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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Two of the teams used their Google lifelines.  Team #2 used theirs to research the PKG_PATH setting for OpenBSD, while team #3 had troubles getting PF enabled in NetBSD.   Even with the disadvantage of working with NetBSD and its (admittedly odd) PF kernel module, Mike Erdely led team #3 to the winner’s circle, completing all of their assigned tasks.  Teams #1 (FreeBSD) and #2 tied for second place, each having minor issues with their firewall configuration.  Team #4 came in a close third place with their DragonFlyBSD system.

All in all, the competition was a lot of fun and very entertaining.  Everyone was a good sport and there was teamwork all around.   I captured the screenshot below shortly after each team completed their installations, reflecting just how little memory each system uses by default.  I look forward to future workshops and hope to get even more attendees next time.

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.

From Jason:

The main focus of this meeting is to have fun learning more about what we already enjoy… BSD administration. But since this might be a recurring event, our official theme this month will be “Secure Webservers”. We will be utilizing a QEMU or VMware Server running virtual machines for each of the team images. Each virtual system will have local network access only, with a dedicated sandbox system for external access (see “life-line” information below) and testing purposes.

We will need an additional laptop for each team, for managing each respective virtual machine (via VMware web client or SSH). I think we will have this covered easily, but if you have a laptop you want to bring in for your team, please do. Here are the details, let me know if you have any questions.

P.S. Yes, I will be serving as the BOFH.

bofh$ cat sysadmin_games.txt

• Theme
  • Secure Webservers
• Goals
  • Install a BSD operating system and dependencies as needed
  • Configure networking
  • Configure the host firewall
  • Configure a webserver with a self-signed certificate
  • Configure start-up services
• Rules
  • Each team will have a “mentor”. This individual will act as a team leader and “life-line” resource for the competition.
  • Each team will have a series of 3 “life-lines”. The life-line period is a maximum of 10 minutes.
    1. Mentor = A team may request the assistance of the mentor from another team. If the question is satisfied (to be determined by the BOFH), the mentor’s team receives a 10-point bonus. If the question is *not* satisfied, the mentor’s team receives a 10-point debit. An assisting mentor may *not* utilize their own life-lines for the purpose of assisting another team.
    2. Google = A team may utilize any internet resource for research on their project.
    3. Phone = A team member may call one individual for assistance. Competition participants are excluded from being an assisting party.
  • Each team will use a different BSD operating system selection. This will be determined by a series of trivial questions at the beginning of the competition. The team to correctly answer a question gets to select the BSD used by *their choice* of one of the other remaining teams. This will continue until all teams have been assigned an operating system.
    Example: Team A wins the first question. They choose DragonflyBSD for Team C. Team B wins the second question. They choose NetBSD for Team A. Team C wins the final question. They choose MirBSD for Team A (poor bastards).
  • Each team will have a maximum of one hour to complete the allotted tasks.
  • Each team will have 10 minutes to present their final results to the BOFH for points redemption.
• Awards
  • The winning team gets a free round of beer.

# EOF

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!

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.