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!
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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.
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We met at OmniTI again this month. Thank you, OmniTI!
I gave a talk [slides] about my recent migration for my mail/web server from i386 to amd64. I also discussed how I installed a ral(4) card in my Soekris to make it a wireless access point. Unfortunately, I think the card overheated my Soekris and crashed my firewall more than once. I have since removed the card.
Equipment:
After the meeting, we adjourned to Victoria Gastro Pub for dinner and libations.
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We met again at OmniTI (thank you for hosting us).
I (Mike Erdely) gave a short talk about using Bacula's encryption mechanisms to store data encrypted on the storage media. Devon O'Dell gave an informal but very interesting talk about the differences between pre-emptive and co-operatively scheduled threading. Then, Jason Dixon introduced us to his new creation: Blogsum. Keep a look out for capbug.org to be using it in the near future. Finally, I gave another short talk describing my experiences with turning off greylisting in OpenBSD's spamd(8).
After the awesome talks, we adjourned to Victoria Gastro Pub for some food and drink. A good time was had by all.
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This month we met at OmniTI again. I gave a talk entitled "Taking the plunge: A guide to tmux for screen users" (slides). It was a very informal talk with a lot of Q&A and some demonstrations. It should be noted that I love tmux.
After the talk we went to Victoria Gastro Pub for some food and libations.
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We had a good turnout for the OpenBSD 4.5 Release Party. Seven CapBUG members and one wife met at Victoria Gastro Pub. In addition to celebrating OpenBSD's 4.5 release, to be fair we also celebrated Amanda's 2.6.1p1 release, DragonFlyBSD 2.2.1, NetBSD 5.0, FreeBSD 7.2, Firefox 3.0.8, 3.0.9, and 3.0.10.
We were also able to bask in the glory that is Jason's new laptop. While there are BSD files on the disk, we won't mention what OS he runs (it's definitely not Debian).
Thanks to everyone that attended and see you on the 26th.
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This month we met for the first time at OmniTI. Thank you to Jason, Devon and Theo S. for allowing us to meet at your office.
Devon gave an excellent talk about Plan 9: Plan Nizzle is tha Shizzle. At our next meeting, we'll take a vote as to whether we should rename CapBUG to CapP9UG and how to pronounce it.
Thank you to Dru Lavigne for posting CapBUG events to her Twitter Feed for BSD Events. We gained a new member to CapBUG and #metabug (freenode) from April's meeting announcement.
After the talk, we met at Victoria Gastro Pub where we enjoyed some good drinks and good food (mmmm.... duck fat fries!)
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After a month off, CapBUG is back. This month we met at SRA/Raba Center again in Columbia, MD. We had 9 attendees including two new members: welcome.
Patrick started us off demonstrating PC-BSD. He described the goals of the project, demonstrated the installation process in a VM and showed us a running system on a desktop PC he brought with him. Then, Jason showed us scrotwm running on OpenBSD -current on his new Thinkpad X400. As a scrotwm user myself, I chimed in whenever possible. Finally Maki showed us BSDAnywhere, an OpenBSD LiveCD.
After the meeting, we went to Victora Gastro Pub for dinner and drinks. It was a nice meeting with a good turnout. Thanks to everyone that joined us.
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I'm sad to report that there will be no February meeting this year.
I have some personal issues that came up this weekend that will be taking all my time this week. Plus school. Plus I have to figure out how to work my job in sometime too.
We'll try to plan the March 2009 meeting as soon as life calms down in the next week or so.
We had a short meeting this month to prepare for DC*BSDCon. Jason doled out responsibilities and we made preliminary plans for setting up the conference area.
We went to Frisco Burritos for food and beers (mmm.... good beers).
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As usual, we met at my office in Columbia. Patrick gave a very interesting presentation on RADIUS and discussed how it can be used to authenticate wireless connections.
After the meeting, we adjourned to the Green Turtle for dinner and drinks.
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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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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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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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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, 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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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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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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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.
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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 month's meeting was once again at Raba in Columbia. We had nine attendees, but with two presenters, that's not all that great! In a BSD Users Group, it's the Users that make the group great! I hope we have more participation next month.
To start us off, Johan Huldtgren gave a short talk about FreeBSD's GEOM ([PDF Slides]). He discussed the basics behind the software RAID framework and explained how he uses it.
To close the meeting, Bret Lambert (tbert) gave a talk about contributing code to the OpenBSD project ([HTML Slides]). He talked about learning C, finding a place to start, kernel hacking and being patient waiting for interest in your diffs.
Audio versions of the meeting are also available as part of MetaBUG: OGG and MP3. (Thanks to Newt0n for hosting the files)
Many thanks to Johan and Bret for their great talks!
We adjourned the meeting across the street at the Green Turtle.
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This month's meeting was once again at Raba in Columbia. We had ten attendees, so attendance was pretty good.
After a few technical hurdles (no DVI converter for Patrick's laptop and a seemingly broken VGA out on mine), the meeting got underway with Patrick Thomasson's presentation on OpenVPN (HTML or OpenVPN Presentation PDF). He gave an overview of how to setup OpenVPN and included several pitfalls one could face along with ways to avoid them.
After Patrick, I gave a short talk on Yaifo. Since most everyone was familiar with Yaifo, it was a very brief talk.
We closed the meeting next door at Nottingham's where the discussion never swayed from serious BSD-related issues. Or something.
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This month's meeting was at SPARTA's office in Columbia and had 13 attendees.
Matt Fisher presented his talk entitled "Mistakes to Lure Hackers: Vulnerability 2.0". Matt introduced the audience to modern web application vulnerabilities including cross-site scripting, SQL injection and even "blind" SQL injection.
Cross-Site-Scripting and SQL Injection are now the most commonly reported vulnerabilities in the CVE. We will examine the entire genre of web application security and the unique security paradigm required, while zooming in on XSS and SQL Injection. Think Web 2.0 sites are neat? So do the bad guys and we'll examine some of the factors going into the "new web" that makes them so vulnerable to script attacks.
Jason's comment: "I personally saw this talk in NYC and am very grateful Matt was able to present it again for our group. This was the first MetaBUG video recording/streaming, and the quality suffers a bit. We have learned quite a bit from just our first session and expect that future presentations will be much improved in both video and audio quality."
As part of MetaBUG, Matt's talk is available an an MP4 download (95 MB) or via Google Video.
Thank you to Matt for donating his time to share his presentation with our BUG. Thank you to Jason for providing the live video and archive video for the meeting. We'll be planning next month's meeting soon, so stay tuned.
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This month's meeting was at SPARTA's office in Columbia. There were 16 attendees this time so Columbia may be a more popular meeting place for us. For this meeting, we had Jason Dixon giving the main presentation on Secure Mail Servers with BSD. Afterwards, Patrick Thomasson gave a short talk about Pure-FTPd.
Jason opened the meeting by announcing the creation of MetaBUG: a Global BSD User Groups organization founded to promote local BSD user groups by helping to share ideas and experiences with other BUG organizations, in addition to possible collaboration and "virtual attendance" from anywhere in the world.
His presentation, Secure Mail Servers with BSD, covered mail delivery using Postfix, a drop-in sendmail replacement, configured for virtual mailboxes and domains, greylisting using OpenBSD's spamd, and content filtering with amavisd-new (ClamAV, SpamAssassin and Vipul's Razor). Mail retrieval duties focused on the Courier-IMAP service and RoundCube webmail. Presentation slides: HTML, PDF and zipped Keynote.
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We all met at Epok's office in Bethesda, MD for our first official meeting last night. A total of eleven members were in attendance to hear Mike Erdely's presentation on the binpatch binary patching system for OpenBSD. It looks like nice way of maintaining patches for multiple systems, although I argued that the same could be done with a few shell commands. However, if some of the proposed features that Mike discussed (patch_add, patch_info, etc) become realized, some very interesting advancements could develop (commercial patch distribution, anyone?). Presentation slides: HTML or PDF.
There was time left, so I did a quick overview of FreeNAS running in a Parallels virtual system on my MacBook Pro. FreeNAS is a very simple way of getting a commodity NAS installed for any home or business. It supports software RAID, and the footprint clocks in at a miniscule 38MB.
In a general discussion, Mike talked briefly about using FuzzyOcr with SpamAssassin to more successfully catch image spam.
Around 8:30pm EST, we decided to grab some dinner over at the Daily Grill. It was a cold 4-block stroll over to the Hyatt Regency, but the Guinness was worth it. The bill was almost as painful as a weekend with SELinux, but the food and service made it worthwhile.
Thanks to everyone who came out for the first official get-together. I'm looking forward to meeting all of the other members who couldn't attend. The next meeting will be held at Todd C. Miller's office in Columbia, MD. More details to follow.
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