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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Jason Dixon started the meeting with a demo of mod_security. He was followed by a brief introduction and a demonstration of Amanda from Dustin Mitchell. I am proud of myself for not bringing up Bacula even once (ohai, Jason).

We followed the meeting up with some pizza and drinks at Pub Dog (or is it Dog Pub).

Thanks to Jason and Dustin for presenting and everyone else for attending. See you in August.

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This month we'll be meeting on Tuesday, July 29, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

Jason Dixon will be giving a presentation on the mod_security Apache module.

Afterwards, Dustin Mitchell will give an introduction to Amanda 'mini-talk'.

Following the talks, we'll have food and drinks at a local food/drink establishment.

Please RSVP to the list (or to me) if you are attending so I can have an approximate head count.

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This month, Patrick Thomasson gave an interesting talk about 'wiring down' devices in FreeBSD. The gist of the talk was: when Patrick added a fiber channel card to the system with existing SCSI disks, FreeBSD changed the order in which the drives were detected. This temporarily broke his ZFS Pools. By 'wiring down' the devices, he was able to for FreeBSD to load the SCSI disks in the order necessary to maintain continuity with his drives and ZFS Pools.

Following that, I gave a demonstration of tmux and how it compares to screen.

This month, we had an extremely small crowd: four (including me). An interesting thing happened with such a small crowd... the entire meeting was completely interactive. There was MUCH discussion during Patrick's talk.

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

This month, Patrick Thomasson will talk about "wiring down" devices in FreeBSD. After that, I'll give a demonstration of a BSD-licensed screen-like tool called tmux.

Then, we'll head over to a local watering hole for some beers and grub.

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This month we'll be meeting on Tuesday, May 27, 6:30pm EST at Raba in Columbia, MD. Directions

I will be talking about and demonstrating Bacula.

Afterwards, we'll congregate at a nearby water hole for food and drinks and wish a fond farewell to one of our CapBUG members from Day 1: blambert@.

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April's meeting consisted of a slightly larger than normal crowd. Having a guest speaker must have had something to do with that.

The meeting opened with Todd Carson talking about his experience finding and submitting a bug which turned into an OpenBSD Errata entry.

Following Todd's talk, Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI Computer Consulting, gave live demonstrations of both ZFS and DTrace. Theo showed some of the many features of ZFS while demonstrating some of them on live Solaris systems and his Apple laptop, including snapshotting. Then, he showed and described how to use DTrace to see what a process is doing. Without concrete problems to solve, it's difficult to show DTrace in all of its glory, but Theo managed to give a great demonstration. To paraphrase: the hard part is coming up with good questions to ask DTrace.

Then, as an aside, Theo showed us how valgrind (on Linux) can point you to exactly where the bugs in your code are.

Thanks to both Todd and Theo for taking the time to talk to us. See you next month.

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This month we'll be meeting on Tuesday, April 29, 6:30pm EST at Raba in Columbia, MD. Directions

Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI Computer Consulting, will give a talk on ZFS and Dtrace. Both of these are available in FreeBSD, although many of the useful features are not integrated yet. Theo will introduce both technologies and give practical examples (on OpenSolaris) for using them in engineering environments.

Todd Carson will also give a brief talk on how his diff became OpenBSD 4.2 Errata entry 008.

Afterwards, we'll congregate at a nearby water hole for food and drinks, and to celebrate the release of OpenBSD 4.3!

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The March meeting consisted of a brief presentation (given by me) about using CVS for Configuration Management. We had a fairly light crowd comprised of most of "the regulars". After talking about CVS, we also discussed Nagios and I gave a demo of how I'm using it to monitor my home network.

Following the meeting, most of us convened at the Dog Pub for some pizza and beer (or soda, as the case may be).

Thanks to everyone that made it out.

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This month, we'll be meeting on Tuesday, March 25 at Raba in Columbia, MD.

Todd Carson will give a brief talk on how his diff became OpenBSD 4.2 Errata entry 008. Todd will talk about his Errata submission next month. I will talk about using CVS to store your configuration files.

As usual, we'll grab a beer and food after the meeting at either Green Turtle, Nottingham's or the Dog Pub.

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Our February meeting consisted of Sysadmin Games (the brainchild of Jason Dixon). Jason brought with him a "server" (beige box) running some form of Linux and VMware Server. He had prepared blank VMware guest systems ready to be loaded with Open, Net, Free or Dragonfly BSD. After a quick trivia contest to choose which team was assigned which BSD, we got started.

The goal was to install your assigned BSD, configure networking, a web server with HTTPS and the firewall. While we were allowed "shout-outs" for help, no one seemed to use that and preferred to use their 10 minute "web search" lifeline. All of the teams fared very well, running into small problems along the way. Only one team completed the task with perfection. :)

All in all, Sysadmin Games was a huge success. We will have to start planning for future competitions.

Update: (notes from Jason)

I took notes during the meeting to track how teams were doing, how well the server was holding up, and what can be done better in the future. Surprisingly, everything went very smoothly except for the host platform (VMware on CentOS) choking at times. It seems that VMware doesn't behave nicely when you have four teams beating on the vmware console over the network. Regardless, we managed to clear those minor obstacles and every team finished with a "passing" score.

Read more...

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This month, we'll be meeting on Tuesday, February 26 at Raba in Columbia, MD. Jason Dixon will be serving as BOFH for our first SysAdmin Games. As usual, we'll grab a beer and food after the meeting at either Green Turtle, Nottingham's or the Dog Pub.

Read more...

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Our January 29, 2008 meeting marks CapBUG's one year birthday. We celebrated with a great Samba talk me Johan Huldtgren, a GNU/screen talk by me and a special BSD Cake that Patrick Thomasson brought for the group.

After the meeting, we tried the Dog Pub for some pizza and beer. I thought it was OK.

Thanks to the CapBUG members and contributors for making our first year a great one. I hope the next year will be just as good (or better).

See you next month!

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This meeting marks CapBUG's 1 year anniversary. For this meeting, we'll gather at my office in Columbia, MD again. To celebrate occasion, Patrick Thomasson will be bringing a special cake.

I will give a mini-talk about how I use GNU/screen, how I have it set up and how I use mutt and irssi. Following my talk, Johan Huldtgren will give a mini-talk about setting up a samba PDC/ file / print server.

The meeting audio will be broadcast (Slides will be linked here and URL for audio will be active during the talk). This should work fine for x11/vlc users (or systems with QuickTime support). A CapBUG representative will be available in #metabug on Freenode to field questions.

After the meeting, we'll head over to The Dog Pub in Columbia for food and drinks.

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