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

Main Topic: Byobu: GNU Screen enhancement

Speaker: Scott Moser
Byobu is a Japanese term for decorative, multi-panel screens that serve as folding room dividers. As an open source project, Byobu is an elegant enhancement of the otherwise functional, plain, practical GNU Screen. Byobu includes an enhanced profile and configuration utilities for the GNU screen window manager, such as toggle-able system status notifications.

Secondary topic: Expect

Speaker: Jim McQuillan
Expect is a Unix automation and testing tool, written by Don Libes as an extension to the Tcl scripting language, for interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, ssh, and others. It uses Unix pseudo terminals to wrap up subprocesses transparently, allowing the automation of arbitrary applications that are accessed over a terminal. With Tk, interactive applications can be wrapped in X11 GUIs. Jim will show some practical examples of using Expect to automate FTP downloads.

Engineering Society of Detroit Membership

Lori Birman is the membership director for the Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD). This month, Lori will give us a brief presentation on the benefits of being a member of the ESD. MUG is now an affiliate member of the Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD). As an affiliate, our members are entitled to become members of the ESD.

Main Topic: Creating a Podcast

Craig Maloney will give us another of his awesome presentations.

Ever thought about podcasting, but not sure where to start? Craig Maloney will demonstrate how he puts together his audio podcast “Open Metalcast”, using Ubuntu Linux, Audacity, and a USB microphone. This will be the podcast that will be released as episode #16. Craig will also answer questions about how he uses WordPress to distribute the files, pitfalls over licensing, and ways to promote your show once you’ve recorded it. He’ll also present some tips and tricks for getting the best quality for your podcast.

Main Topic: Agile CMMI: Driving Radical Change in your organization

Why do we resist change? Why is “process” a dirty word in software development? Why can’t you just leave me alone so I can write software?
In an industry that is becoming progressively more competitive and lean the process used to develop systems and software is the last frontier for competitive advantage. No longer is one country or culture dominating the software profession. Similar education, technologies, infrastructure, and skills are available to all corners of the world, but innovative and useful processes that harness these resources effectively have eluded all but a handful of organizations.

With their high-failure rates, high cost, and over-reliance on mountains of documentation, over complicated and ill-deployed processes have soured the industry on processes based on models such as CMMI, ITIL, ISO, and SPICE. But the success or failure of the systems development process doesn’t lie in these source models, but in the interpretation and deployment of processes based on those models, and this distinction can make the difference between a vibrant and innovative company and one that is struggling for survival.

The application of agile methods to the development of software and systems has revolutionized the industry, but consistency, predictability, and repeatability still have not been realized by most engineering and IT organizations. The CMMI provides an excellent model for the integration of agility with disciplined structure that will address these business needs, but the method used to develop such an approach has never materialized.
His presentation will summarize research conducted while co-authoring the SEI technical Note “CMMI or Agile: Why not Embrace Both?!” and will discuss the reasons for the perceived conflict between agile and CMMI, the science behind radical change, along with some surprising findings and solutions.

Engineering Society of Detroit Membership

Lori Birman is the membership director for the Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD). This month, Lori will give us a brief presentation on the benefits of being a member of the ESD.
MUG is now an affiliate member of the Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD). As an affiliate, our members are entitled to become members of the ESD. We had scheduled to have Lori Birman at the February meeting to introduce us to the ESD and explain the benefits. Unfortunately, Lori has a scheduling conflict this month and has agreed to present at our March 8th meeting.

Election for the MUG board of directors

At this months meeting (weather permitting), we’ll be holding elections for the board of directors. At the January 11th meeting, we opened the nomination period. Currently, the following people have been nominated:

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

The nomination period will remain open until just before the elections on Tuesday, February 8th. If you or someone you know would like to help drive the direction of MUG, please consider submitting a nomination.