Meeting Notes March 5 2007

About 6 people showed up to the meeing.

Topics:
Wireless cards with Linux
SSH tunnels
Finding RPMS.
Wireshark.
Gumsticks.
Cell Phones.
Linux only Tv Tunners.

We had a question as to what wireless card to get. Cisco, Linkysys, and Lucent Orinco was thrown out. Here is a list of cards that HP has tested to work.Linux Compatible Wireless cards

SSH tunnels where talke about. SSH is the secure shell protocol and it allows for a lot of nifty things outside of simply doing terminal sessions. It can also be used for tunneling information. For example, I recently set up a proxy server and I am using it as a VPN using ssh.
SSH and the proxy run on the remote machine. Once the proxy was tested I firewalled so that localhost is the only machine able to connect to proxy. Then a tunnel was created to pass the data between my client and host. The tunnel is established with the following command:
ssh -L 9999:localhost:1080 -l mylogin remotemachine . Once the tunnel is created, the client applications just need to be setup to us a proxy on localhost with port 9999. All the data is then transfered through the SSH tunnel to the server creating an encrypted channel that is hard to intercept.

Finding RPMs is a bit of pain for RedHat, Mandrake, and SUSE users. Thus a service called RPM finder was created to help people find some of these packages. Although most standard packages can be found on the distro site, any non-standard RPM needs to be found. RPM find is one service that helps.

Wireshark is a new networking tool that is following the line of Ethereal. Ethereal had some copyrights associated with it, and development ceased. Thus, the Ethereal author has been recommend people switch to Wireshark that appears to be licenced under the GNU licence.

Gumstick is a new computer that is the size of gumstick. Some people are using gumsticks to do rebotic programming. They work with linux.