meeting notes for Dec 2013 and Jan 2014
We have been having great turn outs despite the cold.
On January 6, 2014 we meet. We had about 10 people.
The discussion started with Brad talking about Xen and Citrix. Apparently, Xen-Server is now opensource. This used to be a commerical product sold by Citrix while the simplier version Xen was opensource. The Opensource Xen-Server has many of the same features you find in Vshpere or Microsoft’s virutalization product. Most of the commerical product sell features like ‘live migration’ and ‘HA’, which Xen-Server does for free.
We talked about sandboxing a machine with ‘chroot’ and ‘lps’. This is one way to keep your Linux machine pretty safe while browsing the web. Other sandboxing solutions are lxc linux containers and docker installs. After talking about sandboxing a system, we went on to Glusterfilesystem and open media solutions in Linux. Some media solutions that came up were ‘media tomb’, ‘plex3’, ‘open media vault’.
On Dec 3, 2013, we had a similiarly large turn out. This meeting was all over the place. We started talking about desktop managers, and ended with security software. Someone mentioned that ‘flux box’ or ‘black box’ was better for running Wine applications on Linux. Another person mentioned that the new version of Mint16 broke Gnome compatiblity. Then we talked about the package managers. ‘Synaptic package manager’ was discussed shortly as one of Ubuntu’s main gui tools. For getting special packages, someone mentioned using ‘ppa’, which stands for ‘personal package manager’. Adding ‘ppa’s to your Ubuntu distro lets you gets software that you normally don’t have access to with the standard packages. Someone had a problem with lvm on a mixed drive that does both solidstate and regular SATA in the same device. We recommended a firmware upgrade. Virtual machines applications were discussed a little. Docke, kvm, vmware, xen, openbox, and parrells are some of the choices people could make. At the end of the meeting, ‘backtrack’ and ‘helix’ were talked about as forensic tools.