apache will be discussed, which will include comparing the rights granted under the two licenses. Midonet will also be explained, at a very high level, to provide context for the decision to make it open source. Please note that this talk should not be construed as legal advice.

The NBLUG elections will be held directly following the talk. A nominations E-Mail will be sent to the talk list with additional information.

In this talk, Greg Larkin, an engineer with Puppet Labs, will discuss some of the historical issues with system management, how Puppet works, how it fits into current types of infrastructure deployments and what some of its enterprise features are. The talk will touch on high-level concepts as well as show some code and how it enforces node configurations. The talk will also cover new Puppet developments that were recently announced during PuppetConf 2015.

While Linux users have spent a lot of time using free software on their computers, usually that stops at the operating system. Being able to view and modify your source code not only gives you more freedom, it gives you more security, in particular from back doors. What’s good for the OS is good for the BIOS, which malware hackers, Lenovo, and state-sponsored attackers have all used to persist their exploits.

In this talk Kyle will cover Libreboot, a completely free software distribution of the open source Coreboot BIOS and discuss the current state of hardware support for Libreboot and how to install it, including a brief description of how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a flashrom BIOS-flashing platform.

Description: Matt will describe how to use run-control files to create declarations or commands associated with a program that it interprets on startup.

In this talk, Nick Bolton will describe how he took a largely abandoned open source project (Synergy) and grew a stable and profitable business around the software. The talk will cover the impact that money had on the technology, the users, and the developer community.

There is general concensus that systemd is an important topic but we haven’t found a speaker to specifically present on systemd so instead we’ll be doing a systemd roundtable. The format will be a friendly discussion about the pros and cons of systemd and its political and technical impact on distributions that have migrated to it for the enlightenment of all. I’ll bring the projector along just in case someone needs it.