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Fourteen attendees managed to find the monthly meeting of the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, despite being held one floor up from the regular meeting room. (A reminder from yours truly that you can save yourself a trip down and up the stairs if you just Read The Fine Announcement Bill McGonigle prepares each month. I needed the exercise anyway.)

Bill Stearns presented “50 Ways to Run Your Programs,” He had tremendous handouts: a vinyl 3-ring notebook binder with 61 pages. He asked us all to skim the materials and pick out the couple of techniques we wanted to drill down into. He covered in some depth (though each could get its own book): passing commands through ssh, combining screen with ssh, using wget as part of a pipe, how wget can work with caching, using tee to redirect output through the pipe as well as to a file simultaneously, the precedence of && in sequencing commands on the command line, some of the implications of subshells and environment variables, gotchas with cron, using eval and netcat. Bill is knowledgeable and rolled well with the punches, like his new HP widescreen battleship of a laptop refusing to run X on the projector. (Bill had an aside about the joys of Open Source providing the means of fixing some bad interrupt logic in the BIOs with a kernel switch – yay, Open Source!) Bill hardly broke a sweat despite the attendance of Professor McIlroy, who is credited with having invented the pipes and filters architecture of Unix. A good time was had by all, with lots of time for questions (from novices “What does that do?” to some pretty advanced questions on piping and subshells and so forth.)

Next meeting is 5 April when Todd Underwood will present ZFS. Thanks to Bill McGonigle for organizing the meeting, Bill Stearns for the great presentation, and all for participating.

Bill McGonigle announces the March meeting of the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, featuring “50 Ways to Run Your Programs” presented by Bill Stearns. Sounds like a great meeting!

“At this meeting Bill will explore ways to change how programs run. He will cover ways to change a program’s priority, where it runs, when it runs, debug new and running applications, and much more. Attendees are welcome, and encouraged, to bring their own laptops and try new techniques that will help them tap the power of a Linux environment.”

“William Stearns is a network security researcher and instructor for the SANS Institute, teaching the Linux System Administration and Perimeter Security tracks. In his spare time he maintains a major antispam blacklist and assists the technical community as a volunteer incident handler for the Internet Storm Center. His articles and tools can be found in SysAdmin magazine, online journals, and at http://www.stearns.org.”