Capital Area BSD Users Group

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.

Filed under: Events, News | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

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 | 1 Comment »

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.

Filed under: Events, News | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

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.

Filed under: Events, News | No Comments »

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!

Filed under: Events, News | No Comments »

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.

Filed under: Events, News | No Comments »

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.

Filed under: Events, News | 1 Comment »

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 | No Comments »