Capital Area BSD Users Group

We again met at OmniTI this month. Jason gave a very good introduction to packet filters in general and OpenBSD PF (
slides). After everyone was up to speed on the basics of OpenBSD PF, we used OmniTI’s lab computers loaded with an OpenBSD 4.5 LiveCD that Jason created to get hands-on experience with PF.

The lab computers were already booted to the CD, so all we had to do was log in. The computers were connected to a switch in the lab that was configured with two VLANs. Jason gave us tasks geared towards learning PF:

1. Configure vlan100 interface to use DHCP
2. Configure vlan200 interface with a static IP
3. Nat on vlan100 for vlan200’s network
4. Allow SSH from outside to a host on the vlan 200 network
5. Block all other inbound traffic
6. Bonus: Give SSH priority over HTTP

Read more »

Filed under: Meetings | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

I’m sad to remote 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.

Filed under: Meetings, News | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

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.

Filed under: Meetings | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »