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
The Capital Area BSD Users Group is a group of BSD users and developers getting together to discuss, promote and share BSD related topics and free/open software.
If you're interested in joining and/or contributing, you are welcome to join our misc mailing list. If you have topic suggestions for future meetings, please suggest them on the list. We're also at #capbug on chat.freenode.net.
Filed under: CapBUG
The purpose of the misc mailing list is to discuss Capital Area BUG related topics. Some off-topic chatter is allowed, but within reason. For more general BSD discussions, please join us at talk@metabug.org.
There are three types of subscriptions to the list: normal (receive each message as sent), digest (receive a daily digest of messages) and nomail (no messages are received, but this subscription can post to the list).
Filed under: CapBUG
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!
Filed under: Events News
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!
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!
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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!
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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!
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
Filed under: News
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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!)
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
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. :)
Filed under: News
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).
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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. :)
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
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.
It would be great if we could have a large CapBUG involvement with this conference!
Filed under: News
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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@.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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!
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
Filed under: News
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.
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Filed under: News
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.
Filed under: Meetings
Filed under: News
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.
Filed under: Meetings
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.
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@).
Filed under: News
While we're in discussion of changing our name to CapBUG, we're also working on a "better" logo. Please vote for your favorite:
Filed under: News
Filed under: News
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