Michigan!/usr/group

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.

Main Topic: Red Hat Cluster Suite and the Global File System

RHCS and GFS are systems for managing clusters of machines. RHCS is a supporting infrastructure to deploy highly available applications that require failover or load balancing while GFS is a filesystem that allows block level access to multiple nodes simultaneously. RHCS and GFS are very important in bringing Linux to the large business.

Andrew Forgue, a Systems Administrator at Oakland University, will talk about RHCS and GFS, what the components are, what they do, and how they fit together. He will also do a short demo about a cluster that is set up at Oakland University.

Secondary Topic: Report from Jim McQuillan on the road

Jim McQuillan will be in Germany for Linux Tag and the OSDL DAM-2 meeting.

One of the especially interesting topics at Linux Tag is the meeting that Mark Shuttleworth has called, between the KDE developers and the Kubuntu team, to help to make Kubuntu the best KDE based distribution on the planet.

Jim’s pdf from Linux Day and Open Source Development Lab

Jim has offered to connect up via IRC and/or Phone, to give a report from the meetings.

Main Topic: Postgres for Programmers

Based on the recent discussions about Postgres development on the MUG discuss mailing list, we’ve been thinking that a MUG meeting devoted to discussing
Postgres for Programmers might be really interesting.

Here’s what we’d like to do:

1. Show the following Database administration tasks:
* Create a user that is allowed to access Postgres
* Create a database
* Create a table

1. Database Programming
* Show how to do the following:
* Connect to a Postgres database
* Construct and execute a SELECT query that retrieves one row
* Construct and execute a SELECT query that retrieves multiple rows
* Construct and execute an INSERT query and insert some rows into the table
* Construct and execute an UPDATE query that updates existing data
* Error handling
* Using the following languages:
* Perl
* Python
* PHP

1. Discuss and demonstrate the following topics
* Views
* Triggers
* Stored Procedures

If you have some other language that you think we need to show, please
speak up. But, keep in mind that we really only have about 2 hours to
spend on this, and we can’t cover EVERY language out there.

Now, the hard part…. We need some volunteers to help out with this
presentation. I’ve done enough Postgres programming that I *could*
handle the database admin stuff, and I *could* also show some Perl and
PHP examples. BUT, I’d really rather get some participation from other
people on this. We definitely need some volunteers to handle the Python
part, and the Views/Triggers/Stored Procedures part.

So, can we get some volunteers?

Main Topic: Security – Panel Discussion

Running a server? Is it Secure? Do you even know?

With all the high speed internet connections available to us, it’s quite common to build a Linux server and drop it on the network. But, too often, not enough attention is paid to securing that shiny new server. This month, we’re having several invited guests, who each have been around the block once or twice to share some of their wisdom and to help us make the internet a safer place.

Invited panel members:

Flavio !DaCosta		confirmed
Jim Small		confirmed
Tom Zerucha		confirmed
Mike O’Connor		Invited

Server Intrusions:

* Detection – How to know if you’ve been hacked
* Forensics – Determining how they got in
* Recovery – Cleaning up after a break-in
* Prevention – Offering services in a secure way
* login
* Secure file transfer
* Webserver security
* Mail server security