meetings

Main Topic: VMware

Robert J Tessanne Jr, Senior Systems Architect/Engineer at Red Level Networks, will be discussing Virtualization utilizing the VMware vSphere product and Storage Virtualization using !DataCore technologies. Because centralized storage is the key to a successful virtualization project, presentation topics will also include VMware vSphere 4.x technologies as well as !DataCore’s SANmelody High Availability virtual storage solution.

Robert J Tessanne Jr is a Senior Systems Architect/Engineer with over 16 years of experience in the IT business with industry certifications from Microsoft, VMware, Cisco, Citrix, !DataCore and more. Currently, Robert works at Red Level Networks in Novi, MI providing IT solutions to over 350 clients such as Buffalo Wild Wings, Belle Tire, Saginaw Intermediate School District and many others. Robert works with all platforms in virtualization by designing, managing and implementing the solutions, while training the client on the solution and supporting the solution after it has been deployed.

Secondary Topic: Google command line tools

Google has developed a set of command-line utilities for interacting with many of their on-line services. This month, Rick Harding has offered to give us a peek at those tools.

Command of the month: netstat

Mug member Jim Glutting will be showing us the awesomeness of the netstat utility for analyzing how your system is interacting with your network.

Main Topic: DD-WRT

DD-WRT is a Linux based solution designed to replace the firmware that ships pre-installed for several wireless routers, most notably the Linksys WRT54G (including the WRT54GL and WRT54GS). Scott Moser will give an overview and demonstration, hopefully covering some of its features and convincing you to want to run one at home.

Secondary Topic: Tethering

Then we will have Duane Brown demonstrating how he’s tethered his laptop to his droid and then discuss other options. Is this available to BlackBerry users? What about iPhone owners?

Meeting Topic: Small, Local Server Network Administration, What, How, and Why

If you ever go to set up a small local server, even for home use, there are many items that need to be attended to. We will touch on as many of these as we can, limited only by time and by participants willing to contribute.

For each topic the discussion should include a statement of just what the item is, why you need it, where it is configured or managed, and an example of the settings.

At this time the list of topics and topics leaders is as follows.

• DNS – Jim McQuillan
• DHCP – Jim Glutting
• CUPS – Jim McQuillan
• Apache Web Server – Gibson Nichols
• Firewall
• IP Tables
• Mail Server, Postfix or?
• NFS
• SAMBA
• Edifax

We are looking for volunteers to lead some of the sessions. Please feel free, encouraged, to add to the list and to volunteer to lead a topic. We envision a 10 to 15 minute session. You do not need to be an expert. Many in the group can supply detail to almost any topic.

TBA

Topic: Lightening Talks

• RSS – Rick Harding
• WiMax – Gib (Gibson Nichols)
• MythTV – Chris
• Something – Mark Ramm
• XO computer – Dave Satwitz, Jim Gluting
• cellular internet – tell us your experiences
• LaunchPad – Rick Harding may be standing in for Jorge Castro as Jorge is out of town
• in place Upgrading your Ubuntu – Duane reports his experience on going from 6.06LTS to 7.10 on his desktop and laptop
• State of the art personal media devices – Duane can tell us about his Archos 605 with wifi, looking for other spokespersons

Main Topic: OpenVPN
Speaker: Flavio daCosta – Slides

The man, the myth, the legend will fill us in on OpenVPN. OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution which can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including remote access, site-to-site VPNs, WiFi security, and enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls.

Additional Topic: LaTex
Jim !McQuillan will tell us the what, whys, and wherefores about !LaTex and related tools.

Main Topic: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Ivan Krstić – Director of Security Architecture for the OLPC project

Ivan’s Google Tech Talk from April 12, 2007

This month we have a fantastic opportunity to see what OLPC is all about from a member of the OLPC team.

Ivan is a software architect and researcher currently on leave from Harvard University. Prior to joining OLPC, he served as director of research at the Medical Informatics Laboratory at Zagreb Children’s Hospital, developing software infrastructure for wide-scale digital healthcare. He is deeply involved in open-source and free software, notably as an administrator of the Ubuntu Server Team and co-author of the best-selling Official Ubuntu Book, and specializes in architecture and security of large distributed systems. He has consulted on both matters for some of the largest websites on the Internet.

Ivan will share with us insights into the OLPC project that you just can’t get anywhere else. He’s prepared to tell us about the technology, security, science and anything else we want to know about the project.

Ivan is traveling from Cambridge, MA to Detroit specifically to be at our meeting. This is our chance fill the auditorium and show Ivan how strong the open source community is in south east Michigan.

For our October meeting, we’ve got two awesome speakers lined up. Each an expert in their field. It should prove to be one of the best meetings yet. Read on for the details.

First Topic: Security
Our speaker is: David Schaefer

David will briefly discuss the scope of Information Assurance (IA), and how it relates to our ever changing environment in Information Technologies (IT) and business. He will lay down a foundation and stress the importance of how IA is all around us every day and used to protect us, and our data. This will be a higher level presentation to point out some of the various layers and obstacles we all need to look out for in order to protect our data. David will then journey into the final frontier of host-based hardening to discuss the common pitfalls and best practices that we can follow as hobbyists and professionals in securing UNIX, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. During the presentation, he will point out some free tools/procedures that can be used to help us audit/benchmark, and lock down host-based systems to help your computers to live long and prosperous lives while staying free of any bad cling-ons.

David Schaefer is a Desktop Support Supervisor at Oakland Community College. David has over 9 years of experience in the education industry, and has held the roles from Desktop Support Specialist to Network Information Systems Professional. David has an MBA with a specialization of Information Assurance (IA) and a BBA with a concentration in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Walsh College.

Second Topic: DRM — A Fiasco, Stuffed in a Debacle, and Wrapped up in a Blunder
Our speaker is: David J. Scholl

The Internet, as a collective machine composed of millions of computers interconnected for high-speed data transfer, can copy and distribute text, audio, and video on a scale that would have been unimaginable even half a century ago. Thanks to this modern-day genie, writers, musicians, and actors in even the narrowest of artistic niches can maintain a world-wide fan base, making and distributing digital copies of their work at negligible cost. Unfortunately, just as wishes granted by genies in ancient fables had unintended consequences, so too does this gift from the modern-day genie. Copyright infringement, the making of an illegal copy of an artistic work without payment to or permission from the owner, is now as easy as a click-and-drag with a mouse. In fact, the ease and near-anonymity of such copying has led to widespread tolerance toward copyright infringement in our society. In response, the corporations who profit from selling digital copies of artistic works are trying to use technical measures known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) to put the Internet genie halfway back into its bottle. The talk will review the most spectacular DRM-related failure ever to occur in the recording industry, the technical reasons why DRM has never worked and almost certainly never will, and how the industry’s current obsession with DRM is actually hastening its deterioration in the entertainment marketplace. Finally, there will be speculation about upcoming developments in DRM, which might lead to either (unlikely) the ultimate victory for DRM, or (probably) the end of DRM in our lifetime.

Dave Scholl holds a BA in Physics from Rice University, and an MA in Chemistry from Stanford University. Mr. Scholl worked in Thin-film physics at IBM Almaden Research Laboratory, and since 1991 has been at Ford Scientific Research Laboratory working on surface physics, nanotribology, combustion diagnostics, sound quality, and vehicle emissions. He has been a Linux user since Red Hat 4.2, a decade ago, and is an Open Source news junkie.

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.