[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: pfSense, m0n0wall

[Paul Nijjar]

(Apologies to those who got this twice.) 

Oh man. Here we go again. The trees have lost most of their leaves.
It's dark by mid-afternoon. The Christmas bombardment has started. I
don't know about you, but I've been packing on the layers of
protective fat for the cold season (supplementing the layers of fat
developed over last fall, summer and winter). The heartless cold
season is upon us, and I for one am ready to climb into a cave, stick
a big KEEP OUT sign at the entrance and sleep for the next six months.

Unfortunately, the bad guys don't hibernate. They're always trying to
crack our password lists and worm into our SSH ports and DDOS our
webservers. What's a poor computer user to do?

This month, Kiwi Ssennyonjo will tell us about some powerful firewall
projects that can help us hibernate a little easier. m0n0wall aims to
be a full-fledged firewall distribution optimized to run off a USB
key, allowing you to transform a meek personal computer into an
anti-badguy warrior that serves as a switch, router and firewall.
pfSense is the big brother of m0n0wall, intended for distribution on
computers. Both of these projects are lean, mean variants of FreeBSD
-- m0n0wall stores its configuration in a single XML file. This
presentation starts at 7pm.

This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is a pleasant departure from the
projects we have been supporting recently. Michel and Sylvie Xhaard,
two ordinary Frenchpeople who took it upon themselves to write the
SPCA5xx kernel driver for webcams. As with many open source projects,
this initiative grew and grew, and now their drivers support over 280
webcam models. If you would like to join our donation just cabal
member Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca

In sadder news, KWLUG member Donald Tees died on October 7. His
obituary appeared in the Record:
http://www.therecord.com/news/obituaries/obituaries2020_5260933.html
We will miss him.

The world keeps spinning, I guess, so if you won't be slumbering
please join us at our usual meeting place:

The Working Centre
43 Queen Street South
Kitchener
Between King and Charles

Maps and pics are on the website, I hope, and you can park your
tricycles in the back lot for free after 6pm.

- Paul






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