Tag Archives | GNHLUG

CentralLUG, 3 April 2006: MS Office Docs to PDF

By Ted Roche on March 27, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on this map. Further directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

This month’s meeting will feature David Berube of http://www.berubeconsulting.com presenting techniques to extract content from MS Office documents. From David:

“Microsoft Office documents are ubiquitous. However, the Microsoft Office suite is not available for all platforms and comes with a prohibitive cost attached to it. While a variety of open source readers are available to read the MS Office suite formats, you can‰t always count on the user having installed one these readers. On the other hand, PDF viewers are common, freely available, and have a much smaller footprint than an office suite. This presentation will show you how to programatically convert Word and Excel documents into PDF, using open source tools and PHP.”

More details at about the group are available at http://www.gnhlug.org.

Should be a great presentation. Hope to see you there!

MonadLUG 9 March: Bill Stearns and ssh

By Ted Roche on March 3, 2006 in OpenSource, Security

Guy Pardoe, MonadLUG Coordinator, announces their March 9th meeting:

The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be Thursday, March 9th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough.

SSH Operations and Techniques – Bill Stearns

SSH is a program to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and secure communications over insecure channels. It is a replacement for rlogin, rsh, rcp, and rdist. It protects a network from attacks such as IP spoofing, IP source routing, and DNS spoofing.

*****************

Directions: The SAU 1 Superintendant of Schools office is directly behind the South Meadow School. From downtown Peterborough, travel north on route 202 approximately 2 & 1/2 miles. Look for a white sign on the left “SAU 1 Superintendant of Schools Office.” The entrance is on the left, just before South Meadow school, and across the street from Sims Press. Follow the drive up towards dumpsters where there is ample parking. Come down the stairs to the set of doors on your right. Enter thru double set of doors and turn left…straight into the board room.

Or check the link to Google maps to see our location:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/OurChapters#monadlug

Monday March 6th: CentraLUG meeting: Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)

By Ted Roche on March 3, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf , marked as “I” on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

This month’s meeting will feature Steve Amsden, Network Administrator for the Merrimack Valley School District, showing off LTSP, the Linux Terminal Server Project. From Steve:

“LTSP is an add-on package for Linux that allows you to connect lots of low-powered thin client terminals to a Linux server. Applications typically run on the server, and accept input and display their output on the thin client display. The power and flexibility of this platform have far reaching implications, particularly for K12 school districts who have been educated and brave enough to seek other solutions than the cost of systems and applications software. But more specifically, being locked into a treadmill of constant upgrades, licensing problems, and unsupportable client-server nework environments that have been the Achille’s heel of technology education. Merrimack Valley School District has five LTSP server environments in various states of implementation, and
uses e-Smith Linux server for gateway, DHCP, content filtering, firewall, and Windows 2000 emulation using SAMBA. Exeter School District, as well as Salem, are too using combinations of e-Smith and LTSP. Though LTSP has made in-roads into the schools, it will be some time before the full impact is realized, and others convinced that there is a better way than the Microsoft Way.”

Should be an awesome presentation! Hope to see you there!

Andy Bair demos WebJob at GNHLUG-nashua tonight

By Ted Roche on February 16, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Who : Andy Bair

What : WebJob

Where: Martha’s Exchange

Day : Thur 16 Feb (*TONIGHT*)

Time : 6:00 PM for grub, 7:30 PM for presentation

WebJob is a client-server system, where a tiny client requests and
downloads a program from a server, executes that program on the client,
then uploads the results to the server.

WebJob provides a mechanism for running known good programs on
damaged orpotentially compromised systems. It is ideal for remote
diagnostics, incident response, and evidence collection.

WebJob also provides a centralized management framework. It thereby
supports and automates a large number of common host-based tasks such
as: periodic system checks, file updates, integrity monitoring,
patch/package management, and so on.

Andy plans to discuss the tool, its architecture, and one or more
demos.

Details at http://www.gnhlug.org

Andy adds:

WebJob is a client-server system, where a tiny
client requests and downloads a program from a
server, executes that program on the client,
then uploads the results to the server. WebJob
is useful because it provides a mechanism for
running known good programs on damaged or
potentially compromised systems. This makes it
ideal for remote diagnostics, incident response,
and evidence collection. WebJob also provides a
framework that is conducive to centralized
management. Therefore, it can support and help
automate a large number of common administrative
tasks and host-based monitoring scenarios such
as periodic system checks, file updates,
integrity monitoring, patch/package management,
and so on.

Here is the outline for the discussion:

High-level View
Details: Client–Server Interaction
Advantages
Disadvantages
Execution Example
WebJob in Action
Demos

The WebJob paper (what-is-webjob-paper.pdf) and
presentation (what-is-webjob-presentation.pdf) are
located at the following URL.

http://webjob.sourceforge.net/WebJob/Papers.shtml

Give Upgrades A Chance

By Ted Roche on January 31, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Over at Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, Bill McGonigle posts Call To Action – Upgrading. “I spoke to Tim Burke, Director Emerging Technologies (including the Linux kernel and Fedora) at RedHat about the state of upgrading this past Tuesday at the GNHLUG meeting in Manchester…”

“So, I issue a challenge to all package maintainers out there who have their projects integrated into distributions like Fedora – give upgrades a chance.”

It’s a tough challenge, but a necessary one. Upgrading is inevitable, and the costs of updating/upgrading are becoming an increasingly important factor in calculating the total costs of owning a system.

Speaking of great GNHLUG meetings….

By Ted Roche on January 12, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

… as I mentioned GNHLUG’s next quarterly meeting, DLSLUG organizer Bill McGonigle posts the audio, slides and video from the last quarterly presentation, featuring Doug McIlroy, an instructor at Dartmouth and a retired manager from AT&T Bell Labs where he worked with Kernighan, Ritchie and other lights of the era. Thanks to Bill for the hard work of taking sub-optimal audio and video and preserving this very special presentation!

Slides are in OpenOffice format. Audio is a 64 Mb MP3 file, Video is a 348 Mb MP4 file suitable for playing with VLC or QuickTime. Thanks to the Internet Archive for hosting the video!

Yet another very cool GNHLUG meeting…

By Ted Roche on January 8, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

What : Open Source Development and Productization

Who : Tim Burke, Director of Fedora Project and Kernel Development at Red Hat

When : Tue, 24 Jan 2006, at 5:00 PM

Where: Walker Auditorium, Robert Frost Hall, SNHU

GNHLUG, NH IEEE/ACM, and SwANH are privileged to host a joint presentation: Tim Burke, Director of Kernel Development for Red Hat Software, and Director of the Fedora Linux Project. He will be speaking on how Red Hat balances its role as community steward and purveyor of enterprise products. The event will take place at 5:00 PM, on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006. It will be in the Walker Auditorium, in Robert Frost Hall, at Southern New Hampshire University.

GETTING THERE

Campus Map: http://www.snhu.edu/212.asp

Robert Frost Hall is #2 on the map.

Directions: http://www.snhu.edu/209.asp

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

Open source development is rapidly gaining momentum due to developer interest as well as empowerment to end users. This presentation will describe Red Hat’s approach to balancing the interests of community, customers, and business partners. We will see how open source projects are integrated to form our distribution and how Red Hat fosters and contributes to the community development process. This approach can serve as a model to others who are trying to understand the intersection of free open source software and business.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tim Burke is the Director of Kernel Development at Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise. The Kernel Development team is responsible for the core kernel portion of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Burke is also the Director of the Fedora Project, an open source project sponsored by Red Hat and supported by the Fedora community. In his role as Fedora Director, Tim leads both internal and external community projects with the ultimate goal of product incorporation. Prior to becoming a manager, Tim earned an honest living developing Linux high available cluster solutions and Unix kernel technology. When not juggling bugs, features and schedules, he enjoys running, rock climbing, bicycling, and paintball.

ABOUT GNHLUG

GNHLUG, the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, is a not-for-profit organization committed to furthering the cause of Linux and Free/Open Source Software in and around the Granite State. GNHLUG has chapters and regular meetings in Nashua, Durham/UNH, Concord, Peterborough/Monadnock, Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee, and Manchester, as well as a state-wide online community. http://www.gnhlug.org

ABOUT NH IEEE/ACM

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession. The New Hampshire Section of the IEEE hosts periodic technical and professional talks, and provides professional networking for technology professionals. http://acadweb.snhu.edu/Isaak_James/ITseminars/

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is a non-profit educational and scientific society dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology. The Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM (GBC/ACM) is a sponsor of monthly meetings, full-day professional development seminars, and publisher of The Real Times. http://www.gbcacm.org/

ABOUT SwANH

The Software Association of New Hampshire (SwANH) promotes and supports the software and information technology industries throughout the State. SwANH sponsors networking events, educational programs through its SIGs and affiliates, and discount programs that provide members with opportunities to gain information, connect with resources, grow their businesses, and succeed. http://www.swanh.org

Do LUGs matter? Yes!

By Ted Roche on December 26, 2005 in Linux, OpenSource, Python

Slashdot asks Do LUGs Still Matter?, pointing to an article by Joe Barr, writing for NewsForge. The answer for all UGs hasn’t changed: User Groups matter if they matter to you. If there’s something you want out of a LUG and you’re willing to put some effort into a LUG, amazing things can happen. Everyone knows of a LUG that’s faded: there’s a natural rhythm to LUGs like all organizations. A leader with fire in his/her belly drives the group to new heights, burns out or gets distracted, and the group declines. A new leader may emerge or the group may fade away like the Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing but an empty web page or two.

The Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group is on another power climb, not its first, nor hopefully its last. Active volunteers are running chapters in Nashua, Peterborough, Hanover, Concord and Durham. A Python Special Interest Group shares many of its members and the groups resources and gives us a presence in Manchester as well.

In the past year, member of the group were present at Linuxworld Boston, the Software Association of New Hampshire InfoeXchange annual conference, the Hosstraders ham radio swapfest, the McAuliffe annual teacher’s conference, and Software Freedom Day.

LUGs can matter as much as you want them to.

MonadLUG, 8 Dec 2005: Tim Lind on anti-spam techniques

By Ted Roche on December 7, 2005 in LAMP, OpenSource, Technology

Guy Pardoe, the MonadLUG Coordinator-in-Chief, announces “The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, December 8th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough… Tim Lind discusses Anti-spam techniques – Using open source tools, how to build an anti-spam system that is self running, updating and allows your email users to configure their own whitelists/blacklists, etc…”

CentraLUG: 5 December: James Fogg on Windows-Linux Interoperability

By Ted Roche on November 29, 2005 in LAMP, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Please note the change in location: we will be meeting in Little Hall Room 230, a lab with computers. On the NHTI map located at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/nhtimap.pdf (warning: 1 Mb+ PDF), the building is marked “K”

This month’s meeting will feature James Fogg discussing Windows-Linux interoperability. James Fogg is a principal with JDFogg Technology Consulting, where he is a network engineer specializing in delivering IT, Telecommunications and Computer Services, Systems, Sales and Consulting to the Fortune 500.

Many companies now operate mixed environments and managers expect their technical staff to be able to “make it work.” James will provide some ideas on how to do it. He’ll be covering interoperability methods between Microsoft Windows products and Linux/Unix systems. File Sharing, Application Sharing, network Services (DNS, DHCP, NTP, etc.), Mail and Printing. Also included will be the basics of Linux, Unix and Active Directory authentication, authorization and auditing.

I was pleased to learn that in the most recent editions of Microsoft’s Services for Unix, Microsoft is including an NFS client. SFU is a downloadable component for the currently supported versions of Windows and Microsoft has committed to including some of the functionality future OS releases. Interoperability is Good. SFU is one of several things James plans to cover.

Hope to see you there!

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