For our main presentation, we have Steve Pierce giving a presentation titled: Wireless Ypsi and why your community needs free WiFi

Steve Pierce founded HDL in 1987, an Internet and web consultancy founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Now living in Ypsilanti, he came to Michigan for true love; his wife moved for a job.

After relocating to Michigan, Steve was a partner inOpAve, one of the first wireless Internet Service providers in Michigan. He relaunched ABQ.com as an email services company and for five years ran MailAndNews.com. With nearly 2 million subscribers it was the second oldest free email service provider behind Hotmail.

Steve launched Wireless Ypsi in January 2008, a free wifi Internet service in Ypsilanti. Since January, Steve has assisted the City of Dearborn, Lincoln Park, Trenton, Wayne County and a number of other communities in deploying similar free wireless networks using the Wireless Ypsi model. Today over 435,000 have used free Internet networks Steve helped design and install.

In 2006, Steve launched YpsiNews.com, an on-line news journal covering Ypsilanti and the surrounding area. He has also been involved in a number of start-ups (including US1 Internet), has been a consultant and teacher for the military, universities, Department of Energy, and NATO and has worked for a number of major corporations as a network designer and security analyst.

Steve can frequently be seen about town riding on a Segway or his Ford Escape Hybrid. In his spare time, he and his wife Maggie have restored three homes in Ypsilanti including the historically significant Glover House, which was a three year $1 million renovation. He shares his home with two German Shepherds named Dax and Ryker. Yes, he is a Trek fan too.
Elections for the Board of Directors of Mug.org
We’ll hold the elections for the board of directors at this month’s meeting.

We currently have the following nominations:

• Jim McQuillan
• Dave Satwicz
• Jim Glutting
• James Hice
• Gibson Nichols
• Craig Maloney
• Will Fuqua

Nominations are open until just before the vote starts at the meeting on the 14th.

Considering the fact that the meeting will conflict with Valentines day, we are trying something new. In addition to the normal voting that will take place at the meeting, we’re also accepting votes submitted via Email.

For paid members that can’t make it to the normal meeting, you can submit your vote for the 6 people you’d like to see on the board of directors in 2012 by sending an email to: vote@mug.org

You can submit your vote anytime between now and 18:00:00 EST (That’s 6pm local time) on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012. Any votes received after 6pm on the 14th will not be counted.
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 at 6:30pm on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012.

We are back at the Farmington Community Library (map)
We’ll be in the large auditorium upstairs.

For our main presentation, we have Bill Allie giving a presentation titled: “An Introduction to the Ext-JS Web Application Development Framework”

Ext-JS is a pure JavaScript application framework that will work in browsers from IE6 to Chrome 11. Using Ext-JS, you can create cross-platform applications using only a browser. It has an extensive APi that provides you with the tools and wigets you will need for your application.

This presentation will provide an introduction to Ext-JS and provide an overview of the basic framework and the core components (widgets) provided by the framework. Also, examples of using the framework as well as lessons learned while using the framework will be presented.
For the second presentation, Craig Maloney will present a command called “pv”.

pv, or “progress viewer” is one of those commands that you probably won’t use on a day-to-day basis, but is extremely handy for long-running jobs where you’re left wondering “just how far along IS it,anyway?”
Nominations
In addition to the two presentations outlined above, we’ll kick off the new year with the opening of nominations for the “Board of directors” of MUG. Every year at this time we offer members a chance to help MUG either by nominating themselves or someone they think will help lead our group through the next 12 months.
The nominations will officially open on Tuesday, Jan 10th and the election will be held on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 (Weather permitting).
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 at 6:30pm on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012.

We are back at the Farmington Community Library (map)
We’ll be in the large auditorium upstairs.

For our main presentation, we have Craig Maloney giving a presentation titled: “A Brief History of Unix”

Description

There’s an awful lot of history surrounding the UNIX operating system, and Craig will distill it to the point where it fits into a nice, neat, entertaining 40 minute period where everyone can smile and feel great about how awesome UNIX and Linux are. There may even be a little show and tell for the presentation.

So, come on out and learn something about our shared UNIX heritage.

The second presentation will cover “Troubleshooting techniques for Linux and Unix”

Description

Have you ever plugged in a USB memory stick and not been able to figure out how mount it? How about trying to figure out what kind of Video card you have installed without opening the cover? Maybe you’ve had trouble getting your wireless card working. We’ll be covering that and a whole lot more this month.

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 at 6:30pm on Tuesday, December 13th.

We are back at the Farmington Community Library (map)
We’ll be in the large auditorium upstairs.

For our main presentation, we have Les Orchard showing us about Web Development and Virtual Machines.

Excerpt

Description

Open Source projects are most successful when they attract enthusiastic and capable contributors. But, often the first thing a new contributor to a web development project faces is a README file with a long list of instructions needed to even get the thing running.

And that’s if they’re lucky: Just as often, the necessary documentation is incomplete or missing entirely, leaving a new hacker no way to get involved without investing a lot of time up front.

This is no way to treat potential volunteers; they’re doing us favors by spending time with our projects. In return for their time, we should do the best we can to make our projects accessible and rewarding without unreasonable demands.

To that end, we can use modern tools like VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Puppet to turn walls of text into virtual machines. We can offer simple bootstraps and even bootable disk images to can get new developers started quickly, allowing them to explore a running system rather than demand they understand the complete stack before the first page view.

Bio

Les Orchard is a {web,mad,computer} scientist and {tech,scifi} writer from the Detroit, MI area working for the webdev team at the Mozilla Corporation.

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 at 6:30pm on Tuesday, November 8th.

We are back at the Farmington Community Library (map)
Unless otherwise noted, we’ll be holding our meetings at the library, in the main auditorium. But, for the October and November 2011 meetings, we’ll be in the smaller meeting room upstairs, near the larger auditorium.

We’ve got a couple of great presentations on tap for the October 11th, 2011 Mug meeting.

For our main presentation, we have Alan Evans showing us the latest from Redhat and Fedora.

Alan will discuss the history of Red Hat based Linux distributions starting with light focus on the earlier days and increasing focus on the current distributions like Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Scientific Linux. Additionally he’ll focus on the technologies and software that make Red Hat based distributions different from other distributions. In particular he will talk about RHN Satellite/Spacewalk, YUM, Anaconda and in depth about RPM.

Bio – Alan Evans
In 2002, Alan graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Information Technology from Rochester Institute of Technology. Since leaving RIT he has worked for several companies in various IT related positions: Desktop Support Technician, Network Administrator and most recently Linux Engineer. Throughout his career Alan has leveraged open source software and in particular Red Hat based Linux distributions. Alan currently works at Secure-24, Inc., a Southfield based managed hosting provider as a Sr. Linux Engineer on the Linux Architecture team.

For our 2nd presentation, we have Sean Millichamp will give a brief presentation on the Linux Logical Volume Management (LVM), including basic concepts and an overview of the key tools used to interact with it.

Bio – Sean Millichamp
Sean has worked in Information Technology for over 18 years. He began deploying Linux and other open source software in production in 1996 and has been using it since. Sean currently works at Secure-24, Inc., a Southfield based managed hosting provider as a Linux Architect. In this role he is responsible for evaluating and recommending new products, technologies, and policies for the Linux team. 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, most recently as maintainer of Puppet’s SELinux support. Find Sean online at http://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmillichamp

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 at 6:30pm on Tuesday, October 11th.

We are back at the Farmington Community Library (map)
Unless otherwise noted, we’ll be holding our meetings at the library, in the main auditorium. But, for the October and November 2011 meetings, we’ll be in the smaller meeting room upstairs, near the larger auditorium.

The Michigan Unix Users Group is pleased to present Marcel Gagné!

Marcel Gagné is best known for his long-running column in Linux Journal “Cooking With Linux” as well as the “Moving to Linux” series of books. Marcel will be coming to speak with us at MUG on September 13th. Marcel will be talking about “Linux and cloud computing . . . theories, technologies, ideas, and practices”. Not a week goes by without a mention about cloud computing, so you won’t want to miss this enlightening and engaging presentation!

Note: Because of scheduling issues with the Engineering Society of Detroit, this meeting will be at our previous location, the Farmington Hills Library. (map)

Security in the Modern Internet

Continuing the security topics from last month’s meeting:

• PAM Authentication (Devin Heitmuller)
• Surviving an audit (Gib Nichols)
• File Permissions (Dave Satwicz)
• File Encryption (Craig Maloney)

Staying secure in the modern Internet

Best practices, Common sense and even some non-obvious techniques

We’ll be covering many things, including the following:

• Password policies including generating, aging, cycling, revoking, … (Jim McQuillan)
• ssh public/private keypairs instead of password auth (Craig Maloney)
• vpns using IPSec, OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP  (and any other technology you might think of) (Jim McQuillan)
• SSL certificates for securing your IMAP, POP, HTTP, Postgresql, … (Jim McQuillan)
• Wireless security with WPA, WEP, … (Gib Nichols)
• file encryption with pgp/gpg (Craig Maloney)
• file permissions (rwx—) (Dave Satwicz)
• Auditing – How to survive a corporate audit (Gib Nichols)
• Home directory encryption (Anyone interested in presenting this?)

We won’t have time to cover every detail of every topic above, but we’ll at least touch on the highlights and see where the conversation takes us.

This will be a collaborative discussion. We invite (and encourage) audience participation!

Map and Directions

The next MUG meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, June 14th.

The Michigan Ubuntu Loco will be sponsoring this meeting. They’ll be providing all of the presentations.

Included in this meeting will be:

• Who we are / What we do / Why we do it – Greg Grossmeier
• PPA’s – Personal Package Archives – Rick Harding
• Ubuntu 11.04 – Latest release of Ubuntu – Craig Maloney
• Ubuntu Server, Oneiric Cycle – Scott Mosher
• Ubuntu One – Jorge Castro

And more to come!

The next MUG meeting is Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 6:30pm at the ESD building in Southfield.

We’ll be having a series of lightning talks.

• Google Voice
• Android on laptop/netbook
• watch
• PDF Creation with PHP
• Big Blue Button
• IRC
• Bookie
• New MUG website details
• LoONIES – League of Overambitious New Inventors Engineers & Scientists

We’re allocating 10 minutes for each session. We still have room to add a couple more, so if you have something you’d like to share with the group, please let us know so we can add it to the list.

Meeting location:

Engineering Society of Detroit
20700 Civic Center drive
Suite 450
Southfield, MI 48076
Map