meetings

Main Topic: RPATH Makes Appliances Easy

The September meeting is shaping up quite nicely. rPath, using the Conary build system is a very hot technology and we’ve got a couple of the actual engineers that designed it to fly from their offices in North Carolina to spend some time with us, to show us what it’s all about and to answer any questions we might have. This is a meeting you shouldn’t miss, and please tell all your friends about it too. Jim McQuillan

Michael K. Johnson and Ken VanDine will present rPath’s technology, from top to bottom. They will demonstrate building an appliance, and then explain how you can build and maintain your own complete OS — as well as why you might want to!

They will describe and demonstrate how the tools work, both from a developer and from an end-user perspective. They will describe how the tools that rPath has created make it possible first to easily create a small operating system image that supports an application — and then make updates to that operating system robust, and ongoing maintenance easy.

They encourage questions, and will be happy to spend time afterwards going into even more detail after they exceed their allotted one and a half hours.

Michael K. Johnson was one of the original Linux hackers. He cut his kernel chops re-writing the parallel port driver and turning the /proc filesystem into something capable of supporting all the features of ps — and then some. He managed the tsx-11.mit.edu FTP site, built low-level tools for kernel interfaces, and ported Emacs to Linux before he learned to love vi. He was the editor of Linux Journal for its first two years. He then joined Red Hat as a member of the operating system development team, where he wrote configuration tools and maintained many packages, then ran Red Hat’s kernel team until he founded the Fedora project and guided it through its first release.

In 2004, Michael left Red Hat, joining with Matt Wilson and Erik Troan to design the Conary software management system that is the core of all rPath technology. At rPath, he is responsible for the development of Conary and rPath Linux.

Ken VanDine, now an Engineering Lead at rPath, was the founder (in 2005) and is the project leader of the Foresight Linux Project. His work with the Foresight Linux Project and Conary software management system led Ken to work for rPath, based in Raleigh, N.C.

Ken has been involved with Open Source technology as an avid Linux user and Systems Administrator since 1993. He worked with Linux while enlisted in the United States Air Force and while employed by software companies and a few dot-coms. During those years he gained extensive experience packaging, maintaining, and deploying software for Linux. After working with a number of package management systems, Ken started using Conary, which solved many of challenges he previously experienced with legacy package management technologies.

As a member of the GNOME Marketing team, Ken has written articles for the GNOME Journal (http://www.gnomejournal.org) and is now the maintainer of the GNOME !LiveCD, based on Foresight Linux and available at http://torrents.gnome.org

Main Topic: Open Document Format

For the August 14th meeting the Michigan User Group is visiting the Southeastern Michigan IEEE in Dearborn who is having a very important meeting on the Open Document Format.

The official tittle of the presentation is: “ODF: How a Digital Document Format is Threatening a Multibillion-Dollar Monopoly. SE MI IEEE announcement, meeting location, schedule

Presented by: Dave Scholl, Ford Motor Company

Time: 5:30 PM Please pre-register for this free event online

We’re encouraging everyone to come with us to the meeting. This would be a great time to pull that MUG shirt out of the closet and show up in force at a great meeting put on with another group. Pay SPECIAL attention to the time change for this meeting.

This is a ONE TIME change of venue. In September, we’ll be back at the Farmington Community Library when the topic will be RPATH – Ken VanDine and/or Michael K. Johnson.

eDiscovery, Intrusion detection, and stories from an FBI Special Agent

Our speaker is: Richard Rytman Managing director of Technical Services and Legal Counsel at Veritas Global.

Mr. Rytman will talk to us about something called eDiscovery and changes in the law, where it is going, how it will effect corporate compliance and/or document retention policies as it relates to electronically stored information (ESI), and the problems that will naturally be associated with the rule. He’ll offer recommendations on how to avoid the pitfalls, or at least minimize the nuisance level, caused by the rule and its implementation by lawyers and judges with little to no IT background.

Additionally, He’ll cover computer intrusion crimes, or hacking, including best practices for defending against a hacker/virus/worm etc. He’ll ask (and hopefully answer) the following questions:

• If your system is hacked, do you know what to do?
• What procedures and policies are in place to deal with the situation that will best minimize loss but also preserve evidence at the same time?
• Under what circumstances should you contact law enforcement (which one and who) and what to expect if you do (i.e., the whole legal process involved from A to Z).
• Do you have a duty to report a hacker?

Finally, if there’s still time at the end, he’ll share some war stories from his time with the FBI and give us a chance to ask some questions.

About the speaker:

Mr. Rytman is a former Special Agent with the FBI. He is a certified Technical Trained Agent (TTA), a small select group of highly trained agents whose responsibilities include supporting case agents in the field through the use and deployment of a variety of sensitive electronic surveillance equipment and methods via covert technical operations.

Prior to being selected for the TTA program, Mr. Rytman was the lead investigator for the Cyber Crimes Squad in the State of Michigan. His primary areas of responsibility included investigating federal computer intrusion crimes and presenting to various computer security groups, business executives and system administrators on the topic of computer security and related legal issues. He helped form the first cyber crime squad in Detroit and successfully investigated many complex computer intrusion crimes on both a national and international level.

While at the FBI Mr. Rytman was also a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, where he was responsible for gathering intelligence and building complex criminal cases against various terrorist organizations operating within the United States.

Mr. Rytman was also a certified legal advisor and firearms instructor for the FBI and has served as a member of the Detroit FBI SWAT Team. He also served in the United States Navy in the intelligence arena as well as in the United States Army Reserves as a Combat Engineer Platoon Leader.

Prior to joining the FBI, Mr. Rytman was an Assistant District Attorney. He is a member of both the Wisconsin and Michigan State Bar.

That’s an awful lot of stuff to cover in one meeting, so we’ll need to make sure we get started on time. I think this is a unique opportunity for us to get an inside look at the legalities and intricacies of the industry that we’re all a part of, from someone who’s got the experience to talk about it.

John Terpstra

For this meeting, we’re bringing in special guest John Terpstra.

John H Terpstra works with AMD in the cross platform group focusing on
digital media solutions. His key interest is to enable the delivery of delightful media entertainment on open source platforms.

John is a well known contributor and visionary in the open source community who has an active commercial focus. He is co-founder of the Samba-Team, and a member of the Open Source Software Institute Advisory Board. He has worked with the LSB, Li18nux (now !OpenI18N.Org), is a best selling author of “The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide”, “Samba-3 by Example”, “Hardening Linux” and has other books in production.

Prior to joining AMD John worked with The SCO Group (previously Caldera Inc.), and !TurboLinux Inc., in VP level positions.

John will be with us for the whole evening, and he’s agreed to give us 2 presentations:

Samba3 Update: Recent changes and their impact, reviewing the changes in 3.0.20 through 3.0.25. How to take advantage of recent developments.

Demonstration of an AMD multi-media concept platform. The machine that he will demonstrate is a concept model for future technology developments. John mentioned that this hardware was “rough around the edges”, so it should be loads of fun. A brief overview will be given of the challenges that are being addressed to create new entertainment experiences.

Jim’s note: I’ve known John for a long time, and I’ve seen him speak on numerous occasions. He’s really a great speaker. He’s extremely knowledgeable in both topics and he’s able to share with us his passion for the technology. You really shouldn’t miss this meeting.

Main Topic: Mark Shuttleworth

Jim McQuillan will be in Seville, Spain From May 2nd through the 12th, for the Ubuntu Education Summit (UES) and the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS). We’ll be doing a live remote MUG presentation from Seville. This will be live 2-way interactive Audio AND Video. We’ve worked out the technology and we’re pretty sure that we are ready to give this a try.

Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu founder and Cosmonaut) has agreed to take part in this presentation. He’ll talk about Ubuntu, Space and whatever else he pleases. This’ll be a great chance to ask him some questions.

In addition to Mark, we’ll have some other Ubuntu developers, and we’ll pick their brains about what’s coming up in the next release of Ubuntu, the process that the Ubuntu team uses to create a release, and maybe they’ll tell us a bit about the deal with Dell agreeing to bundle Ubuntu Linux on some of their desktop and laptop computers.

Keep in mind that Spain is 6 hours ahead of Detroit, so it’ll be very late there when we hook up and do the presentation. We hope to get Mark’s part of the session going quickly, so please try to be at the meeting BEFORE 6:30pm next Tuesday.

This will be the first time we’ve tried doing a remote session with video. It’s impossible to tell how the audio and video quality will be, until we actually get there and do it. We’ll be testing the connection very well before the meeting, so hopefully, we’ll have it all tuned up perfectly, and everything will come out great.

This should be a great meeting and it will give us a chance to show that the Metro Detroit area has a strong technological group. One that we can all be proud of.

Additional Topic: PostgreSQL 8.2 what’s new
Our speaker is: Billy G. Allie

Bill has given many MUG presentations over the years, this month we’re happy to have him give us a review of what is new in PostgreSQL 8.2.

Main Topic: Systems for tracking support requests or developer bugs
Our speakers are:

• Erick Tyack : RT (http://bestpractical.com/rt)
• Mark Ramm : Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/)
• Rick Harding : Mantis (http://www.mantisbt.org/)

Our speakers will go over the features and drawbacks of three different bug/support trackers each in a different programming language. Find out which one can solve your needs in your own office.

Because of a small turnout due to the weather last month the election for the Board of Directors will be held this month.
The Michigan User Group is managed by a group of people we call the Board of Directors. Each year, MUG Members have the opportunity to cast their votes for the 6 people we’d like to see on the board. This is your chance to either run for a position on the board, or vote for the people you would most like to see on the board.

At this time, the following people have been nominated:

Brown, Duane Accepted
Castro, Jorge declined
Glutting, Jim Accepted
Harding, Rick Accepted New
McQuillan, Jim Accepted
Nichols, Gibson Accepted New
Satwicz, Dave Accepted
Williams, Dick Accepted

The nomination period is still open and will remain open until just before the election on Tuesday evening, Feb 13, 2007. If you would like to nominate someone, including yourself, please send an email to board@mug.org stating who you’d like to nominate.

Main Topic: NX from NoMachine
Our speaker is: *_Ryan Kather_*

Quoting the NoMachine website “NoMachine NX is a Terminal Server and Remote Access solution based on a comprising set of enterprise class open source technologies.”

Ryan is an IT professional who believes that the free flow of information benefits the global society. Ryan has been using open source and Linux for over 5 years and has contributed to the following OSS projects:

• ORPP (http://orpp.sourceforge.net) – Open Robotics Peripheral Platform
• Gaim – Gaim multi-protocol instant messenging client
• GASH (http://gash.sourceforge.net) – GAim SHell perl plugin for Gaim
• CPR Backup (http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?cpr-backup) – NetWare-centric backup facility with Rsync, Cron, and Perl

Secondary Topic: SSH
Our speaker is: *_Flavio daCosta_*

Using SSH for more than logging on to remote machines.

Things we’ve asked Flavio to cover (and then some):

1. Creating SSH tunnels (How and Why)
2. X-Forwarding
3. Compression
4. Choosing cyphers
5. ssh key management – creating & using keys, agents, and verifying host fingerprints, etc.
6. Remote shell scripts via ssh, this has been a topic of interest on the mdlug list. Flav’s tips and tricks for running commands

Election for the Board of Directors

The Michigan User Group is managed by a group of people we call the _Board of Directors_. Each year, MUG Members have the opportunity to cast their votes for the 6 people we’d like to see on the board. This is your chance to either run for a position on the board, or vote for the people you would most like to see on the board.

At this time, the following people have been nominated:

Brown, Duane Accepted
Castro, Jorge declined
Glutting, Jim Accepted
Harding, Rick Accepted New
McQuillan, Jim Accepted
Nichols, Gibson Accepted New
Satwicz, Dave Accepted
Williams, Dick Accepted

The nomination period is still open and will remain open until just before the election on Tuesday evening, Feb 13, 2007. If you would like to nominate someone, including yourself, please send an email to board@mug.org stating who you’d like to nominate.

Main Topic: Mail Server setup and configuration, with SPAM filtering
Our speakers are Bill Allie, and Rick Harding

Spam has become a huge problem, clogging up our inboxes and the internet as a whole. there are estimates that 80-90 percent of all email is unwanted, unsolicited junk mail (spam). there’s a number of ways to combat this problem. Our first speaker, *Bill Allie* has recently rebuilt his Linux based mail server and is going to tell us about setting up a basic mail server with SPAM and virus filtering using postfix (why postfix and not sendmail, he’ll tell us), greylisting and sagator: http://www.salstar.sk/sagator/.

His goal was to stem the flow of junk mail (both SPAM and viruses) that his server had to handle. He’ll discuss what he did to filter out the junk using open source tools. The discussion will cover the selection and configuring of the Mail Transport Agent (MTA), how to limit spam using SMTP policies, header restrictions, spam filtering software, and virus blocking software.

*Rick Harding* will add his input on using amavisd as the filtering end of the solution as well as some information on tweaking spamassassin.

If you have topics for future meetings you would like us to cover please email the board, thanks.

Rick’s Spam Notes

Urls
Postfix setup with Spamassassin

• http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/focus_spam_postfix/
• http://wiki.splitbrain.org/postfix?DokuWiki=f1cc8a65abe6d4815c2c6d890cd08595
• http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/mail/postfixadmin+on+debian+sarge
• http://postfix.pentachron.net/#AEN172
• Greylisting/Postfix help – http://calum.org/posts/postfix-antispam

Spamassassin Config

• Whilelisting – http://www.mail-archive.com/amavis-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06614.html
• FuzzyOcr – http://www200.pair.com/mecham/spam/image_spam.html
• FuzzyOcr – http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/FuzzyOcrPlugin
• Extra Rules – http://www.rulesemporium.com
• ImageInfo plugin – http://www.rulesemporium.com/plugins.htm#imageinfo

Stats

• mailgraph/pflogsumm – http://www.howtoforge.com/mail_statistics_mailgraph_pflogsumm_p2

Packages Used

• Stats – amavis-stats
• Stats – mailgraph
• Postfix
• Postgrey
• amavisd-new
• clamav
• spamassassin
• script really not package – rules_du_jour

Election for MUG board of directors in February!

It’s time once again for the election of the members of the board of directors of the Michigan!/usr/group. Nominations are now being accepted and the election will be held at the February 13th regular MUG meeting.

The current board members are:

• Jim McQuillan
• Dick Williams
• Duane Brown
• David Satwicz
• Jorge Castro
• Jim Glutting

There are 6 positions on the board, and every year, we hold the election to choose who the members will be for the coming year.

Board members are expected to be available for a monthly face-to-face board meeting and also to participate in email discussions to help facilitate upcoming MUG meetings and handle MUG business.

If you’d like to really help out, or you know someone who you think would make a great board member, speak up and nominate that person.

Main Topic: Collaborative Development

Our moderator is: Jim McQuillan

Many of us have been in the position of needing to work on a document or program with other people either locally or geographically dispersed. This month we’ll be having a discussion about the various tools and technologies to make collaborative development easier. This could be One-on-One, or there may be many people involved in the collaboration. For this meeting, we’ll be primarily focused on the small team of 2 people collaborating over the internet.

• communications
  • Voip
  • IRC
  • Instant Messaging
  • group meeting tools (FOSS tools to work with or replace netmeeting)
• sharing
  • screen
  • vnc
  • Gobby
• editors
  • vim
  • [[http://ace.iserver.ch/][ACE]] is a platform-independent, collaborative text editor. It is a real-time cooperative editing system
  • [[http://docsynch.sourceforge.net/][DocSynch]] is a collaborative editing system on top of IRC
  • [[http://darcs.0x539.de/trac/obby/cgi-bin/trac.cgi][Gobby]] – A free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat
  • [[http://me.sphere.pl/indexen.htm][MoonEdit]] is a multi-platform collaborative text editor
• document/code management
  • cvs
  • subversion
  • Bazaar

We won’t have the time to go into depth in every item in the above list, but we’ll cover whatever we can. We expect this to be a highly interactive meeting, so if you have ideas of your own, for how to deal with collaboration, show up and tell us about it.

Secondary Topic: GIMP

Gibson Nichols will be talking about GIMP.

Main Topic: Linux Powered Office Infrastructure

Here is the situation. Someone that you know, your brother-in-law, your cousin, your minister, your …., well someone, wants to setup a back office computing operation for a small business, or an organization, or something. They know that you are a computer expert. They ask you what to do.

You, being completely committed to open software and not being quick enough to have hidden, want to respond with a complete solution. What do you do?

What functions might they need? What software should you install to meet those needs? Then how do you setup those software systems and how do you administer them? Don’t worry about money. There is none. You will be using mostly hand-me-down hardware and only new store-bought-stuff if absolutely necessary and if the price is low.

An introduction to the various components with a chance for feedback, to get an idea of what our membership would like to hear more about at future meetings.

It has been mentioned that we could try to actually install and configure parts of this. There seems to be far too many things in our solution to install anything during the meeting. If anyone wants guidance with selection, installation, setup and administration of these parts bring it up and I’m sure someone will be more than glad to help.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a requirement, where possible.

We started this exercise at the October and November meetings with discussions to identify the required functions and the software candidates to fulfill those requirements. At the December meeting we will give a brief introduction to each of them and may try to actually install and configure as much as we can. There will probably be far too many things in our ‘Back Office’ solution to install them during the meeting.

If there is interest we may have presentations on installation and configuration of the various pieces of the Linux Powered Office Infrastructure at future meetings.

Our current list of possible components