CPLUG

It’s December… so this month we’ll be doing our annual “installfest” and social extravaganza on Tuesday, 12/8/09 at 6:30 PM.

Please bring some food to share — snacks, deserts, and similar goodies would be great. We’ll still order pizza too.

If you have any Linux/OSS questions, please feel free to bring them. If you’d like to bring your laptop or desktop to get help with something, you are welcome to do so!

And if you don’t need help with anything, no problem! You can either help other folks, or just hang out and talk about geeky things and eat yummy food. :)

Check out the Meetings page for directions, and see you there!

CPLUG’s November meeting was a triple-header with presentations on Asterisk PBX (Dennis), Dropbox and Ubuntu One (John M.), and cloud computing with Rackspace and Amazon EC2 (John P.).

The next meeting will be December 9, 2009 at 6:30 PM.

The first talk at CPLUG’s May meeting was presented by Rob, who discussed “Home Automation with the Vera Z-Wave controller”. After the break, Lon and Eric discussed the online TODO apps Remember the Milk and Hiveminder.

And don’t forget, you can check out the full list of previous meeting topics.

The next meeting will be on June 9, 2009. See you then!

CPOSC, the Central PA Open Source Conference, is a one-day, multi-track, low-cost conference about all things open source: software, programming, operating systems, community and more. It will take place on Saturday, October 17, 2009 in Harrisburg, PA.

The Call for Participation (CFP) is open right now and we are currently looking for interesting talks and presentations. If you’ve given a talk at CPLUG before, or if you’ve got a cool topic to talk about, please don’t be shy! We’d love to hear your idea!

The Speaker FAQ page has all the info you need to submit an abstract. And yes, you can submit more than one! ;)

More info is available at the CPOSC 2009 website. Check it out, and we hope to see you in October!

The February 2009 CPLUG meeting is over, and was on various security topics:

First up, Jerod Lycett gave a talk on some security basics, including information about passwords, wireless and a few other items of interest.

Second, Jeff Best talked about security and compliance, including the 5 W’s of security. He has a wiki page posted at http://cplug.pbwiki.com/Security-Stuff.

After pizza, John Place talked about SSH, its history, some of its more overlooked but very useful features, and a bit into ~/.ssh/config, and how you can make your SSH life easier using it.

Finally, Chris Moates gave an impromptu talk about the yubikey, a device from Yubico that generates one time passwords. More information on the yubikey can be found at http://www.yubico.com.

Here’s some pictures of each speaker:

The next meeting will be on March 10th.

The December CPLUG meeting was held on December 9, 2008. There was one talk on TiddlyWiki, followed by what has been called “an installfest and social extravaganza”!

The next meeting will be on January 13, 2009.

Remember, the mailing list is the best way to keep track of upcoming events. Sign up!

We have a meeting coming up tomorrow (11/11/08) at 6:30 PM.

We didn’t have an official October meeting, so the meeting this month will have a belated-Halloween theme — Dead Protocols and Zombie processes!

We’re going to talk about a number of has-been protocols that were quite cool in their hay day, and Chris will be explaining what those zombie’s in our process lists are (amongst other things).

See you tomorrow!

Just a quick reminder about the meeting this coming Tuesday. As usual, we have two talks:

1. A programmer from Mapquest will be spending some time talking about how mapping and routing work, their development platforms (including Linux), and all sorts of similar goodies.
2. Eric will be doing a talk called “Staving Off The Apocalypse with pfSense (how to save the world with a router).”

See you then!

The August CPLUG meeting will be tomorrow night at 6:30 PM at ITT. The topics will be:

• 10 Awesome Firefox Plug-ins (Jason May)
• Embedded Linux Distributions (Bob Igo)

Directions can be found on the meetings page.

We had a special guest at tonight’s meeting! Brad Lhotsky, a Security Administrator at National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave a talk on Network Introspection with Open Source Tools. Here’s the abstract:

“Information Security is a hot field these days. However, most Security Policies deal with the world from the perspective of high school physics class: no friction, zero air resistance. This presentations intends to demonstrate how to leverage a variety of Open Source Projects to gain a better understanding of your network. Leveraging this understanding, it’s possible to attach security policies to networks that actually increase productivity and limit wasted time and money.”

Brad will be giving this talk at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this year.