meeting notes: March 4th 2013 at 7PM.

We had an open meeting. About 8 people showed up for the meeting. We had a bunch of new people during this meeting.

We discussed using the Linux command line. We helped a user with an Ubuntu install. We also discussed Linux news sources.

Jan 2011 Meeting Notes

We had a small group of 6-8 people this evening.

Items of Interest:
Brad was getting 25Mb Business Class Fiber from Verizon.
He said it took 30 calls to setup the order.

Talked about how Linux and Ubuntu are doing things differently. There seems to be a desire to make Linux more friendly to the masses. As a result, controls under the hood seem to be getting covered up by developers. Although this is helping new Linux users, hiding the controls is frustrating older Linux users. At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Europe, a sysadmin, Wolfgang Draxinger attempted to complain about missing documentation and his frustration with the current state of where Linux is going. We think that his goal was to show how Linux is becoming evil with it’s heavy dependence on multimedia. More specifically, Pulse audio, gdm, gs-streamer, and phonon are not very well documented. However, the developer of these applications had strategically placed himself in the audience and made is presentation a little award. Although there was a dialog between developer and users, the air of superiority from this one developer is exemplified in this youtube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

In the meeting, there was further talk of how to make Ubuntu like and feel like the old versions of Linux. More specifically, to get the virtual terminals now you need Console-kit. Console-kit is an application that keeps track who is logged in. Virtual-Terminal switching is being turned off in many newer distos. It needs to be explicitly turned on to use it now.

Brad talked more about puppet. Puppet allows you to run the same command on multiple machines. For example, if you need a jpg on a specific machine in a server farm, you run the puppet master command on your designated controller and the command gets executed on all the machines in the group. Puppet is saving Brad and his company a lot development time.

Dave D. mentioned that he purchased some Indy Games from humble indie bundle. The humble bundle generated $1M for charity.
Linux Games
———–
Indy game ( humble bundle.com)
Amnesia the dark decent.
Dragon Age.
Infocom Games.
Oregon Trail

Brad has been using Suse Studio. To develop turnkey openvpn applications his customers can download.

We also discussed on-line gaming. Recently a person purchased a virtual space station for $600K. The previous owner purchased the virtual space station for $200K.
Pictures of the virtual space station can be found here.

There was also a question about how to wipe disks and Brad posted a solution for this on the list serve.

August 2010 Meeting notes

Dave B. had some questions about x509 certificates and how they work. In summary, Dave Dodge gave a short background on how x509 does. The talk then spawned into PGP and how key based encryption works.

Using Verizon Action Tech as a bridge to reduce the performance bottleneck. According to Brad, when most cable modems refer to NAT but are actually doing PAT. PAT and NAT are better explained on wikipedia.
PAT has limitations when you plug in a lot of devices. Thus, to him you get better results putting your cheap verzion action tech fiber modem in Bridge mode and run NAT on an open source router.

Printer recommendations. Someone said the best printer is the one with the cheapest toner. Most printers are given away free, but the toner cost a fortune to replace. Thus, be weary of free printers.

New file-systems: BTRFS and ZFS filesystem and Oc2fs.

Using UPS bypass.

Token ring networks.

July 2010 meeting notes

About 6 people showed up for this meeting. This meeting was an open topic.
Thus, we just talked about random things.

Topics:
1. Fon Router
Patrick R. gave a review of the Fon Router. He says in Europe many are given the fon router if they setup an open/free wireless. Here in America Star bucks and Barnes and nobles is all free so it is a null point for star bucks. However, as a corporate entity they could probably get free routers from fon for providing open/free wireless.

2. DC LUG
DC Lug and GWU are having a interesting speaker this month according to Michael. One of particular interest was new screen technology that the Linux based ‘one laptop per child’ project has introduced. The new screens require a very small amount of power. They use sunlight to illuminate when used in sun light. Also the screens are practically indestructible. The screen technology is being used by new the mini laptops.

3 Oracle and Open source. Orcale is one of the most expensive commercial software solutions. Now it owns Sun, and Mysql. Both Sun Java and Mysql are very large open source projects now under it.

4. Patrick gave a plug for his podcast. He is a blogger press agent. As an agent he does stories for plan8.

5. Misc. quotes:
“Centos is a north american distro.”
“Redhat and jboss don’t work together despite being under the same corporate umbrella.”
“Sony sued itself once. The case was Sony entertainment vs Sony electronics.”
“Open sources biggest educational stronghold is Hawaii”

June 2010 Meeting notes

About 6 people showed up for this meeting.

We had an open meeting.

New Linux issues:
1. Nick was having some issues setting up Subversion 1.6 and in dependency hell.

2. Demitri was setting up Ubuntu 10 on this new System76 laptop. He had some questions about cron and anacron, which put us in a talk about the the two schedulers. Anacron it appears came about for laptops. It runs from a cronjob. If you don’t have anacron set to run in cron your cronjobs that were missed when a machine was off will not run. Demitri also had some questions about secure backups. Brad recommended that Demitri look at Drdb which does block backups.

3. There was some talk in regards to what databases to look at in Linux. Most recommended mysql as a database. However, Postgres is also good if you have previous database experience and want something that has more advanced database features.

4. Brad gave a demo of a content management system called concrete5. Concrete5 is a CMS that was created to provide a simple alternative to Drupal.
He showed his site thefootballbooklist.com Brad also mentioned that Blue ray writers provide a cheap way to make media backups holding 50-200GB backups.

5. Dave said he built a new system for less than $1000.
components: 6GB Crucial RAM ( newegg)
1 Fathontom 2 processor (Tiger Direct)
1 Asus Motherboard Model M4N98TD EVO with Nvidia on-board.
2 9800 Gforce EVGA cards for quad screens