Long Time No Tell You Anything!...

I've been trying to entice Aaron (the former prez) to recapitulate his great contributions of talks on Linux audio, but have not so far succeeded. His wife keeps pulling rank on me. To the end of "the show must go on", This last meeting featured John Lightsey's fantastic talk on looking at one's own usage stats - namely looking into one's command history to see what one uses the most of. His command history was revealing. Everything from vi to fakeroot was discussed. But I also contributed a few comments on some bath products I ordered from thinkgeek.com, as well as describing three out of four successful attempts to load Audacity, the open source editing suite. OpenSuse confused me, but I had good luck with OSX, XP and Linux Mint (a Debian variant).

That brings me to next week. If Russell Adams can't make it to do his pre-prepared presentation (is that recumbently redundant?) I should be able to demonstrate this:

http://www.ion-audio.com/ionttusb05

I should be able to use Audacity on Linux to record both from microphone and from the Ion turntable before a live audience in two weeks. Wish me luck. May 24th is the date (if Russell is unavailable) and otherwise will be the second Saturday (first HLUG meeting) of next month (June 14).

More to come...

Coming Up

This Saturday the 12th will be Robert Carlile's TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE, which exhumes various Nix programs still useful in today's Linux context (and in virtualized environments if all else fails). Then down the road, we'll skip a session due to the General Meeting, THEN Aaron the Previous President will be along (looks like second Sat. of May) to do the Linux Audio show (latest edition).

Also, here's an IBM announcement Robert Spotswood was sent (thanks for forwarding it):

--------

Dear Houston Linux Users Group Members,
Attend these two IBM developerWorks briefings on Thursday, May 1, 2008 to
learn how the IBM Rational software tools can help you be more effective.
Register today.

Change and Release Management for Software Development
Date: Thursday, May 1, 2008
City: Houston, Texas
See how IBM products: Rational® ClearQuest, Rational ClearCase, Rational
Build Forge, and Tivoli® Provisioning Manager can help solve application
deployment problems that many companies face today.

Agenda:
8:30 a.m.
Complimentary breakfast and registration for morning briefing
9:00 a.m.
Change and release management for software development
12:30 p.m.
Briefing ends

Effective software testing - tools and strategies for project success
Date: Thursday, May 1, 2008
City: Houston, Texas
Whether you are planning to build expertise in your IT organization, or
looking for partners with testing expertise, IBM Rational software quality
solutions and best practices can provide you with the framework and tools
you need to use excellence in software testing as a strategic business
advantage.

Agenda:
1:00 p.m.
Complimentary lunch and registration for afternoon briefing
1:30 p.m.
Effective software testing: Tools and strategies for project success
5:00 p.m.
Briefing ends

Check out other worldwide IBM developerWorks Live! events. We look forward to seeing you at these briefings.

Sincerely, The IBM developerWorks team
-------

P.S. - Registration is needed; here's the link:

Link

A truly great performance

... by not only Robert Spotswood but our happy colleagues from the Czech Republic and the Russian Federation was experienced by all at Saturday's meeting. I brought a pre-virused XP machine (infected basically by turning off all protection and heading for any address with .cz or .ru on the end) and technician Spotswood proceeded to examine it via a novel method I'd never seen demonstrated. As opposed to my earlier descriptions of the method (I didn't quite understand it), he indeed brought Linux into the picture but not via a second machine. He booted a Linux live CD (Knoppix? Mepis? I've forgotten) on the stricken machine and then used it to bring in (from a USB thumb drive) an application called Clam Antivirus. Clam is an open-source AV product maintained at http://www.clamav.org (we used the Linux version in this case, although I hear there's a somewhat limited Windows version as well).

Robert's writeup (current version) is located on his page:
http://www.spotswood-computer.net/
- and just scroll to the bottom and click on the title "Cleaning Windows With ClamAV"; it's PDF only last time I was there but HTML may be on the way.

Bottom line: assuming that your Windows machine is still OK hardware-wise, booting from the CD and using the antivirus app on the USB drive provides a protected point from which to first observe and control the internal drive (location of infections) and then from which to run the definitions comparison. Remember that this process indeed depends upon a definitions file (shit list of filenames or descriptions), so if somebody paid somebody to write a custom day-zero attack, this method wouldn't see it. It would, however, see common rootkits and malapps on which such an attack could depend.

Coming up next meeting (second Saturday of April) will be Robert Carlile's show that I've dubbed "A Trip Down Memory Lane", which exhumes various lost programs that still work today, either in Nix environments or something virtualized (he has a faster computer than me so he can do such things...)

Coming up for this Saturday, March 22nd!

Our HLUG program for this Saturday will involve the Return of Robert Spotswood, and he'll speak on a trick you may find useful if you have some sort of system administrator job. Suppose - JUST SUPPOSE - that a Microsoft Windows network develops a virus problem (actually, you could assume a Mac or even Linux or anything else network in theory here). Robert has a Linux machine set up to go out onto a network and delete all sorts of bad guys, and is pretty well locked down itself so as to be as attack-resistant as possible. The demonstration will be set up for this Linux machine to clean up a stricken Windows computer (the probable industry predicament), and right before our eyes. It'll be my job to bring the stricken Windows machine, and we'll see if I can properly virus one without sending it all the way to Davy Jones' Locker.

Also new this week: the opening feature we're calling "Favorite Flag", which will be presented by a different presenter than the main presenter. Since every Nix-world command has 26-ish potential "flags" or alterations to its functional behavior, we should have an almost infinite supply of new things to learn about a command every time we have a Saturday Presentation. Flag to be announced, and probably assigned to somebody at the Wednesday meet.

Foolishness Or Insanity? You Be The Judge

(This post was suggested by issues raised in the previous post...)
Offhand, I think I run the following distro's/OS's:

Windows XP
Windows 2000
Windows Server 2003
Windows 98
Mac OS 8.6
Mac OS 9.0
Mac OS 9.1
Mac OS 10.4.x
OpenSUSE Linux
LinuxMint Linux
CentOS Linux
FreeBSD Unix
NetBSD Unix

I have many more OS's, but all of the above are actually installed on hardware, about 90% of which works.

I think I've disabled comments on this post. At least I hope so.

HLUG happenings

Long time no post!! Well, the last two meetings that happened with HLUG concerned Robert Carlile's XML adventures, then Robert Spotswood's description of the GIMP (both the newest release changes and that image manipulation program in general). This last meeting (Saturday March 8th, was it?) featured myself with a lightly-prepared investigation of the LDAP - PAM relationship, plus a question/answer session widely reported to have been better than the presentation, particularly since the old reliable question came up from someone "What's your favorite OS?". My attempt not to answer forced me to expand on that attitude with an attempt to list every single OS I currently run at home. I gave up at 10 (it's actually 12, I later determined). My rationale for this situation was that all OS's do something well for some constituency, explaining their continuance in a competitive marketplace, plus it's good for an admin to be prepared for whatever they break and then ask you to fix. Carlile thinks I'm insane and that I should concentrate on fewer systems. Debate continues.

The LDAP-PAM subject is basically a can of worms. If you wish to use Pluggable Authentication Modules in a context of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, not only do you need general knowledge of the history and nature of these matters, but you need documentation regarding exactly how these matters are implemented. For example, I found good instructions as to how to set things up for Red Hat in the McGraw-Hill test study manual for the RHCE certification. If you want to use LDAP in your distro (Linux Distribution) and it's not in there, the easiest solution would be to get an updated or otherwise different distro that has it/uses it. In broad terms, PAM is a modular way to set up the login/password routine for a Nix OS (other than what's provided at default), and LDAP is one approach to setting up a network-enabled password database. Specifically (according to the Sun website), the precursor DAP was set up in Solaris 2.6 in the mid-1990's and then, as TCP/IP began to show up everywhere, the "lightweight" version appeared, which presumed the presence of TCP/IP, thus not having to bring such specific code into the situation.

The best resources about LDAP and your favorite login arrangement would probably be the stuff at http://www.openldap.org and then the .org that maintains your distro.

Site Design Issue

(also posted at hlug.org)

I haven't talked with previous presidents about this, but I actually like the fact that this site (hlug.org as well as this blog) does not operate as a forum (anymore...)

I've often remarked that not having forum (discussion) capability keeps down spam and bad feelings about flame wars, but there's another reason, and bigger. The material that would normally go to online boards were they available, in this situation must take place at the meetings. Bad punctuation, but you understand.

Users' groups have been in decline for ten years. Restricting most of our activity from the net, from IRC and from any other remote methods requires the interested individual to show up, and that improves our attendance, as well as Hal-PC numbers. Some theorize that the internet is killing users' groups due to the convenience of getting information remotely rather than in person. It's certainly cited as hurting technical print media in the case of the recently departed SYSADMIN Magazine.

So regardless of the condition of this site, my blog, the twiki, or anybody else's pages, I'm in favor of continuing the blackout on forum activity. Besides, not only do you get more info faster (potentially) in a human conversation, but it's not possible to rummage through our give-away pile over the net. It's also a lot easier to get six people to comment on your machine that you're rebuilding when you drag it into the Wednesday night workshop. Long live the blackout!!