Capital Area BSD Users Group

This month we're meeting Thursday, March 31 (6:30 PM EST) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

We have a special guest speaker (Stephen Nelson-Smith) who will be giving a remote talk from the UK.

After the talk, we will head over to Victoria Gastro Pub for dinner and drinks.

Below is what Stephen sent regarding his talk (and his background):

Title: FreeBSD system automation with pc-sysinstall and Chef

Synopsis

Although FreeBSD is in many ways one of the most advanced operating systems in the world, boasting access to a vast array of current, upstream software, and with ZFS and dtrace increasingly mature in the latest releases, it still has a reputation for being difficult to manage and automate, compared to Linux. This talk looks at system automation and configuration management strategies on FreeBSD, exploring unattended installs using the pc-sysinstall tool, system management using Opscode Chef, and options for running FreeBSD in the cloud.

Prequisites: None

Tags: FreeBSD, pc-sysinstall Installation, Automation, Chef, Devops, Infrastructure-as-code, configuration management

Bio:

Stephen Nelson-Smith is an experienced agile infrastructure consultant, UNIX system administrator and Ruby and Python programmer. As principal consultant at Atalanta Systems, he evangelises 21st century systems infrastructure, and specialises in system automation, monitoring, and the application of lean and XP-derived principles on the operations side of the business. A ruthlessly logical problem solver, powerful communicator, and enthusiastic mentor and motivator, his skills have been employed by household names such as Sony, Motorola, the AA, the Department of Education, and a host of young, technology-driven enterprises. A thought leader in the emerging infrastructure-as-code community, his blog agilesysadmin.net is essential reading for anyone building software today.

Filed under:   Meeting

This month, we're not having a meeting. We weren't able to get interest in a topic. Instead, we will be having a second Beer & BSD for January at Victoria Gastro Pub on Thursday, January 27. Let us know if you'll be there by emailing the list mailing list.

See you there!

Filed under:   beer&bsd

This month we're meeting Thursday, August 26 September 23 (6:30 PM EST) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

This month's meeting is essentially what last month's was supposed to be before it got put off until this month. Mike Erdely (me) will be giving a small talk about using softraid crypto in OpenBSD. Todd Carson may speak briefly about using softraid for redundancy.

Then we'll head to Victoria Gastro Pub for some food, beer, cider, and fun. See you there!

Filed under:   Meetings

This month we're meeting Thursday, August 26 (6:30 PM EST) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

Mike Erdely (me) will be giving a small talk about using softraid crypto in OpenBSD. Todd Carson may speak briefly about using softraid for redundancy.

Then we'll head to Victoria Gastro Pub for some food, beer, cider, and fun. See you there!

Filed under:   Meetings

This month, we're pushing our July meeting back a week to accommodate two guests: Dru Lavigne and Mark Peoples. We're meeting today, Thursday, August 5 (6:30 PM EST) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

Mike Erdely (me) will be giving a talk some of the changes in OpenBSD's pf that were implemented with OpenBSD 4.7. I will also talk about using disk UIDs in OpenBSD. And, Dru will talk for a few minutes about BSD Certification.

Then we'll head to Victoria Gastro Pub for some food, beer, cider, and fun. See you there!

Update: Slides are available from Mike's pf talk and Dru's BSD Certification talk.

Filed under:   Meetings

This month, we're meeting Thursday, March 25 (6:30 PM EST) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

Johan Huldtgren will be giving a talk about his experience migrating his mail/web server from FreeBSD to OpenBSD.

Then we'll head to Victoria Gastro Pub for some extremely healthy food, beer, cider, and wine. See you there!

Filed under:   Meetings

We will be having Beer & BSD for March at Victoria Gastro Pub on Thursday, March 11. The time will depend on the reservation, which I will make on the 8th at ~7 PM. Sign up for reservations on the mailing list mailing list to save a spot.

See you there!

Filed under:   beer&bsd

This month, we're meeting Thursday, February 25 (6:30 PM EST) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

Jason Crawford will be giving a talk on the Cell Processor.

Then we'll head to Victoria Gastro Pub for some extremely healthy food, beer, cider, and wine. See you there!

Filed under:   Meetings

Happy New Year!

This month, we're meeting Thursday, January 28 (6:30 PM EDT) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

Nick Hasser will be giving a presentation about Snort on OpenBSD.

Then we'll head to Victoria Gastro Pub for some extremely healthy food, beer, cider, and wine. See you there!

Please email me or reply on the mailing list if you are going to join us at Victoria's.

Filed under:   Meetings

Jason Dixon has created a new Blog engine called Blogsum. He and I have worked to migrate the CapBUG site from Wordpress to Blogsum. This is a work in progress, but the site should be usable at this point.

Filed under:   CapBUG