DCLUG - Bytes 2003

Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 Speaker(s): John Lewis John Lewis will present a talk on Linux security: Now that we know a dedicated attacker can break into almost any computer permanently attached to the INTERNET, defense of home and small office networks is becoming an important issue. In the past, LINUX has been less vulnerable than software products from other software suppliers, but that is changing rapidly as major organizations begin widespread LINUX deployments and attackers begin to focus on LINUX. In this talk, we explore some past and present attacks and vulnerabilities, sniff some of the network traffic, explore vulnerability assessment tools, and investigate more secure LINUX configurations. Slides: - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 Speaker(s): John R. Callahan, Ph.D. of Sphere Corp. and Harry Foxwell of Sun and GMU It will be a joint meeting with the DC XML User Group, at their site: NOTE CHANGE IN LOCATION!!!! The meeting will be at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at 2000 Florida Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20009-1277. Our hosts kindly request that we register for access (they promised to provide cookies :) http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/meeting-register.html The meeting will feature two presentations: John R. Callahan, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Sphere Corporation XML Web Publishing and Pipeline Processing Using Cocoon Harry Foxwell, George Mason University Web-based Representation and Visualization of Analogies DIRECTIONS: By Metro: get off the Dupont Circle stop and walk north to Florida Avenue...turn right. snipped driving directions... Slides: - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 Speaker(s): Przemek The March 2003 meeting of Washington DC Linux user group would normally take place on Wednesday, March 19, 7pm. This happens to be right around the 48 hour deadline, and possible start of the you-know-what, so I expect difficulties, so please check your mail on Wednesday afternoon for updates. If things look calm, the meeting will feature a talk on Literate Programming by yours truly. Slides: - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 Speaker(s): Oracle Oracle offerings for Linux, in particular on Java Development Environment with Open Source Tools and Oracle9i JDeveloper on Linux. Specific technologies discussed: Sun's J2SDK 1.4, the Jakarta Project's Ant, CVS, Oracle9i JDeveloper, and some open source projects from SourceForge. Slides: - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 Speaker(s): Przemek The meeting's topic will be a hands-on session on 'Hard disks in Linux: RAID, SMART and LVM', with the caveat that LVM will only be mentioned there's someone there who actually knows how to use it :) Slides: - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Speaker(s): please advise webmaster of speakers name The meeting's topic will be dealing with email spam, using MailScanner and it's components. An overview of: How they work How to install How to configure MailScanner is a highly-respected open source e-mail security system. It processes well over 500 million e-mail messages every day, removing +2 million viruses and identifying +75 million spam messages. MailScanner is used at over 20,000 sites around the world protecting top government departments, commercial corporations and educational institutions. It is becoming a standard feature of many ISP's since virus protection and spam filtering are now essential requirements for most users. MailScanner configures and uses the open source application SpamAssassin(tm) as a mail filter to identify spam. SpamAssassin identifies "spam" using a wide range of: Heuristic tests on mail headers and body text DNS block lists A trainable Bayesian scoring system DCC Pyzor Razor2 MailScanner can also use ClamAV (open source virus detection) or any of 14 other commercial virus detection engines (one or more can be used) to detect viruses. Slides: - Discussion:

Date: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 Speaker(s): Przemek Przemek will report on the goings-on at the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland. Slides: - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 Speaker(s): Robert Burgoyne of True Blade Systems Robert Burgoyne from True Blade Systems will present a talk on "Using PXE and RedHat's Kickstart to Build Identical Client Computers" His talk will discuss using PXE and RedHat's Kickstart to install RedHat 8.0 on a computer with no CD or floppy. The focus will be on installing to a large number of client computers, resulting in identical configurations. We will discuss how PXE works, how to configure a server to allow clients to boot PXE from it, and how to tailor Kickstart to perform a minimal install. After the minimal install, we will discuss using yum to install additional packages. Slides: see http://dclug.tux.org/200308/200308.pdf - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2003 Speaker(s): Thomas Heute of NIST Thomas Heute, a computer security researcher at NIST will be talking on 'Linux on a PDA'. The talk will be an overview of what is available about Linux on PDA (hardware, linux distributions and windows managers). A quick presentation on how to install the familiar distribution of Linux with a windows manager on an iPaq will be followed by an explanation about creating your own applications for such devices. Slides: see http://dclug.tux.org/200309/LinuxOnPDA.sxi - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 Speaker(s): Jon 'maddog' Hall of Linux International Jon 'maddog' Hall, a long-time Unix and Linux activist and executive director of Linux International, will be the speaker. By his interests and renown, he knows everything important in the Linux space, and of course he is a very entertaining speaker. Jon's talk, "Programming for the 21st Century: back to the future" will be about parallel programming techniques, Beowulf clusters and superclusters. "It is not by accident that memory sizes and CPU needs increase without bounds. In the days of sailing ships problems were a lot less complex and needed a lot less data to be useful. We had more time to come up with an answer." "Our problems not only get larger (not "weather" but "climate") AND finer-grained (not "over there" but "over here") but also more time sensitive (not "in a month" but "in two hours")." Slides: see http://dclug.tux.org/200310/index.html - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 Speaker(s): Rob Page of Zope Rob Page of Zope Corporation will present Zope, the killer web app that established Python as a serious application implementation language. Zope is a high-performance application / web server, content management system. It is a complete, robust, scalable solution. Zope includes an object database, web services architecture, and powerful programming capabilities. Come learn about Zope, Zope scalability and performance, and the community development model. Attendees will also see a technical demonstration of Zope and various add-on products that are available. Slides: see http://dclug.tux.org/200311/index.html - Discussion: -

Date: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Speaker(s): Frank Hearon of amltd.com will warm up the audience by showing his company's Linux handhelds, followed by Gina Guerrieri of Genaware Corp., who will describe their open, non-proprietary tools for viewing, analyzing and publishing geospatial data to the web and embedding in other applications. If you are interested in mapping and GIS, this will be an interesting talk. The DCLUG meeting dates for 2004 are: January 21, February 18, March 17, April 21, May 19, June 16, July 21, August 18, September 15, October 20, November 17 and December 15. Slides: see http://dclug.tux.org/200312/index.html - Discussion: -

DCLUG - Bytes