KWLUG Meeting: Monday, April 8 2013, 7pm

Have you seen the light? I hope so. Spring is finally here, which means that sometimes you can see sunshine at 4pm. Many people's moods have lightened after a long dark winter. So maybe it is appropriate that April's KWLUG presentation will feature a light-hearted take on a lightweight subject: the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP. LDAP provides mechanisms for querying and managing directory informations, often about user and network information. Rumour has it that LDAP is lightweight in the same way that SNMP is simple, but Tim Laurence will happily shed light on the topic. In his presentation, he will cover basic concepts, how to set up and use a simple LDAP server to store addresses and user accounts, and how to create highly available LDAP clusters.

As you might have guessed, this topic is likely not to be beginner-friendly except to those beginners enthusiastic about LDAP clusters. But it is likely to be a good presentation; in the past Tim has graced us with presentations that have been very well-received.

In other news, longtime KWLUG member John Eddie Kerr contributed a Linux tutorial as part of the "How-to Videos for 100 Linux Tutorials" campaign, and he got a nice write up for doing so:

http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/712255-law-lib…

In other events, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is offering a couple of talks relevant to techies this month. On April 16, Steve Crocker from ICANN will be talking about "the Multi-Stakeholder Model of Internet Governance", and on Wednesday April 17 there will be a breakfast event on "Privacy, Access and Corporate Control: The Battle for Canada's Internet" featuring Glenn McKnight and Evan Leibovitch, whom some people might recognize as one of the founders of CLUE, the Canadian Association for Open Source. You can find out more about these events at the following sites:

http://www.cigionline.org/events/when-less-more-past-and-future-of-mult…

http://www.cigionline.org/events/cigi-and-communitech-breakfast-privacy…

In other user groups, Andrew Cant would like you all to know that there is a (relatively) new Ruby on Rails meetup in town: http://www.meetup.com/kw-ruby-on-rails/ . Their next meetup is Tuesday, April 16.

Another group of interest might be the folks at Hackademy, who are attempting to help communities become digitally literate and fluent in programming. They care currently looking for people to help them teach courses, and it looks like all of their recommended subjects feature FLOSS software or hardware. If you are interested in becoming an instructor or a student, they have surveys for you to fill out at http://hackademy.ca

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Tim Laurence will tell us how to use LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) to centralize user information across machines in a network. He may also show us how to set up a redundant failover cluster of LDAP servers.

Edited to add: Here are the slides of the talk in ODP format.

Here is a tarball containing the slides above, and configuration snippets from his presentation.

Video:

and here is a link to the video if the embedded version does not work.