Definite More-than-minor Situation (UPDATED 11pm)

No meeting Saturday - Hal-PC is closed for the... weather...

Looks like Hurricane Ike will drive up the Interstate, taking my exit and pulling into my parking lot. Well, maybe not exactly but I'm heading to my plan B secure location:

PLAN B

So, Saturday the 27th is now the day for the Linux Backup presentation. Everybody keep your head down...

MEDICAL NOTE on Steve: longtime member Steve Mussacchia is in the hospital due to various unwelcome maladies. The doctor at St. Joseph's Hospital describes his condition as "grave" and Steve is currently under sedation in the ICU. Fortunately, he's breathing on his own, but since the apparent seizure Wednesday night there has been little good news. Stay tuned for further details; Steve's a valued member of this organization due to his having done various great presentations for the Saturday HLUG shows and having mentored scores of us.

Possible Disaster

NOTE: IF THE HURRICANE (Ike) COMES HERE, we may not have the meeting. Watch the Hal-PC site as well as this one...

Coming up this Saturday...

...is Russell Adams on Linux Backup Best Practices (my title).

Also, a bit of news: Mr. Carlile has donated two old Sun boxes, one to me personally and one to the Wednesday Linux group at Hal-PC. So I've been installing (sometimes reinstalling) the freely distributed Solaris 10 for Sparc lately. These both are of about 7 to 8 years of age and have a whopping 128 meg of ram (included; top limit much greater than that). So we're both using the "thinner" of the two desktop environment options you get, namely CDE, the Common Desktop Environment. Also included in the Solaris 10 download is the Java Desktop Environment, which will run on these machines, but so slowly that we need a donation of memory really badly. Screen redraws on these machines running JDE take over 5 seconds! But it's great to be able to see Sun's current workings on a machine still capable of running 10, and not through the hardware 'simulation' circumstance of virtualization. Come in and see our UltraSparc soon! I added a directory for the contents of the documentation CD, which has an html index that leads to the chapter .pdf's.

A little look at security certification...

Although we ran out of attendance forms, please accept my contention that a dozen showed up (including some incoming new HAL members) and we began the HLUG Saturday meeting with my description of the CompTIA manual for the Security+ certification. This particular book is the one by Pastore and Dulaney. It refers to exam SYO-101 and the edition copyright is 2004, with the first edition having come out in 2003.

There was no video shot of the meeting, so there will be no record of any rude comments regarding any inaccuracies found in the current edition of the CompTIA/Sybex printing. True, the Macintosh material appeared about 11 years out of date (claiming that TCP/IP capability had been added "recently") and page 212's sample directory structure of Linux/Unix systems was... inventive (using backslashes instead of forward slashes). But in October we can expect a new test, and new testing study materials to shortly follow.

I saw many similarities in structure between the above material, though, and the CISSP manual I have. All chapters in the manual for the Certified Information Systems Security Professional and the CompTIA book in question had analogues of each other with the exception of the one in CISSP on application security (the writing of secure code). That's just as well; high-order languages are beyond my pay grade right now.

But the Security+ cert is, even prior to the upcoming improvements, a good dry run for more difficult certs for two reasons. First, the material is generally the same (covering such predictable topics as OS patching, physical security and risk management). Second, unlike SSIP and CISSP, Security+ is inexpensive ($258 at present) and requires no documentation as to previous experience in computer security, as well as no sponsorship by one's current employer.

They'll even let me take the thing.

So stay tuned for a future report when I acquire the cert. Coming up on the second Saturday of September, Linux/Unix Best Practices for Backups from Russell Adams. 'Til then...

Emacs talk a success??

Yep. I don't believe it myself, but 18 people (apparently all Hal-PC members although we would not have thrown anyone out for being a guest) signed in, which is double the usual amount for my entire (14-months' worth) administration. I didn't guess in advance whether the idea would be well received; as a hot-button subject I assumed that it would either turn them out in droves or turn them away in droves. At any rate, there was advance buzz both here and at the Wednesday Lab meetings, plus Russell was a known quantity who had delivered good programs before, PLUS I guess a common reaction to the idea was that people said to themselves "Try to sell ME Emacs?? This should be amusing."

Coming up: Two meetings from now, Russell will be back with some thoughts about good backup practices for Linux. That date will be September 13th (second Saturday in that month). Now, the next meeting (August 23rd) will be from myself regarding the Security+ ("Security Plus") certification. This CompTIA cert may or may not get you three weeks on the Italian Riviera a year, but it's at least a bit of backup for your periodic sermons to the users about not using 'password' for a password. It's not platform-specific and it's got a fee that's way cheaper than the CISSP one, so I'm researching the heck out of it. AND will be able to deliver specifics about it on the 23rd, to possibly aid you in your decision to delve into it further.

STOP THE PRESSES: In an effort to be more visible, one of our members has set up shop at

houstonlinux.org

- and so now, more info should spread somewhat more quickly. It's managed by Mr. Lightsey of the NixNuts site (previously established) so veterans of this group will see familiar material, plus newer material soon.

Emacs Heaven Or Emacs Hell?

Or project management hell? Or is that phrase redundant? We'll find out some of all that on Saturday as Russell Adams shows us how to use Emacs as an organization tool. According to Russell, the Org mode is better at managing workflow than my method, which at one time involved greater than 600 sticky notes.

At any rate, thanks to all that showed up for the last presentation (July 26th, I think). I did not. Robert Spotswood did, and gave a great rundown of the two previously mentioned security programs (for Linux), denyhosts and ipblock, the first pertaining to the protection of ssh and the second pertaining to the whole system (using shit lists of known bad guys, if you will). Anyone who needs knowledge of how to harden "nix" servers should quickly go to HERE (and then hit the "view the latest videos" link to get to what's on the newest stuff list) and download that presentation and watch it over and over, or by all rights be slapped with a wet chain saw.

Done your advance reading? I used aptitude to grab both Org mode... and Emacs itself, finally... and am furiously trying to make sense of it all... See you Saturday at 2pm at Hal.

Further Announcements

In addition to Robert Spotswood's show this Saturday the 26th on denyhosts and ipblock, there's one in the works for (estimated) August 9th: we're going for controversy on this one.

If Russell Adams is available, he has a video as well as demonstrations regarding the "org-mode" use of the Emacs editor. Some revile this editor and some revere it; the "org" mode makes use of Emacs not as an editor but as a personal organizer, and Russell has made use of Emacs this way in project management. I don't know how many others are willing to consider the pitch for this use, but I'm willing to, and I'm a VI user.

So barring changes in plans, it's quite possibly Emacs Org Mode on August 9th - stay tuned!