CPLUG

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.

At the June meeting (6/10/08), Todd (tmz) gave a presentation called “What is packaging and why should you care?” which is the first in a series of talks about that various packaging systems available for Linux.

I did a talk on “Flying Light with Lighttpd”. Lighttpd is a secure, fast, high-performance web server that is really worth checking out, especially if you are using a framework like Rails or Django.

At the meeting on Tuesday, the topics were Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and OpenVPN.

Nate’s EC2 presentation slides are below. You can check out Matt’s OpenVPN presentation notes on his website.

Continue reading ‘May meeting slides and notes’

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 Sunday, October 19th at the ITT Tech campus in Harrisburg, PA.

We have started the Call for Participation (CFP) and 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 CFP page has all the info you need to submit an abstract.

More info is available at the CPOSC 2008 website.

The next CPLUG meeting will be on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 6:30 PM. Nathan Powell will be talking about Amazon’s super-cool Elastic Compute Cloud and Matt Rinehart will be discussing OpenVPN.

Slides from Chris’ talk from the April meeting are below…

Continue reading ‘Command Security with Sudo’

We are still in need for one (possibly two) people to speak at the upcoming meeting on May 13, 2008. There are a wide variety of topics available, and just about anything involving Linux would be welcome.

If you are interested, either post a comment below or email Eric directly.

In addition to Chris’ talk on user privileges, Todd Z. will be doing a presentation on revision control:

Revision control is used by many open source projects, large and small. You can use it too, to follow or contribute to those projects, or to track your config files, scripts, and whatnot. We’ll talk about various revision control tools as well as the differences between centralized and distributed systems.

The meeting will be on Tuesday, April 8 at 6:30 PM. Details and directions are on the meetings page.

For the April meeting, I’ll be discussing solutions to control user privileges at the command line level.

I’ll kick things off with a basic introduction to the problem, followed by a high level overview of the most popular solutions around today. Then we’ll go into a lot more detail on how sudo helps to manage this problem effectively and cleanly. From the mundane to the obscure, most of the major functionality of sudo will be covered. The expectation is that you will be better equipped to both understand what sudo is configured to do on your system, as well as be given enough knowledge to start your own further research on the topic.

MythTV and LinuxMCE were the topics at tonight’s meeting. Bob did the pre-pizza talk and Seth did the post-pizza talk:

The next meeting will be April 8, 2008 at 6:30 PM.