Michigan!/usr/group

New Location!

Command of the month: netcat

Dave Satwicz will be covering the netcat command this month. Netcat is often referred to as a “Swiss-army knife for TCP/IP.” Its list of features includes port scanning, transferring files, and port listening, and it can be used as a backdoor.

Nomination for the board of directors

At the February 8th meeting (weather permitting), we’ll be holding elections for the board of directors. At the January 11th meeting, we’ll officially accept nominations for candidates to the board. If you or someone you know would like to help drive the direction of MUG, please consider submitting a nomination.

LAST meeting at this location!
Starting with the January 2011 the MUG meetings will be held at:

Engineering Society of Detroit
20700 Civic Center Drive
Fourth floor, Suite 450
Southfield, MI 48076

Main Topic: LinuxTV

Devin Heitmueller will be talking about LinuxTV, which is an open source project dedicated to making TV and video capture work well under Linux. This talk will cover the current state of hardware support, the various applications out there, and how you too can watch HD television being freely transmitted over the air. Break free from the crummy DVR your cable company is charging you fifteen bucks a month for!

Devin has been an active contributor to the Linux kernel
since 2007, focusing primarily on the media subsystem. He has also contributed patches to a variety of other projects including Wireshark, Perl core, Kaffeine, and !MythTV. He currently works at a popular TV tuner manufacturer but has previously held positions as a Linux kernel maintainer for embedded security products, designing ISDN terminal adapters and IP routing hardware for 3Com, and working at
Lucent Bell Laboratories.

Secondary Topic: IPMI – Intelligent Platform Management Interface

The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) specification is an Intel-led standard that defines a set of common interfaces to a computer system that system administrators can use to monitor system health and manage the system. More than two hundred companies support IPMI. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel Corporation, and NEC Corporation announced IPMI v1.0 on 1998-09-16, v1.5 on 2001-03-01, and v2.0 on 2004-02-14. The technology is now considered a de-facto standard

Jim McQuillan will give an overview of the technology, how to configure it, and a demonstration of some very useful tricks with IPMI, including running a remote console and monitoring temperature sensors.

Command of the month: netcat

Dave Satwicz will be covering the netcat command this month. Netcat is often referred to as a “Swiss-army knife for TCP/IP.” Its list of features includes port scanning, transferring files, and port listening, and it can be used as a backdoor.

Main Topic: Linux gaming

Fun and Games with Craig Maloney

Think Linux gaming is Frozen Bubble and Quake clones? Think
again. Craig will show some of the more recent games available
for Linux, with a quick demo of each of them.

Secondary Topic: The new MUG web site.

Will Fuqua has been working on bringing the MUG web site out of the 80’s. He’ll show off state of nation, um site. While he’s at it we can also pick his brain about what he’s using to make it happen.

Command of the month: netstat

Did you ever want to know what network connections are active on your system? How about knowing what services are listening, waiting for incoming connections?
In this month’s Unix Command Line session *_Jim Glutting_* will give us an introduction to netstat. An extremely useful tool for seeing what’s happening on your network.

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.