Michigan!/usr/group

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

Main Topic: The State of Wine

Our speaker is: Jeremy White.

Jeremy is the founder and CEO of CodeWeavers, the primary corporate supporter of the Wine Project. Wine allows applications written for the Windows ™ operating system to run (unmodified) on Linux. For those of you stuck in the and of windows, this can be a great way to run your favorite operating system and still be able to run those required applications that normally require a Windows machine.

Jeremy has been using Linux since the mid 90’s, and involved with the Wine project since the late 90s. He lives in St. Paul, MN, where he spends most of his time goofing with his kids (when he isn’t playing World of Warcraft with his wife, that is <grin>).

Jeremy will report on the State of Wine. That will include a brief technical overview, an overview of flavors of Wine and how to get them. Then he’ll talk about recent progress, where Wine is going, and what it does well right now. And, of course, there will be cool demos.

We’ve asked Jeremy to reserve some time at the end of his talk, to answer questions. He’s involved in all kinds of Linux desktop related activities so if you have questions, bring them to the meeting and let’s see what Jeremy has to say.

Secondary Topic: “Smart Office” Planning

We’ll spend 20-30 minutes planning the December meeting. We’re looking for topics and volunteers willing to give a 5-10 minute introduction to the technology that they would use in a Linux/Opensource/freesoftware office infrastructure.

More details available at Meeting-20061212.

T-Shirts and Polos

We’ll have our stock of MUG.org T-Shirts and Polos at the November meeting. The T’s go for $10 each and the Polos are $20 each. But, if you are a paid member, you can get $5 off your first T-shirt and your first Polo. Such a deal.

Main Topic: The Linux Crystal Ball
Our speaker is: Marcel Gagne

Gather around and gaze into Marcel’s Linux crystal ball for a peek at the future. What’s going on? What does it mean? Where are we all going? And what is it going to be like when we get there? All that and some cool desktop demos.

Marcel is an award-winning author and columnist, probably best known for his Cooking with Linux column which appears monthly in Linux Journal. His best-selling Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! (now in its second edition) is the premier guide for those wishing to take the plunge into desktop Linux. His first book was the acclaimed Linux System Administration: A User’s Guide. His most recent book is Moving to the Linux Business Desktop. As if that’s not enough, he’s written numerous articles on Linux and Open source projects for various publications including Linux Journal, InformIT, Unix Review, !SysAdmin magazine and several others. He also appears regularly on radio and on TV as the Linux guy on Tech TV’s Call for Help.

If you’ve been missing MUG meetings lately, this meeting will be a great opportunity for you to get caught-up with what’s going on in the world of Linux and Free software. In fact, this is also a great chance for you to bring a friend, to introduce them to the idea that we have a choice in what we run on our computers.

links Marcel mentioned

• Easy Ubuntu
• penguin liberation front
• Democracy Player

Secondary Topic: Linux Powered Office Infrastructure

For our December 12th meeting, we’ll be devoting the entire evening to demos and discussions of a complete Free Software back-office suite. So, for the October meeting, we’ll start the planning for this. If you have a favorite Free/Open Source technology that you find useful in your business/home/school, such as Webservers, Databases, Mail servers and anything else, then bring it up during our second topic, and we can get it added into the schedule for December.

FREE STUFF

We still have books to give out that Jim Glutting brought back from Linux World.

Duane also picked up a couple of shirts from the Ohio LinuxFest and a copy of “The Offical Ubuntu Book” with DVD (release 6.06 LTS) which he’s decided to give away.

You must be a member to win one of these valuable prizes

MUG T-Shirts and Polos

The MUG T-Shirts and Polo shirts are in and they turned out awesome. In fact, they came in just in time for the Ohio Linux Fest in Columbus, where a whole bunch of us got to show our MUG spirit .
We’ll have the shirts for sale at the October meeting. The prices are extremely reasonable too. The T’s are $10/each and the Polos are $20/each. BUT, paid members will get a $5 discount on their first T-Shirt and also on their first Polo. They can buy additional shirts at the regular price.

These shirts are going to go fast, so be the first on your block to have one (or more).

First Topic: PHP 5
The presenter will be: Rick Harding (Rick’s presentation)

Rick is a System Administrator/Web Developer for MSU Flint Area Medical Education where he’s been using PHP for almost 4 years. He will be discussing the new object oriented features in PHP5 and how best to use them. He dreams of shooting his MS Exchange server with a large rifle, and his blog can be found at http://www.mitechie.com.

Second Topic: AJAX, JavaScript, and ???. OH MY!!

There’s been an awful lot of hype lately about Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript And XML). A great example of the power of Ajax can be seen on the Google Maps and Google gmail sites.

Our presenter for this session is our old friend Wolf. Wolf has a very impressive background, doing time at Ashton Tate, Apple Computer, Mozilla, Trolltech and now he’s doing Ajax development for Slashdot.

If you’ve ever seen Wolf talk before, you know that he’s *very* knowledgeable and a great speaker.

SWAG

Several of us have been doing some traveling, and we’ve accumulated a decent amount of SWAG (Stolen Without A Gun) to hand out. We’ve got Books, Shirts, stickers, bottle openers and all kinds of doodads to hand out.

Main Topic: Jabber

Jorge Castro will be giving us an overview of Jabber. Jabber is best known as “the Linux of instant messaging” — an open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo. Under the hood, Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols and technologies that enable any two entities on the Internet to exchange messages…

Secondary Topic: Recap of Desktop developer conference and Ottawa Linux Symposium

Jim McQuillan and Dick Williams went to Ottawa, for the Linux symposium. Time permitting we’ll get a recap of the various session topics and a recap of the kernel keynote and the GPL implications.

First Topic: Backup PC

Flavio DaCosta will tell us about BackupPC. From their website “BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux and WinXX PCs and laptops to a server’s disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.”

The current version is 2.1.2 released on September 5th, 2005 and updated to 2.1.2pl2 (patch level 2) released on June 18th, 2006

Second Topic: MONO

Jay Wren will tell us about mono. From the Mono website: Mono, the open source development platform based on the .NET framework, allows developers to build Linux and cross-platform applications with improved developer productivity. Mono’s .NET implementation is based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure.

Sponsored by Novell, the Mono project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community. Mono includes both developer tools and the infrastructure needed to run .NET client and server applications. It is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

Mono includes compilers, an ECMA-compatible runtime engine (the Common Language Runtime, or CLR), and many libraries. The libraries include Microsoft .NET compatibility libraries (including ADO.NET, System.Windows.Forms and ASP.NET), Mono’s own and third party class libraries. Gtk#, a set of .NET bindings for the gtk+ toolkit and assorted GNOME libraries can be found in the latter. This library allows you to build fully native Gnome application using Mono and includes support for user interfaces built with the Glade interface builder. Furthermore, Mono’s runtime can be embedded into applications for simplified packaging and shipping. In addition, the Mono project offers an IDE, Debugging, and a documentation browser.

Aaron Thul will be following up on our presentation from May on clustering addressing clustering with MySQL and PostgreSQL. He’ll cover one and then we’ll take a short break and continue with the other.