Capital Area BSD Users Group

We're meeting on Thursday again this month.

This month, we're meeting Thursday, November 19 (6:30 PM EDT) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

This is a special meeting time to accommodate the Thanksgiving holiday.

I will demonstrate my Nagios configuration again and Devon will talk about something cool.

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

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We're meeting on Thursday again this month.

This month, we're meeting Thursday, October 29 (6:30 PM EDT) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

Jonathan Andersen will be giving a talk/demo of his 3D printer.

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

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I have made reservations for ten people at Victoria Gastro Pub for October 15 at 6:00 PM. There are currently 8 seats still available. Reply to the mailing list to save a spot.

I've asked Victoria's if we can switch the reservation to 6:30 (it wasn't available at OpenTable) and will update this post (and send an email to the list) if we change to 6:30.

See you there!

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We're moving to Thursdays!

This month, we're meeting (today) Thursday, September 24 (6:30 PM EDT) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

I will be giving a talk summarizing my recent experience migrating from my i386-based Mac Mini to my amd64-based PowerEdge 840 for erdelynet.com/capbug.org/metabug.org's mail & web.

Edit: I'll also be showing some pictures of my recent attempt to make my Soekris into a WAP.

Then we'll head to Victoria Gastro Pub for refreshments. See you there!

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Our monthly meeting is next Tuesday, August 25 (6:30 PM EDT) at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]). We'll have a series of short talks by different speakers.

• Devon O'Dell - Differences between pre-emptive and co-operatively scheduled threading (high-level talk)
• Jason Dixon - Introducing Blogsum, a simple blog written for OpenBSD
• Mike Erdely - Bacula encrypting data before sending to Storage Daemon & erdelynet.com spamd/spamassassin setup and results (edit: merdely 200908202211)

Afterwards we'll adjourn to Victoria Gastro Pub for refreshments. See you there!

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I have made reservations for ten people at Victoria Gastro Pub for August 13 at 6:00 PM. There are currently 8 seats still available. Reply to the mailing list to save a spot.

See you there!

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After a month off, we will be meeting on July 28 at 6:30 PM EDT at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

I will be giving a talk entitled "Taking the plunge: A guide to tmux for screen users".

After, we will adjourn to a local establishment for refreshments.

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This month, we will be meeting on May 26 at 6:30 PM EDT at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]). (NOTE: Be sure to go to OmniTI and not SRA/RABA!)

This month Jason will be doing a firewall/networking interactive lab. We will be using OmniTI's lab machines along with a custom OpenBSD 4.5 Live CD that Jason created to play with VLANs and PF. Jason has been kind enough to make enough CDs so that you can take one home with you.

After, we will adjourn to a local establishment for refreshments.

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CapBUG is hosting an OpenBSD 4.5 Release Party at Victoria Gastro Pub in Columbia, MD [map] on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 6:30 PM EDT.

Please join us for a Lagunitas Undercover Investigation Shut-down Ale (or some other beverage).

Please RSVP either by replying on the mailing list (or email info@capbug.org if you are not subscribed).

This gathering is in addition to the not-yet-planned monthly meeting schedule for Tuesday, May 26.

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This month, we will be meeting on April 28 at 6:30 PM EDT at OmniTI's Columbia Office ([Google Maps]).

NOTE THE CHANGE IN VENUE!

One of our new members, Devon O'Dell, will be giving an introduction to Plan 9. He will be showing off some of the basics:

(stuff about using rio, mouse chording, editing the terminal buffer, etc). It'd get into plumbing (e.g. RFC:1234 + middle click = you get to read RFC 1234), private namespaces (goodbye $PATH), and importing / exporting the network stack, which will be demonstrated to work both ways using different network stacks.

If time permits, I might get a bit into some of the differences between Plan 9's implementation of C and its C library as well. (For instance, Plan 9 has polymorphism in structs, and a `typestr' keyword which allows for operator overloading, among other things).

This sounds interesting. Thanks, Devon.

After the meeting, we'll find a nearby place to grab some food and drink.

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This month we'll be meeting on Tuesday, March 31, 6:30pm EDT at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

We'll discuss using BSD on the desktop (or laptop). Feel free to bring a machine for a demonstration. I will, of course, be demonstrating scrotwm on top of OpenBSD. Like you didn't already know that.

After the meeting, we'll head to a nearby watering hole for refreshments.

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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.

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DC*BSDCon was a booming success. In just three short months, Jason put together a polished, well run conference. The speakers gave very interesting talks and the space for the conference was organized very well. The main conference area held plenty of seats for the attendees and the speakers were easy to hear.

The Frack Room was set up for gaming, but I'm not sure how much gaming was done in the room. Brad brought donuts and coffee and I'm sure that's what most people visited the Frack Room for. :)

Read more...

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Meeting Update

The Tuesday meeting (for Jan. 27) is postponed to Thursday!

Because of bad weather, we're moving our meeting this month to Thursday, January 29, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

We will still be discussing final details about DC*BSDCon. If you can, please join us to talk about how you can help with the conference.

After, we'll go out for beers at Frisco Burritos.

Stay warm.

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

Assuming we're not all snowed in, we'll be meeting to discuss final details about DC*BSDCon. If you can, please join us to talk about how you can help with the conference.

After, Jason will take all of us out for beers at Frisco Burritos. That, or you have to pay your own way. It depends on if you're hallucinating or not. :)

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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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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'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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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We will hold our Nov/Dec combo meeting on Tuesday, December 18 at 6:30 at the Raba Office in Columbia, Maryland (the usual place). We'll hit either The Green Turtle or Nottingham's afterwards.

I will be giving a talk "Intro to Porting" mostly inspired by bernd@'s talk at OpenCON.

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Due to unforeseen circumstances, we will not have a regular meeting this month and will just meet at Nottingham's for "Beer & BSD". We'll eat food, drink beer, maybe play pool and talk about BSD, if it comes up.

See you there at 6:30 PM EDT.

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This month, we'll meet at the PROTEUS headquarters in Annapolis Junction (near Columbia, MD) [map] at 6:30 PM ET.

Jason Dixon will give his entertaining, popular "BSD is Dying" talk. Then, we'll break out our laptops and set up some ipsec tunnels with OpenBSD.

After the meeting, we'll head over to the Courtyard Cafe at the Couryard Marriott for beers.

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As reported on The OpenBSD Journal, a Linux kernel developer removed the BSD License text from Reyk Floeter's Atheros wireless driver.

As Theo de Raadt wrote in a comment to The OpenBSD Journal article:

The other files in the driver, written by Reyk, are the replacement for the HAL. This basically is the hidden register access code which Sam (basically employeed by Atheros) refused to release. This code was placed by Reyk under an ISC license, something our project prefers to use since it is so simple that even a grade 5 student cannot misunderstand what it says. It translates to "You can do anything, but not delete the text".

Only Reyk could change that copyright notice, since he is the author.

At this time, Slashdot does not consider this news (even though a story has been submitted). This must be a too negative reflection of their beloved Linux.

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This month, we'll meet at the Raba office in Columbia again at 6:30 PM ET. We are considering moving the meetings to PROTEUS in the future, but this month the meeting is at "the usual place".

Johan will give a short talk on FreeBSD's GEOM. Bret will stop being a straphanger and give a short talk about contributing code/diffs to OpenBSD. After the talks, if we have time and interest, I can possibly do a demo on starting a port.

After the talks, we'll then head over to Nottingham's or The Green Turtle for a couple beers.

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This month, we'll meet at the Raba office in Columbia again at 6:30 PM ET. I will give a short talk on Yaifo. Barring anyone else having a topic to discuss, we'll then head over to Nottingham's for a couple beers.

Update: Prior to or following my Yaifo talk, Patrick will give a talk on OpenVPN.

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This month, we're not having a meeting. We're just going to meet at Nottingham's in Columbia for Beer and BSD (stolen from PhxBUG) at 6:30 PM EDT (22:30 UTC).

Nottingham's Address:

8850 Stanford Blvd, Suite 1100

Columbia, MD 21045

See you there!

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Our May CapBUG meeting will be May 29 at 6:30 PM (22:30 UTC).

This month, we'll have Marcus Ranum give his talk on dumb ideas in computer security. From his website:

"Let me introduce you to the six dumbest ideas in computer security. What are they? They're the anti-good ideas. They're the braindamage that makes your $100,000 ASIC-based turbo-stateful packet-mulching firewall transparent to hackers. Where do anti-good ideas come from? They come from misguided attempts to do the impossible - which is another way of saying 'trying to ignore reality.' Frequently those misguided attempts are sincere efforts by well-meaning people or companies who just don't fully understand the situation, but other times it's just a bunch of savvy entrepreneurs with a well-marketed piece of junk they're selling to make a fast buck. In either case, these dumb ideas are the fundamental reason(s) why all that money you spend on information security is going to be wasted, unless you somehow manage to avoid them."

This meeting will also be broadcast as part of MetaBUG.

We will again hold this month's meeting at Raba in Columbia, MD.

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Fresh off his interview with Will Backman on bsdtalk, Jason will be giving a talk and demonstration on PF, CARP and pfsync. The demonstration will include using two Soekris embedded devices with OpenBSD configured as a redundant carp pair. Though highly dramatic, I doubt Jason will use the infamous "axe" technique to show failover. I guess it depends on how much caffeine he had that day.

Due to the availability of equipment, we will hold this month's meeting at Raba in Columbia, MD at 6:30 PM EDT. We will again broadcast this talk as part of MetaBUG.

As always, we'll get together for food and drinks afterwards.

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John Ferrell wrote in to say:

For the past several years Tux.org, an umbrella organization supporting the efforts of users groups and developers, has had a booth at FOSE (Federal Office Systems Expo). Tux.org's goal at FOSE is to help promote the use of Linux and other open source software in government. This year CapBUG was invited to help out at the TUX.org booth and I was able to represent CapBUG.

In addition to all the Linux related materials on display at the booth we had two BSD related posters on display: an OpenBSD poster and an OpenSSH poster. For swag we had the current issue of Linux Journal and CDs including Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu and FreeSBIE, the live CD based on FreeBSD 6.2. Unfortunately I did not make enough of the FreeSBIE CDs; we ran out of them on Wednesday. I think the BSD posters caught other BSD folk's attention. Several people came up to the booth to say they were BSD users. There was at least one company at FOSE that was using FreeBSD in the products. They had built a rugged wireless access point to be used with satellite communications using a Soekris single board computer and FreeBSD. It was good to hear that people are using BSD.

Hopefully CapBUG will be invited to help out again next year. If so, we can start planning early on how best to represent CapBUG and the BSDs at FOSE. There is definitely an interest in open source software, and I think we could do a lot to help promote the use of BSD.

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Our monthly CapBUG meeting takes place next week, February 27, 6:30pm at SPARTA in Columbia, MD. Jason Dixon will be doing a presentation on recommended technologies in a modern *BSD-based mailserver. The proposed setup includes Postfix, Cyrus-SASL, SSL/TLS, virtual user accounts, PostfixAdmin, OpenBSD spamd, Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, Razor2, Courier-IMAP, and Courier authdaemond. Other technologies such as FuzzyOcrPlugin, RoundCube Webmail and server-side filtering with Courier maildrop will be touched on as well.

We're asking for volunteers to do a short demo of their favorite *BSD-related hardware or software product. Nothing formal is required, just a basic understanding of the item(s) and a willingness to be embarrassed in front of your peers. If it's really good, I might even buy the winner a free Guinness afterwards.

Directions to SPARTA

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We changed our name from Maryland BSD Users Group to Capital Area BSD Users Group. To inaugurate our new identity, we've come up with a new site design. Please vote on the new design in our Poll.

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We're planning the February meeting for Tuesday, Feb. 27 in Columbia. It will tentatively be held at SPARTA. We're looking for talk ideas and a presenter. If you have an idea, please leave a comment or email misc@capbug.org (Note: You must be subscribed to post to misc@).

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While we're in discussion of changing our name to CapBUG, we're also working on a "better" logo. Please vote for your favorite:

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