Tag Archives | GNHLUG

CentraLUG notes, 1-October-2007: Michael Kazin on Nagios

By Ted Roche on October 2, 2007 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Ten attendees made it to the October meeting of the Central NH Linux Group, coming from as far away as Nashua, Laconia, Peterborough and Hanover. CentraLUG is a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, and our meeting was held as usual on the first Monday of the month at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Library, Room 146, from 7 PM to 9 PM.

Michael Kazin presented Nagios, the host and service monitoring system. Michael told us a bit of his colorful personal history, and his exposure to Nagios as a student administrator of the Rutgers University computer center. He had found a neat diagram of the relationships between the configuration files in Nagios (we covered the current 2.x and not the 3.x, currently in beta) and went to explain how it could be used for businesses and home users, keeping an eye on working systems, alerting the operating to problematic conditions of low disk space, high CPU usage or unavailability of resources or services. Nagios has a huge number of pre-built modules, a 240-page manual, and documentation on how to extend the system for your own use.

Michael ended up with a presentation of a working Nagios installation on his home network, and showed how shutting down a service would set off an alarm, how the operator could flag the alarm as acknowledged, fix the problem, and verify that the alarm cleared. While the audience watched, participated and pestered Michael with questions, we identified and fixed a couple of permissions issues with his install and got the system to do things he’d never tried before. A good time was had by all. Wish you were there.

Michael’s slides are available on the GNHLUG site.

Bill Sconce was present to point out that modules could be written in Python. Ben Scott was heckled. I made the usual announcements: GNHLUG meetings can be found on http://www.gnhlug.org; several related meetings are taking place this month: SwANH’s annual infoeXchange, the NEARfest ham radio gathering. See the web site for links.

Thanks to Michael for a fine presentation, to Bill Sconce for providing the projector, to NHTI for providing the space and to all for attending and participating.

Notes from the NH Ruby/Rails Group, 25-Sept-2007: Scott Garman and Nick Plante

By Ted Roche on September 26, 2007 in LAMP, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology

Five attendees made it to the September meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails User Group, held as usual at the well-appointed RMC Research offices, though not on the usual third Tuesday. A round of introductions lead to some vigorous discussions, including how to broadcast and record meetings (perhaps a future meeting will be available via WebEx?), other computing organizations and conferences in the Granite State (GNHLUG, SwANH, the infoeXchange conference, NH High-Tech Council, etc.).

Nick Plante had some great stories about the Ruby Rampage, a 48-hour online programming contest he help run. A large number of teams competed and a fair number actually delivered working applications, some of them looking quite polished. There’s open voting on the most popular applications, and winners will walk away with a number of desirable prizes. Nick’s also been tapped to do the closing presentation at Ruby East, where he will demonstrate some of the more popular applications. There are some great apps there, and some will be providing their source code, though not all. Check them out!

On to the main presentation: Scott and Nick had started a simple Ruby app for NHRuby members to be able to suggest future meeting topics and vote on them, giving the organizers some ideas on what to present next. Tonight, Scott presented the unit, functional and integration test frameworks built into Rails and/or available as add-ons. Nick showed the UI for the voting interface and dove deep into how the form functioned. There was a lot of discussion, with debates on where the boundaries are in unit vs. functional vs. integration, and how Javascript (via the Prototype libraries) can be integrated into the interface and how Rails allows graceful degradation on platforms with Javascript unavailable or disabled. Comparisons were made between the internal, programmer-centric tests provided by Rails and external tests a QA person might run with a tool like Selenium. Lots and lots of great ideas. In a future meeting, Scott and Nick will discuss the next step, deploying the application, perhaps using Vlad the Deployer (ow) and/or the new Capistrano 2.

Thanks to Scott for organizing the meeting, Tim of RMC for providing the meeting space, Scott and Nick for the presentation, Brian for mentioning Selenium and all for their attendance and participation!

CentraLUG: 1-Oct-2007: Michael Kazin shows Nagios

By Ted Roche on September 24, 2007 in CSS, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology

The Central NH Linux User Group returns to the Library after a summer hiatus at the Sybase offices in Concord. The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Library, room 146, at 7 PM. Next month’s meeting is on October 1st at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available at http://www.centralug.org Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

At this meeting, Michael Kazin will be presenting Nagios, the Open Source monitoring service. From http://www.nagios.org, “Nagios® is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program.” Written in Perl and controlled by text configuration files, Nagios offers the ability to alert administrators to a huge number of possible problems with connectivity, speed, or performance. Nagios offers a web interface for close-to-real-time monitoring, email/pager alerts, the ability to launch other programs, etc.”

Michael is a computer consultant at a well-known consultancy working for well-known companies in the military-industrial complex. He is a member of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group’s Board of Directors. Previously, Michael helped run the Rutgers University Student Linux User Group and gained his experience with Nagios by monitoring hundreds of machines in the Rutgers Data Center.

Future Meetings: Currently, we have a couple interesting meetings coming up: November: Ted Roche on Cascading Style Sheets, December: David Berube on Ruby, January: Bruce Dawson on low-power Linux computers. As always, meetings are subject to change. You are encouraged to join the low-traffic announcement list to get announcement and cancellation information.

MonadLUG notes, 13-Sept-2007, Charlie Farinella on digitizing analog vinyl albums

By Ted Roche on September 14, 2007 in Linux, Technology

Ten people attended the September meeting of the Monadnock Area Linux User Group, MonadLUG, one of the LUGs of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the second Thursday of the month at the SAU 1 Administration offices on Hancock Road in Peterborough.

Charlie started off the meeting with a round of introductions, and we welcomed several new members and shared our interests and backgrounds. We covered a bit of news about upcoming events; I mentioned that we try to keep all upcoming meetings on gnhlug.org and plugged upcoming meetings by other LUGs as well as the Manchester Tech North conference, the GBC/ACM meeting with Guy Steele, and the SWaNH infoeXchange conference.

Charlie covered upcoming MonadLUG meetings, a record number of them:

October 11,. Ben Scott, DNS
November 8, Ted Roche, Cascading Style Sheets
December 13, Tim Wessels, Revolution OS
January 10, Ray Côté, something tbd
February 14, Tim Wessels, SuSE Linux Enterprise 10

On to the main presentation, Charlie talked about his project of digitizing his collection (he estimates 800) of vinyl records. (For those not familiar with Charlie’s background, he spent 30 years as a piano technician, and some of his favorite recordings include pianos that he had tuned.) Charlie was not focused on high-fidelity, high-fiddling recordings; rather, just burning CDs he could listen to in the car, so quick, efficient, simple and good quality was the focus. Charlie talked about how he hooked up a consumer-grade turntable and stereo receiver to the computer’s sound card line in (you need to go through the receiver because phono output needs pre-amplification and the signal has a specific profile). Folks in the audience offered that pre-amps were available as standalone units inexpensively on eBay.

Once the sound arrived at the sound card, it needed to be digitized. Charlie talked about how it worked on his Slackware machine, but he could never figure out how to un-mute the sound inputs in Ubuntu. Several folks offered sympathy and similar stories of getting tangled up in the various sound systems (OSS, ALSA) and not getting incoming sound to work well. This is a topic where a local expert could make a very popular meeting, I expect!

Having failed to get the sound mixers and Audacity to record directly, Charlie used the rec command line (from the sox package) to record instead. Charlie provided a handout (which I hope to post to the LUG wiki here) with the commands he used and some additional notes.

Once the sound was captured as a WAV file, he brought the sound into Audacity and used the filters and trimming facilities to amplify the sound to the full dynamic range, remove (or at least reduce) clicking, get rid of background noise, and split the recording into separate tracks. Charlie would save these separately and burn them all to an audio CD to play on the home or car stereo.

It was great to see someone actually use Audacity and understand what many of the buttons and options are used for. I was inspired to try to digitize some of my old fogey music.

Thanks to Charlie for organizing the meeting and doing the presentation.This is one I would encourage the other LUGs to consider asking Charlie to repeat.

MerriLUG, 20-Sept-2007: OpenOffice.org Styles

By Ted Roche on September 14, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Jim Kuzdrall, announcement coordinator for MerriLUG, gets to announce himself as the featured speaker this month at MerriLUG:

Who : Jim Kuzdrall, Intrel Service Company

What : Introduction to OO styles and some handy simplifications
Where: Martha’s Exchange
Day : Thur 20 Sep **Next Week**
Time : 6:00 PM for grub, 7:30 PM for discussion

Overwhelmed by formatting choices in OpenOffice Writer? Continually fiddling with formatting that never comes up quite right for your present document? Help is on the way! A diagrammatic overview of the OO style system is the first step. Why are they needed? Where do they reside? How do they interact? Should the defaults be changed? How do templates come in? What are the “Gotchas”? Next, a different approach to style management deftly cuts the styles and templates down to an easy-to-use few. Once you create your small set of custom styles and templates you will rarely revisit formatting details again. (Yes, the scheme evolved from roff macros.)

Driving directions here.

Seacoast LUG Notes, 10-Sept-2007, Ben Scott on RAID and LVM

By Ted Roche on September 11, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Twelve people attended last night’s session of the Seacoast Linux User Group, a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the second Monday of the month at the UNH Durham campus, Morse Hall room 301.

Ben Scott had presented “RAID and LVM” and he had lots of information, and attendees had lots of questions, comments and war stories. There was plenty of participation, and Ben was still going strong when I had to
excuse myself at 10 PM. Ben had some good tables in HTML and diagrams in SVG to show the concepts, and used the network to log into his home machine and the GNHLUG web server Liberty to demonstrate the command line and GUI tools used to manage and maintain LVM and RAID. Side discussions included disaster recovery, pros and cons to reliability, redundancy and downtime, and the use of SMART interfaces on hard disk
drives. I’m sure everyone learned something. I certainly did.

Thanks to Ben for the presentation and Rob for hosting the meeting.

Seacoast LUG 10-Sept-2007: Ben Scott on RAID and LVM

By Ted Roche on September 10, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

What : RAID and LVM storage management
Date : Mon 10 Sep 2007 (TONIGHT)
Time : 7 PM to 9 PM
Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH

For the September 2007 SLUG/Seacoast/UNH/Durham meeting, Ben Scott
will be speaking on storage management using RAID and LVM.

=== About the presentation ===

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) and LVM (Logical Volume
Manager) let you do more with your disks than create partitions and
filesystems. With RAID, you can combine disks to make larger
filesystems, and/or add redundancy to help protect against disk
failure. LVM takes that a step further, by letting you create
arbitrary Logical Volumes (to hold filesystems), which can be easily
reallocated, resized, moved, and copied (snapshots).

Ben will be talking about some of the concepts, review the tools and
techniques available, and (hopefully) doing a live demonstration of
some of the things you can do. The specifics will be flexible, in
response to attendee demand.

=== About the speaker ===

Ben is a local Linux user, enthusiast, and advocate. He handles the
care and feeding of the GNHLUG Internet server, and is a GNHLUG
Bored^W Board Member.

=== About SLUG ===

SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG,
the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG
coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time,
same place. You can find out more about SLUG and GNHLUG at the
http://slug.gnhlug.org/ and http://www.gnhlug.org/ websites.

Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all.
The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it’s not uncommon to find
hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the
third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New
Hampshire, in Durham.

Schedules Direct supplies TV/cable schedules for MythTV users

By Ted Roche on September 10, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

“Schedules Direct is a non-profit organization that provides raw U.S./Canadian tv listing data to Free and Open Source Applications. Those applications then use the data to provide things like PVR functionality, search tools, and private channel grids.” Recently, the Tribune Media Services company Zap2It decided to discontinue their free service that had provided TV/cable schedules to home hobbiests. Schedules Direct was formed by advocates for the various home-brewed PVRs to step in and supply the content. After negotiations with a number of vendors, they ended up back with TMS as their supplier. In a matter of weeks, the Schedules Direct crew managed to set up the infrastructure to provide a 10-day trial membership, a paid subscription service ($15/3 months initially, with a goal of $20/year or less once they establish the viability of the service) and a working infrastructure. Users of MythTV need to upgrade to the most recent (v 0.20.2 or later) version and change their configuration to use the new service. I switched over the weekend, confirmed I could read the new schedules, and paid up for the first three months. What a great example of the community coming together to supply their own needs.

GNHLUG has had several MythTV meetings, and I anticipate more in the future. Jarod Wilson presented a very popular session at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group last year, and that lead to an effort by Jarod and maddog and others to run a series of MythTV installfests at NHTI.

DLSLUG Notes, 6-Sept-2007: ATTACK of the Nifties!!!

By Ted Roche on September 7, 2007 in CSS, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Bill McGonigle hosted the September meeting the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held as usual on the first Thursday of the month, but at a different location: the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center. Seven members attended.

The night was announced as “Nifties:” short presentations that hope to elicit from the audience just that reaction. Everyone present had something to show off:

I showed the S5 (Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System) developed by Eric Meyer of CSS fame. S5 used standards-compliant CSS, JavaScript and XHTML to generate a slide show with keyboard shortcuts, drop-down slide lists, handout and slideshow formats, additional notes and more. Free as in speech, free as in beer. Nifty!

Bill McGonigle showed off pfSense, following up on a blog entry he had written. pfSense is a spin-off of monowall, the xBSD-based firewall program. Bill talked about how to configure it off a read-only CR, with a small (512 Mb) USB fob holding the configuration file, running diskless on an older computer. The web interface was pretty slick, rich and intuitive, and exposed a huge number of options. Nifty!

Adam showed off some work he had been doing with WebSphere Community Edition (aka Apache Geronimo) and a commercial add-on that provided VT-400 terminal emulation via Java and a browser, to access some legacy machines he needs to maintain. Nifty!

I mentioned that TheOpenCD September 2007 edition was out and available via BitTorrent. We talked about some of the neat software on the disk. PDFCreator seemed most popular, but OpenOffice and WinSCP got good mentions, too. Nifty.

We did NOT mention the OpenEducationCD, a spin-off project, but that got mention at last week’s GNHLUG Board of Director’s meeting.

We talked quite a bit about the OLPC project and I showed off one of the videos available on the RedHat site to great acclaim. Not just “Nifty!” but “I want to work there!!!” There are more videos here, here and here.

Many interesting side discussions, too. Sorry if you missed it; it was a fun night.

Electronic Surplus Services in Manchester, NH

By Ted Roche on August 25, 2007 in Linux, Technology

I needed a couple of high-current-carrying lugs and cables for a set of batteries within a UPS (the previous owner had replaced four batteries with two and discarded the excess cabling), and fellow tinkerers on the GNHLUG mailing list suggest I check out the Electronic Surplus Services Store. I hadn’t visited their facilities since it was down in the mill buildings on the river — they’ve moved up to Candia Road now — and they had the parts I needed, as well as lots of cool toys to think about tinkering with.

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