Capital Area BSD Users Group

This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, December 16, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205). Note: this is a change from our normal “last Tuesday of the month” to accommodate the holidays. We should get back to normal in January.

Patrick Thomasson will give a presentation about using RADIUS for authenticating wireless connections. I will bring in my landisk that Maki helped me connect a serial port to and give a demo of it.

Then, we’ll head across the street for some food and drinks. Hope to see you there.

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For November, we had a very open “round table” discussion about PostgreSQL. And Jason gave us updates about DCBSDCON.

Then, we met at The Green Turtle for food and drinks.

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This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, November 18, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205). Note: this is a change from our normal “last Tuesday of the month” to accommodate the holidays.

We will have a sort of general discussion about PostgreSQL including its license (BSD!), some best practices and possibly some demonstrations.

Starting this month, we’re going to add a new “monthly agenda item” to the meetings. Patrick Thomasson suggested that we encourage our meeting participants to share a small “admin trick” each month. Many of us learn so much from the simple little things others do each day. I think this is a great idea. So, during each month prior to the meeting, if you do something cool in your work, make a note of it and share it with us at the next meeting! Patrick says he already has some to share with us on the 18th.

There will also be updates about DCBSDCon.

After the meeting, we’ll convene for food and drinks at a local establishment.

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Coming in 2009: DCBSDCon!

Our very own Jason Dixon posted the Call For Papers announcement: Sorry for the late post here, Jason!

The DCBSDCon conference has opened up a Call for Papers for the 2009 event. Speakers are welcome to submit any topic of interest, although security themes are preferred. This conference leads up to the very popular ShmooCon hacker convention in Washington, D.C. where OpenBSD developers and users are always in attendance.

Main Website: http://www.dcbsdcon.org/
Call For Papers: http://www.dcbsdcon.org/cfp.html

P.S. ShmooCon registration opens Saturday, November 1 at 12pm EDT. If you’re planning to attend both events, make sure you register for their event. Previous attendees know how hard it can be to get tickets.

ShmooCon: http://www.shmoocon.org/registration.html

It would be great if we could have a large CapBUG involvement with this conference!

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This month, we met at our office and talked about some SysAdmin best practices and tricks. We talked about different tricks to manipulate output of commands using awk in for loops in the shell and several other things.

Then, the big announcement: DCBSDCon 2009! Jason Dixon is organizing the event, with my (and others’) help. If you’d like to be involved, please send us email.

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This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, October 28, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

We will have a sort of round table discussion about SysAdmin best practices, tools and tricks.

After the meeting, we’ll convene for food and drinks at a local establishment.

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Sorry for the late meeting wrap-up email.

At this meeting, Jason Dixon spoke about network accounting and some general network troubleshooting. His talk included a demo of his Netflow Dashboard project. In his talk, he also talked about NetFlow and OpenBSD’s new pflow and pfflowd.

Afterwards, we headed to The Green Turtle for dinner and drinks.

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This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, September 30, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

Jason Dixon will be talking about “Network accounting and stuff” and I will do a brief demo of using VNC and SSH to provide remote technical assistance.

After the meeting, we’ll convene for food and drinks at a local establishment.

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I started the meeting with a presentation on using OpenBSD as a remote MP3 player using OpenBSD, mpd, icecast, ssh and mplayer. I use this to listen to music on my laptop wirelessly (in a DMZ) and the MP3 files are on my OpenBSD server on my LAN. It’s secure and easy to use.

We followed this up with Patrick’s suggestion for a round table discussion on some “Best Practices.” This was a very informal discussion that covered things like shell configuration files, using OpenSSH’s multiplexing and dynamic port forwarding, shell command history using, set -o emacs/vi and more.

We then made our way to The Green Turtle for more casual BSD discussions and food (and drink). Thanks to everyone that made it.

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This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, August 26, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

We will have a round table discussion about SysAdmin best practices. If you have any, please share. If you want to demo something, bring your laptop or let me know in advance to see if I can accommodate with my laptop (I don’t usually let others drive). If there is time (of course there will be time), I will give a "dazzling presentation of OpenBSD as a multimedia powerhouse" (ohai, Johan). "dazzling" is code for "short". And "presentation" is code for "thrown-together demo". And "multimedia powerhouse" is a euphemism for "remote MP3 player".

After the meeting, we’ll spend too much time deciding where to grab some grub and drink and then go there. See you there.

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