A not to be missed presentation: the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group will host Christoph Doerbeck of RedHat presenting “Virtualization on Linux,” a live demo of the Xen technology running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Details here. Reservations are strongly encouraged for dinner: we’ve had a couple of huge showings at MerriLUG lately, and the staff at Martha’s have been very accomodating at getting everyone fed and on time for the meeting. I suspect this one could be SRO also.
Tag Archives | GNHLUG
Notes from CentraLUG, 2-April-2007: Bill Stearns on LVM
A great meeting last night. The Central New Hampshire Linux User Group met at the usual place and time: The New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Library, Room 146, 7PM on the first Monday.
I did my usual rounds of announcements, Shawn O’Shea pointed out that besides for the discuss and announce mailing lists, you can also subscribe to the lists via RSS by using one of GNHLUG’s archival sites. Add one of these to your favorite RSS readers to see the GNHLUG announcements: mail-archive.com or gmane.org
Everyone got to introduce themselves and speak a little bit about what they’re up to. I passed around a couple lists of topics and speakers from the wiki to find out what the attendees want to see for future sessions.
Bill Stearns presented “LVM: Logical Volume Management.” He explained about the basic need to expand or re-allocate disk resources without making hard partition changes, in some cases without even shutting down. We started right in on an exercise: using the loopback device and some spare space in /var/tmp, we created three loopback block devices. We assigned them as PVs (Physical Volumes) and allocated two to a Volume Group. Then, space could be allocated out of the volume group to provide the space needed. Additional PVs could be added to the VG, additional space from the VG could be allocated to a mount. We had a good discussion about the choice of filesystems and the different processing required for ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs file systems – most of which can be resized when on-line. (Bill recommended the MythTV HOWTO for a good discussion of which file system to use.
We had a good side conversation at this point about the mount tables and the significance of several flags Bill had. An intesnse discussion of ‘noatime’ – useful for hierarchical file management, but generally of little use, and a lot of disk activity, power consumption, speed decrease, and for FlashROM devicers, perhaps lifetime shortening can be avoided by adding noatime to the mount tab. Bill also had war stories about the security implications of nodev and nosuid both of which are a good idea for insertable media unless you have a specific reason for needing them.
We finished up the LVM exercise by adding the third PV to the VG and then resizing the ext3 partition to include the space. Bill took questions from the audience: one lady had just installed LVM on the Linux partition on her mainframe (!) that weekend, and wanted to know more about LVM striping. Other questions on reliability, use with RAID. Bill had some pointers for adding additional storage: use of USB2 (not USB1!) external drives (Bill hasn’t been happy with Firewire storage on Linux) or using an external storage solution (he mentioned CoRAID which uses rackable ethernet-to-ATA raw drives; Bill had one sample to play with) and handled some questions further afield, like the file defragmenter Bill has on his site.
Yet another great LUG meeting. Thanks to Bill Stearns for the great presentation (and 3-ring-bound handouts) and providing the raffle door prizes. Thanks to Bill Sconce for providing the projector and doing the note-taking during the meeting. Thanks to the New Hampshire Technical Institute for providing the facilities.
Look forward to a great presentation on OpenWRT by Ben Scott at the May 7th meeting (where you can expect him to be heckled) and another great presentation on Drupal by Seth Cohn on June 4th. Hope to see you there.
DLSLUG: April 5th: Todd Underwood: ZFS
Bill McGonigle announces the April meeting of the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group. The main presentation will be “ZFS: The Last Word in Filesystems, ” presented by Todd Underwood, VP of Operations and Professional Services, Renesys Corporation. Here’s the pitch:
ZFS is the most original work in storage management in years. It offers a revolutionary, integrated approach to block device, raid, volume management and filesystem technology. We’ll take a high-level look at what makes ZFS so different from previous storage technologies and look at efforts to port ZFS to free operating systems (ZFS is available for FreeBSD and in a userland port to Linux, but the path will not be easy).
Todd has with more than 10 years experience in architecting, building, and supporting large-scale distributed systems. Before Renesys, Todd was senior vice president and chief technology officer at Oso Grande Technologies, the largest Internet service provider in New Mexico, where he was the lead consultant in the security practice. Before that, Todd was chief technology officer at Lightdart Managed Data Centers, a co-location and hosting start-up built in partnership with Public Service Company of New Mexico. As a graduate student, Todd led the effort studying high-speed networking for large-scale computer clusters at the University of New Mexico. Todd holds a B.A. from Columbia College, Columbia University and an M.S. in computer science from the University of New Mexico.
Looking forward to the meeting. Hope to see you there!
CentraLUG, 2 April 2007: Bill Stearns on Logical Volume Management
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 our usual location, 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 at http://www.nhti.edu and on the GNHLUG site at http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/DirectionsToCentraLUG. The
main meeting starts at 7 PM, with Bill Stearns presenting LVM: Logical Volume Management. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
Bill is an authority in the field of security, an instructor for the SANS Institute and an activist in several anti-spam efforts. Visit
http://www.stearns,org for a list of some of the interesting projects he’s been working on and packages he maintains. At April’s meeting, Bill will explain the infrastructure of LVM and how to work with it. LVM is a great technology that allows you to add disk space to running systems, manage the mapping of logical and physical volumes and manipulate disk usage. With the correct choice of hardware and file systems, much of the work can be done while the systems continue to run! Bill has some practical insights into how these systems work, and can talk about some of the subtleties of why you might choose LVM-atop-RAID vs. RAID-atop-LVM. Attendees are encouraged to bring laptops: using temporary space (no need to repartition), Bill will use some loopback tricks to let you create some devices and manipulate the LVM commands – a great hands-on experience!
More details at about this meeting and the group are available at http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org as I learn them!
In future meetings, we are looking forward to Ben Scott demoing OpenWRT (May) and Seth Cohn showing off Drupal (June) – dates and times not yet confirmed and in flux, so stay tuned. Hope to see you there!
Notes from MerriLUG, 15-March-2007, Matt Brodeur on PGP/GPG Encryption and key-signing
Nineteen attendees participated in the March meeting of the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group, MerriLUG, held as usual on the third Thursday of the month at Martha’s Exchange in Nashua, NH.
Matt Brodeur gave a presentation on GNU Privacy Guard, GPG, the Free/Open Source implementation of the Pretty Good Privacy algorithms and protocols. Matt pushed the presentation pretty quickly, as he wanted to ensure we had time for the keysigning, as well. Matt’s presentation is available from his website and that link, in turn is on the GNHLUG Wiki along with the announcements and instructions.
Following the presentation, Matt and Heather Brodeur organized the key-signing. Nearly a dozen of us had prepared and registered our PGP certificates in advance, and we read out-loud our identifying information, practicing our phonetic alphabet and confirming that I should have brought my reading glasses. Following that phase, we lined up in two queues and exchanged identification to confirm we had IDs that matched our names on the certificates. Heather was the caller for this slow-motion folk dance and kept us on task despite our urge to chat and socialize. An odd number of attendees and one additional volunteer made the sequence interesting, and we completed successfully.
Overall, I think the keysigning went quite well, by the number of signed keys I’ve received in the last week. I suspect we’ll have some feedback for Matt, too, on whether there might be some way we could make the follow-up key exchange easier. This was a lot of work, and I want to express my personal thanks to Matt and Heather for all the work. Thanks too, for all who attended and participated and asked questions, and thanks to Martha’s for providing the facilities.
GNHLUG MythTV Installfest beta 31-March-2007
GNHLUG recently held an alpha installfest of MythTV, the media-center software (think Free TiVO, jukebox, photo album, more) that runs on Linux. We’re just announcing the beta version in two weeks:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MythFest
This installfest is limited to GNHLUG members and staff and students of the New Hampshire Technical Institute. We hope to open future versions to the public, as we refine the process.
Seacoast LUG: OpenWrt, 9-April-2007
Ben Scott announces the April meeting of the Seacoast (New Hampshire) Linux User Group, a presentation on OpenWRT:
- Who : Ben Scott
- What : OpenWrt – LinkSys firmware enhancements
- Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH
- Date : Monday 9 April 2007
- Time : 7:00 PM to 9ish
For the April 2007 SLUG/Seacoast/UNH/Durham meeting, Ben Scott will be presenting on OpenWrt and related tools. The focus will be on initial installation and configuration, and a general survey of capabilities, rather than a specific application. A live demo is planned.
OpenWrt is “a Linux distribution for embedded devices”. In particular, it is commonly used as third-party firmware for the popular LinkSys WRT54G line of SOHO routers. OpenWrt provides a modular system for customizing the firmware (embedded software) for such devices. It can add everything from SSH to VPN to VoIP and more.
In addition to the OpenWrt base package, X-Wrt and WebIf^2 will also be covered. X-Wrt is a set of additional/updated packages for OpenWrt, which provide even more enhancements, with a particular focus on end-user experience. In particular, it provides WebIf^2, an advanced web user interface for OpenWrt.
Ben will bring a LinkSys WRT54G device running stock firmware, and attempt to demonstrate the whole process of installing and configuring OpenWrt and X-Wrt. Come see Ben tempt the Live Demo Gods!
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. 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.
MerriLUG: GNU Privacy Guard and PGP
Matt Brodeur will reprise his popular GPG/PGP presentation at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group meeting tonight. In addition, we’ll try for a keysigning event. Details here.
CentraLUG, 5 March 2007: Andy Bair, Digital Forensic File Carving
Originally, we had scheduled this presentation for November, but Andy Bair was called away at the last minute for a family emergency. He’ll be back in Concord New Hampshire to reprise his presentation, which has gotten rave reviews from several other local LUGs.
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of (most) month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.
For this meeting, Andy Bair will present “Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques.” Data carving techniques are used during digital forensic investigations and existing file carving tools typically produce many false positives. This briefing describes new tools and techniques used by the winning team of the the 2006 File Carving Challenge held at the 6th Annual Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS). The current briefing is also located here.
Stay tuned for more information on future meetings: Bill Stearns will be presenting Logical Volume Management April 2nd and Seth Cohn will present Drupal on May 7th. More details on the group and directions to the meeting at http://www.centralug.org.
PySIG, 22-Feb-2007: Dave Rowell and Django
Bill Sconce announces the upcoming meeting of the Python SIG of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (but Windows and OS X users are welcomed!): Dave Rowell of Appropriate Solutions will do a presentation on Django, Kent’s Korner will talk about the Module of the Month, lots of time for announcements, questions and answers, beginner’s time before the main meeting, and milk and cookies.