meetings

Feature Presentation: Juju

Mark writes: “I remember 10 years ago when I discovered installing Mailman using apt-get install mailman. A working mail server in one line. Everything just worked. These days I’m working on a project called Juju that aims to provide an even more powerful tool for deploying and configuring software services. Now you can just type juju deploy casandra, and get a working Casandra server in the cloud; no need to buy a machine, install and configure the OS, or know how to install and configure Casandra. And if you want to connect services together (such as a working and High Availability WordPress instance, a working memcache server, and a working MySQL with a read-only slave) — you can do all of that in just a few lines from the command line. And you can deploy that same set of services to a local testing environment using Linux containers, your own Open Stack cloud, or to cloud services like HP, Amazon, or even Microsoft Azure. This talk will be all about Juju, what it does, how it works, and how it can change the way developers and system administrators work together.”

Mark Ramm is Director of Engineering at Canonical — the people who brought you Ubuntu — and for the last year has been working on a new tool called Juju that makes it easy to deploy and connect software services in the cloud. He is the BDFL emeritus of TurboGears (a Python web development framework), and one of the creators of the Allura project that now powers all the software development tools on Sourceforge.com, and is incubating with the Apache Foundation.

Steam Machine

Not to be confused with carpet cleaners, the Steam Machine is a line of gaming consoles and specifications using SteamOS (a Linux-based OS). Unfortunately the Steam Machine isn’t due to ship until 2014. What if you’re impatient and want to play with Steam now? Jorge Castro will demonstrate how to build a dedicated Steam-compatible machine.

And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Raspberry Pi Giveaway DOOR PRIZE: We will be giving away one Raspberry Pi computer to one lucky participant. The contest is open to current paid-up members, and you must be present to win.

Firefox OS

Firefox OS is an effort by the Mozilla Corporation to build a complete, standalone operating system for the open web. It’s built on a minimal Linux distribution that boots directly into a Firefox-based environment that
supports applications developed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Les Orchard will give a quick overview of the project, how it started, how it works, and where it’s headed.

Les Orchard is a web developer for the Mozilla Corporation who has worked a bit on Firefox OS as a part-time contributor. He blogs at http://lmorchard.com

Book Swap

Bring your old and gently used books to trade and swap with other folks. Take a book or leave a book, or do both. You don’t need to bring anything to take something home. We’ll send out more information about how this will work on the Discussion mailing list.
And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.

July 9th, 2013 Regular MUG Meeting

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

DOOR PRIZE: We will be giving away one Raspberry Pi computer to one lucky participant. The contest is open to current paid-up members, and you must be present to win.

Planned topics include:

Benjamin Mako Hill (Wikipedia, remixing content, and learning from past failures to improve online communities)

Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist, technologist, and activist. In all three roles, he works to understand why, and when, peer production succeeds. He is a PhD Candidate in a joint program between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. In September 2013, he will join the faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His research aims to explain why some attempts to create free culture and free software result in large volunteer communities like Wikipedia and Linux — while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. He has also been an leader, developer, and contributor to the Free and Open Source Software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books, a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab.

Join us for Benjamin Mako Hill’s talk on Wikipedia and remixing content, and how we can learn from past failures to improve online communities. Mako is a very dynamic and engaging speaker. He’€™ll entertain and educate on the topic of peer production, where content is produced by the general public rather than by paid professionals and experts in the field.

Command of the Moment

If we still have some time, we’ll jump back into our continuing series: Command of the Moment. We’ll pick some UNIX commands at random and ask folks to take 5-10 minutes to discuss them. A list of the commands we’ll be picking from is available here.

And of course we’ll have some of the other great features you’ve come to enjoy at our meetings, including current events and Job/People seekers.

Hope to see you there!

June 2013 Regular MUG Meeting

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Our Topics include:

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer that runs Linux for $35. It’s built to use peripherals that many homes or schools have lying around, and it’s got a set of general-purpose I/O pins that come in handy for the kinds of DIY electronics projects made famous by the Arduino and friends. Though initially inspired by the 8-bit machines of the 80’s that introduced kids to the wonders of computing and electronics, it’s also found its way into the workshops and entertainment centers of adults. Les Ochard will present a quick overview of the Raspberry Pi & the Foundation behind it. He’ll also talk about things people have done with the Raspberry Pi, and attempt a quick demo of it hooked up to a Macbook, an Arduino, a LCD display, and more.

Les Orchard is a web developer for the Mozilla Corporation who collects small linux computers and likes seeing what kinds of things they can plug into.

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library

Big Data

Speaker: Sharan Kalwani

These days one cannot swing a dead cat without hitting the buzz phrase “Big Data”! So what is all this hoopla (or Hadoop) all about really? Many years of technology advances in processing power, cheaper storage, faster I/O capabilities, cheaper memory chips, greater WiFi coverage, widespread mobility
have *all* contributed to a vast explosion of information in all shapes and forms. The term “Big Data” first came into usage about 6+ years ago, when a major database scientist wrote about a new paradigm of science (sometimes also called the fourth pillar) – one which is based on letting the data tell us what
was really going on, as opposed to guessing up a hypothesis/theory and then running with it. Of course, our beloved Linux platform was a key enabler in this and the Hadoop framework, which was born from an engineer’s work, originally inspired by a couple of papers written by Google’s team. This talk will dwell on many “Big D” (pun intended!) topics, history, what this means in technology terms and more importantly the impact on society.

Sharan Kalwani is an HPC specialist with 20+ years of experience. Sharan has degrees in both Engineering and Computer Science. He has worked in IT architecture, systems deployment, software development, OS kernels, UNIX device driver writing, networking and compilers. He has also worked on
several engineering, technical & scientific applications. Sharan has worked with several computing vendors such as Cray Research, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), etc. He has managed several very large HPC sites with corporate organizations such as General Motors (GM) and research universities (KAUST). Sharan is a member of IEEE/Computer Society, USENIX, Michigan User Group and the ACM.

Elections

We will be holding our board elections for the 2013-2014 period. Nominations are currently open for those who would like to serve on the board. There are six spaces available for nominations, and the term runs through April 2014. Nominations for the board should be sent to board@mug.org by April 9th, 2013 at 6:30pm. Voting will commence at the meeting.

You must be a current paid member in order to serve on the board or vote for the board. Please see the Membership page for details.

Book Swap

Bring your old and gently used books to trade and swap with other folks. Take a book or leave a book, or do both. You don’t need to bring anything to take something home. We’ll send out more information about how this will work on the Discussion mailing list.
And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Hills Library.

Introduction to Ceph

As the size and performance requirements of storage systems have increased, system designers have looked to new architectures to facilitate system scalability. Ceph is a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability from terabytes to exabytes. This talk will describe Ceph architecture, the goals of the project, and why you should care about yet another storage system.

Bio: “Patrick McGarry is a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company helping users to learn and deploy Ceph. An experienced community manager, gamer, mischief maker, and all around geek, Patrick spent five years writing and managing Slashdot under the nomme du keyboard ‘scuttlemonkey.’ Patrick enthusiastically helps companies to understand and adopt Open Source ideals and continues to be a strong advocate of FOSS on the desktop and in the enterprise. He still hates writing these bios.

Reduce your SPAM in 5 easy steps, guaranteed!

Running your own mail server can be a great experience, but the ever-looming threat of SPAM can suck the fun right out of it and make you wonder if moving your mail server to Google Mail or some other service would be better. IN this short tutorial, Craig Maloney will show several easy techniques you can put into place today in order to keep your mail server from accepting SPAM. He’ll also touch briefly on the SPF protocol and how you can help lower SPAM back-scatter, and help get your mail through witl little hassle. We’ll also cover why Bayesian Spam Filtering and Greylisting are overkill for a problem that can be easily addressed on a low-powered machine. Get your mail queue back, and take back your resources, garanteed, or your money back.

Bio: Craig Maloney is a member of the MUG Board, and frequent contributer of talks. He hosts the podcat Open Metalcast, and co-hosts Lococast with Rick Harding. He too hates writing these bios.

And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more. Hope to see you there!

Introduction to Puppet

Sean Millichamp will present an introduction to Puppet, an open source systems and infrastructure management tool. Puppet allows you to declare, audit, and enforce a desired system state over the entire lifecycle of the system. He will introduce Puppet and discuss the architecture and design concepts in the product, including the various components in the Puppet ecosystem, what they are, and how you might use them. He will also show some relatively simple examples of Puppet code and discuss his experience with Puppet in real-world use. There will be opportunity for Q&A and open discussion.

This is Sean’s 20^th year working in Information Technology. He began deploying Linux and other open source software in production in 1996 and has been using it since. Sean currently works as an Enterprise Architect at Secure-24, LLC, a Southfield based managed hosting provider. In this role he is responsible for evaluating and recommending new products, technologies, and operational policies for the organization, with a focus on Linux. Sean is also an adjunct professor in the CIS department at Oakland Community College. Sean graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering in 2001. In his “spare time” Sean has contributed to a number of open source projects, including Puppet. In 2012 Red Hat named Sean their Worldwide Certified Professional of the Year. Find Sean online at http://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmillichamp

And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more. Hope to see you there!

IPV6

There’s a lot of buzz about IPv6.  IPv4 depletion in Asia and Europe.  LTE/4G devices bringing IPv6 to my perimeter network.  US Internet backbone IPv6 penetration of over 2% with a 150% annual growth rate.  Do we really need IPv6?  How does it differ from IPv4?  What’s the impact and when should I consider deploying it?  What do I need to get started?  Jim Small will help us dive into the why, how, where, what,  and when of IPv6.

James R. Small is a Senior Consultant with CDW where he advises on, architects, and implements IT solutions for a diverse array of businesses and government organizations.  He is an adjunct professor at Macomb Community College as well as a frequent speaker at user groups and conferences.  Most recently he spoke at the annual gogo NET Live IPv6 conference in California and was a panelist on the Packet Pushers IPv6 Security podcast.  His focus is on security, networking, and leveraging tools for automation and orchestration including several large scale global projects for GM and Dow.  Jim has over 17 years of experience in IT and when he’s not beta testing, he enjoys running, playing hockey with his sons, and traveling with his family.

(Slides: IPv6 Overview)

History of MUG

Would you believe MUG. has been around for *mumble mumble* years? We’ve lived through the rise of UNIX, countless proclamations of UNIX’s death, and the rebirth of UNIX in Linux. It’s been an interesting ride thus far, and we’ll take the latter half of the meeting to talk about the history of MUG, as well as reminisce about technologies past, present, and still to come. If you’re an alumni of MUG and want to come and share your stories, you won’t want to miss this meeting. Bring your MUG artifacts and stories, and hear the history of Michigan’s longest-running UNIX User’s Group.

And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.Hope to see you there!

(Slides: Random Snippets of the History of MUG)