From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jan 4 20:09:31 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2014 20:09:31 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: High Availability KVM clusters Message-ID: <20140105010930.GA8529@nb-laryngitis> Hello, new year. Let's start off 2014 by making some clouds. We won't call them "clouds", of course. That would be uncouth and possibly inaccurate. Instead we can call them high-availability clusters for virtual machines -- specifically, clusters using DRBD replicated storage and KVM as the hypervisor, which sounds completely different than clouds. In this presentation, Madison Kelly will walk us through high-availability clustering, live-migration, fault-tolerance, and failure recovery. In addition to clouds there will be props: 200lbs of cluster hardware, that somehow we will get upstairs to the presentation area. I for one thought clouds were light and fluffy, but maybe I have been proven wrong once again. We'll find out this Monday, starting at 7pm. In other news, there are presentation spots available from March onward. If you have a topic you would like to share with the group (with or without 200lbs of server hardware to accompany it) then please get in touch. This month's meeting will be held at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There is free car parking in the Worth A Second Look parking lot, and free bike parking alongside the building. (Maybe it should surprise no one that there is an overlap between people foolhardy enough to ride bicycles in January and people who use free software?) You can find photos and maps of the location here: http://kwlug.org/sjk The meeting starts at 7pm, and doors will open at 6:20pm or so, if the meeting host gets his act together. Setup volunteers (especially setup volunteers with strong backs) would be particularly welcome this month. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Mon Jan 6 13:36:24 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2014 13:36:24 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting tonight CANCELLED Message-ID: <20140106183624.GB3752@nb-laryngitis> Because of the blizzard warning tonight, we are cancelling tonight's KWLUG meeting. We will reschedule the topic for an upcoming month. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Mon Jan 6 14:10:46 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2014 14:10:46 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting tonight CANCELLED In-Reply-To: <20140106183624.GB3752@nb-laryngitis> References: <20140106183624.GB3752@nb-laryngitis> Message-ID: <20140106191045.GG3752@nb-laryngitis> This is the last update! I promise! A few people have stated that they care much more about Linux than their personal safety, and will be at the meeting location anyways. So there will be some kind of informal meeting happening. (I would not recommend driving in from Elmira to come, however.) The formal presentation has still been cancelled, and it will still be rescheduled. - Paul On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 01:36:24PM -0500, Paul Nijjar wrote: > > Because of the blizzard warning tonight, we are cancelling tonight's > KWLUG meeting. We will reschedule the topic for an upcoming month. > > - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Feb 1 17:11:58 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2014 17:11:58 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: Samba 4 Message-ID: <20140201221158.GA3718@nb-laryngitis> Wailing. Gnashing of teeth. Stalwart long-time KWLUG members picketing the KWLUG world headquarters in their wheelchairs and walkers. So much controversy! But if KWLUG is known for anything it is ignoring the voice of popular opinion, so we're going ahead anyways: this month's presentation on Samba will revisit a previous topic. It's true! We have had presentations on Samba not once but twice in the past, and the last one was held a mere ten years ago, in January 2004. (How scandalous!) I remember those days, and sometimes I think about them while sitting in my walker. Linux was still cool and we were all fresh-faced and optimistic. I remember hearing about how Samba made it easy for us to interoperate with Windows fileshares and printers, and how we could publish our own. And I remember the exciting talk of Samba 4 -- how it would take Windows interoperability to the next level by allowing us to simulate Active Directory domain controllers and workstations in non-Microsoft environments. Soon we would be enjoying a glorious future. Years passed. Samba remained popular -- if you set up "Windows shares" on a Mac or a Linux server or a NAS, it is probably using Samba. But Samba 4 remained under development for years and years and years -- until December 2012, when it was released to the world. Now Samba 4 is here, and it provides a free software implementation of Active Directory. Does it work? Does anybody use it? Lori Paniak does, and during his presentation he will take us through his experiences with Samba 4's capabilities. In other news, those of us interested in the Open Data movement might be interested in International Open Data Day, being held on Feb 22. Open Data Waterloo Region is holding an hackfest which might include incorporating food premise inspection data to OpenStreetMap. The event is still being planned, so to get details you can visit their wiki page at http://wiki.opendataday.org/Waterloo_Region . Also: we are precariously close to having an empty presentation slot for March. If you would like to offer a 40 minute presentation on some topic related to free software, please get in touch. There are many presentation slots available for June and beyond as well. As usual, this month's meeting will be held at St John's Kitchen: St John's Kitchen (corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener Doors open around 6:30pm, and setup helpers are always welcome. The meeting starts at 7pm. There is some parking available at the Worth A Second Look parking lot, and you can chain your picket signs to the side of the building. You can find pictures and maps of the meeting location here: http://kwlug.org/sjk - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Mar 1 21:18:28 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2014 21:18:28 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Free Software Economics, FirefoxOS Message-ID: <20140302021828.GA12149@nb-laryngitis> It's March! It's March! February has somehow ended! Against all odds, March has somehow arrived! This calls for a celebration: namely our longstanding KWLUG tradition of having a March meeting -- in March, even. Our festivities will include two presentations, at least one of which will be beginner-friendly. John Kerr will tell us about the economics of free software, including how it affects consumers and taxpayers. This month's other presentation will be about FirefoxOS, a project by the Mozilla Foundation. FirefoxOS extends the trend of building mobile phone OSes named after web browsers (and built on free software). Andrew Cant will tell us more about this project and its status (surprise! You can actually get a phone with FirefoxOS on it in 14 countries, none of which are Canada.) In other news: KWLUG member Chris Craig forwarded a survey the Linux Foundation is conducting. If you are a Linux System Administrator or Linux System Engineer, you might want to check it out: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LinuxFoundation2014JASurvey Our very special March meeting will be held at the usual (very special?) location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Weber and Victoria) Kitchener The meeting starts at 7pm. Doors open around 6:30pm. Setup helpers are always welcome. There are photos and maps of the location at http://kwlug.org/sjk . There is car parking available at the Worth a Second Look parking lot (on the other side of the building) and rails for parking your bicycle near the entrance. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Apr 5 15:16:34 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 15:16:34 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: OpenSCAD Message-ID: <20140405191634.GA6147@nb-laryngitis> This month's presentation will be about OpenSCAD, a script-driven solid 3D CAD modeller. This program is popular in the 3D-printing community. We are fortunate to have Marius Kintel, the lead developer of OpenSCAD, to present the software for us. You may have been expecting a presentation on Open-Source High-Availability Clusters this month. Because of logistical issues, this presentation has been rescheduled for July. The meeting will be held in the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener See http://kwlug.org/sjk for more location information. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat May 3 07:20:54 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 3 May 2014 07:20:54 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: GnuCash, ledger Message-ID: <20140503112053.GB21735@nb-laryngitis> For most of us, tax season is over, and it is time to turn our attentions to more pleasant things, such as accounting. This month features two presentations on two fairly different interfaces to balancing your accounts. One presentation will be a special joint endeavour by John Kerr and Brent Clements, who will combine forces to present GnuCash, a graphical double-entry accounting system. Chris Frey will present ledger (http://ledger-cli.org), an accounting system that processes a specially formatted text file (!) which contains all of your transaction data. These presentations will begin around 7pm (after meeting announcements and recalcitrant audio-visual equipment). We have a FLOSS Fund nomination for this month. After the Heartbleed bug drama last month, Darcy Casselman nominated the hard-working folks who develop OpenSSL as this month's nominee. You can read an article that motivated Darcy at http://veridicalsystems.com/blog/of-money-responsibility-and-pride/ and you can contribute to our donation at the meeting, by getting in touch with me, or directly at http://www.openssl.org/support/donations.html . (You may also make nominations for future FLOSS Funds, provided that you are not a member of a mysterious FLOSS Fund Cabal that probably doesn't even exist.) Our meeting will be held at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at Weber) Kitchener Doors open around 6:30pm. Setup help is greatly appreciated. Learn more about the location at http://kwlug.org/sjk - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat May 31 16:41:15 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 31 May 2014 16:41:15 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: AppArmor Message-ID: <20140531204115.GB3670@nb-laryngitis> Do you know what makes the world so fantastic? What makes the world so fantastic is that our computer software is perfect. Every line of code is written with the utmost care; every possible way that those lines of code can be used (and abused) are carefully considered and planned for, and no external aspects of the world ever change in ways that allow any of this perfect software ever to be compromised. Schopenhauer was wrong. This cannot possibly be the worst of all possible existences. An existence where software was not perfect would be much worse. Just think of it -- small coding errors could lead to all kinds of unexpected effects; "bit-rot" could mean that software that used to work well does not adapt to changing conditions, and every so often there would be some horrible zero-day exploit with huge consequences that would render sysadmins everywhere quivering blobs of weeping flesh. Woe and suffering would befall anybody foolish enough to run a service on the Internet. Let us give thanks that we are spared existence in such a universe. In this month's presentation, Tim Laurence will explore the consequences of this dystopian alternative reality. In a world where software was not perfect, where new exploits were discovered every day, and where some exploits went undiscovered, what hope would there be for a hapless systems administrator? Could there be any way to mitigate against the flaws of imperfect software technologically? Tim will show us one attempt which could be very helpful in such a dismal reality: AppArmor, which protects applications and file paths from exploitation by restricting program access to resources. Tim will explain the ideas behind AppArmor and show us examples that demonstrate how easy it is to configure. It is true that this will not be a beginner-friendly presentation. However, Tim has a history of taking big sysadminny topics and making them accessible to a wider audience. For example, he once walked through the SSL handshake process without putting his audience to sleep. And that's it. We meet at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at Victoria and Weber) Kitchener You can park your TARDISes and Hot Tub Time Machines in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and bicycles along the side of the building. For maps and photos, see http://kwlug.org/sjk The meeting starts at 7pm. Setup starts around 6:30pm. Setup helpers are super-welcome. -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Jul 4 17:19:59 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 17:19:59 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: Short talks Message-ID: <20140704211949.GA7902@nb-laryngitis> (If you are surprised to get this message despite CASL, read below..) Surprise! Canada Day fell on a Tuesday this year, so we are holding our monthly KWLUG meeting this Monday, not next. Surprise! The topics for this month have changed, because the originally-scheduled presenter is out of town. Instead we have a collection of shorter presentations intended to educate and delight (and sometimes provoke): - Khalid Baheyeldin wanted to get over-the-air free high-definition television on his TV. Easy, right? In this presentation you will learn about the shiny toys required and how to set them up. - Paul Nijjar (Hey. That's me. Uh oh.) wanted to record KWLUG presentations and publish them as podcasts. Easy, right? Find out during this presentation. - Tim Laurence knows of at least 10 reasons Linux sucks, and he would like to share them with you. Tim's other hobbies probably include poking sticks inside wasp nests and commenting on online newspaper articles. - Brian Bentley (and Bob Jonkman if he can get to KW from Toronto during rush hour, so probably just Brian Bentley) will share their missionary efforts to transform members of the Bits and Bytes computer club into Linux users (zealots?). This series of presentations will start at 7pm. Surprise! I mentioned the magic word "KWLUG podcast", and it turns out that this is a thing that exists. There is no video podcast available (yet?) but if you would like to listen to audio of our meeting presentations, you can subscribe to the KWLUG podcast here: http://kwlug.org/podcasts Surprise! September is coming up quickly, and with it comes Software Freedom Day (http://softwarefreedomday.org) . It looks like we are going to put together another celebration this year (which is maybe not a surprise?) but by starting relatively early we hope to do a lot of outreach to demographics who do not already participate in these things (which may be a surprise) and make the event more relevant to a 2014 audience (which may also be a surprise, but shouldn't be). We could really use your help! If you would like to get involved (in outreach, in giving a presentation, in volunteering during the day, or something else) please send me an email and I will get you on our SUPER-SECRET sfd-planning mailing list. Surprise! I said the phrase "mailing list", which might bring to mind the brand new Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (http://fightspam.gc.ca/) which will eventually mean that nobody in Canada will ever get spam. Hooray! For some of you, that might bring up questions of why you are getting this message at all, and why we did not send out the usual "please click this tracking link to resubscribe to our newsletter" message all the businesses have been flooding us with. After some discussion on our kwlug-disc mailing list (in the thread starting here: http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/2014-June/012749.html ) it appears that our messages do not fall under the category of commercial electronic messages. In addition, most (all?) people on the list have given explicit consent to be on it, either verbally, by signing up for announcements on our KWLUG signup sheets, or subscribing themselves. Having said that, we do not want anybody to be on this list involuntarily, and the unsubscribe mechanisms provided by GNU mailman are awkward (especially if you cannot remember the email address you used to get on the list). So if you are sick and tired of getting these emails (or just don't want to get them any more) then you can email me and I will get you off the KWLUG lists pronto. I think that is all the surprises for this month. Our meeting location is no surprise: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener More meeting location information is available at http://kwlug.org/sjk The meeting starts at 7pm, and the building should open around 6:30pm. Setup helpers would be greatly appreciated, particularly this month. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Aug 9 00:07:45 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2014 00:07:45 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: OpenWRT Message-ID: <20140809040745.GG4338@nb-laryngitis> It's August, which for many of us means it's time to head off to the cottage. Maybe back in the 1950s you could go to the cottage without your wifi, but these days canoeing without your laptop or telling ghost stories without your email is gauche. But now it is 2007, and mobile broadband is not ubiquitous yet, so you need a wireless router. Enter the trusty Linksys WRT54GL... Oh wait. It's not 2007. It's 2014, and even though you probably use your phone to check email[0] on your phone, you might well have a broadband connection someplace, and in 2014 the trusty old WRT54GL is not cutting it. Now the wireless-N standard is ubiquitous[1], and people have gigabit networks at home. Sure, some people just buy whatever router is on sale at the local computer store[2], and use the stock firmware to distribute their network signal. But what fun is that? You can't run an OpenVPN endpoint or Asterisk server on stock firmware. If you haven't noticed, though, wireless routers are confusing! Some routers don't work well with third-party firmware. Some routers do work well until the manufacturer changes the revision and switches all the router internals? Where do you turn if you want a solid, flashable router that supports modern standards? You turn to Khalid Baheyeldin, that's who. He went through the odyssey of finding a router that would work well with the OpenWRT firmware in 2014. Furthermore, he knows how to use his router to track the things those of us with bandwidth caps care about: which devices are sucking up the data? How can you see what processes are active at any given time? Are there pretty graphs? In this presentation Khalid will tell us all this and more. This presentation will start at 7pm. In other news, Software Freedom Day organizing is coming along. This event will be held on Sept 20, from 10am-4pm. There will be workshops on the Scratch programming language, installing security and privacy tools in the post-Snowden era, and building your own Linux machine. There are also plenty of presentations lined up, including sessions on making a living with FLOSS and on the Open Access publishing movement. You can find out more about the day at http://kwlug.org/sfd , and you can offer to volunteer by contacting me off-list. (We especially need volunteers to staff our installfest, and to help with publicity.) And that's it. Now I need a vacation, but there is no rest for the wicked, so attending a KWLUG meeting makes for a pretty good substitute. Here is the location info: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener Park your campers in the Worth A Second Look parking lot. Park your touring bicycle along the side of the building. Find our sunny destination at http://kwlug.org/sjk . - Paul BONUS: Mean-spirited footnotes, courtesy of my inner critic: [0] Email? Who uses email? [1] Ain't you ever heard of 802.11ac, grandpa? [2] Local computer store? It's 2014! Bricks and mortar are so 20th century! -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Sep 5 20:14:18 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2014 20:14:18 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: XBMC Message-ID: <20140906001418.GF4354@nb-laryngitis> It's September, which means that (this week's weather notwithstanding) summer is over, which means that it is time to stay inside and not venture outside again until June or July, which means that it is time for another XBMC presentation, which will probably be the last presentation on XBMC at KWLUG ever. Being a highly efficient person, Adam Glauser is interested in consuming his entertainment while expending as few joules as possible (which explains why he is an avid cyclist and hiker?). So instead of walking up to his XMBC-enabled television and twiddling with the rabbit ears to change the channel, he has programmed an amazing device called a remote control, and some of his presentation will focus on how you too can get remote controls working with XBMC. If there is time (and there should be time) Adam will also discuss getting online services such as Netflix working, and answer whatever questions you might have. His presentation will begin at 7pm, after introductions. In other news, Software Freedom Day is a thing now, and you are invited! It will be held on Saturday, Sept 20 from 10am-4pm at The Working Centre on Queen Street. There are lots and lots of activities planned: - Presentations on Making A Living with FLOSS, Open Access Publishing, Open Data at the City of Kitchener and Region of Waterloo, RawTherapee, and Inkscape. - Workshops on Learning to Program with Scratch and Privacy and Security Tools. - A Film Festival of CC-licensed and public domain works - An installfest and "build your own Linux machine", where we are making computers available for cheap ($20 with monitor, $0 without) and helping people install a free software distribution on them. See http://kwlug.org/sfd for more information. We could also use more helpers, both to help prepare for the event and on the day. In particular, there has been a lot of interest in the Installfest, so if you can contribute a few hours of time to helping people install free software it would be greatly appreciated. Contact me if you are interested in helping out, and contact sfd at kwlug.org if you are interested in preregistering for activities. It looks like the people at CIGI are on an internet governance kick, and they are running several events this month which may be of interest to KWLUG members: - On Tuesday, Sept 9, CIGI is holding a talk on "The Global War for Internet Governance" with Laura DeNardis: http://www.cigionline.org/events/global-war-internet-governance - On Tuesday, Sept 23, CIGI is screening "We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks" : http://www.cigionline.org/events/cigi-cinema-series-we-steal-secrets-story-of-wikileaks Visit the links to sign up for these events. And that's it for this exciting episode of Meeting Announcement. As usual, our meeting will be held here: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There is parking at the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and bicycle parking along the side of the building. For more information, see http://kwlug.org/sjk The doors open around 6:30pm, and setup helpers are always welcome. The official meeting starts around 7pm. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org Join us for Software Freedom Day on Sept 20: http://kwlug.org/sfd From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Oct 3 22:17:34 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2014 22:17:34 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: Cloud Storage Shootout Message-ID: <20141004021734.GE4853@nb-laryngitis> The forecast looks cloudy, which is great news: clouds are awesome and we all are going to love them whether we like it or not. There is The Cloud, of course, but business can now have Private Clouds and Hybrid Clouds, and lowly individuals like us can have Private Clouds, which used to be called "servers". This is great news for those of us who have our heads in the clouds, and this month's presentation will cut through the fog and give us the scoop on two personal (self-hosted, even!) cloud storage services. Bob Jonkman (who enthusiastically trusts and loves all authority, especially government surveillance agencies) has an OwnCloud installation. Jeff Smith (who is colloquially known as "Cranky" on the kwlug-disc list, even though he isn't really) has a Synology NAS device running the DS Cloud service, which gives him worldwide access to all of his legally-obtained movies. Together, they fight crime! Or maybe they just fight! We'll find out on Monday, starting at 7pm. In other news, Bob Jonkman (who enthusiastically trusts and loves all authority, especially government surveillance agencies) discovered a neat "fireside chat" on cybercrime by Gus Hunt, the former CTO for the CIA. The chat is being sponsored by Cambridge security firm eSentire, so I guess Tim Laurence wants you to attend the talk as well. You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/from-hollywood-to-the-headlines-the-rise-of-cybercrime-tickets-13396482239 If you happened to miss Software Freedom Day this year you are in good company. However, you can listen to audio of the presentations on the KWLUG podcast: http://kwlug.org/podcasts La la la location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener See http://kwlug.org/sjk for informative pictures and maps. Park your Care-A-Lot Cloud Car in the Worth a Second Look Parking lot, and your Cirrus Cycles along the side of the building. The meeting starts at 7pm. Setup starts around 6:30pm. Setup helpers are very very welcome. - Paul -- All-candidates meetings: http://www.waterlooregion.org/municipal-elections-2014 From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Oct 31 17:50:51 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 17:50:51 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: Virtualization with KVM and Virtualbox Message-ID: <20141031215051.GC3816@nb-heartburn.theworkingcentre.org> Man, we've been talking about The Cloud a lot lately. Clearly it is time to change focus. So why don't we have a presentation about virtualization. At first, people don't get virtualization ("Simulating a computer using a computer? You computer nerds never give up, do you?") and then they figure out how useful it is and want to virtualize everything ("Of course I want to virtualize my nuclear weapons launchpad. What could possibly go wrong?"). Khalid Baheyeldin has been on a version of that journey, and in this month's presentation he will tell us all about it. In particular, he is interested in running headless virtual machines using VirtualBox, KVM, libvirt, virt-install, virsh, virt-top and other tools with "virt" in their names. Why did he go on this quest? To build a personal clou... oh. Nuts. In other news, a friend of KWLUG is organizing a multi-week Ubuntu course for women, to be run starting in January. She is looking for a female co-facilitator to help her with the course. The co-facilitator should have some familiarity with Linux and some ability to troubleshoot Linux- and network-related problems. If you would like to help out (or know somebody who would) please contact me and I will forward further details. And that's it, I guess, except for the location info: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street South Kitchener (at Victoria and Weber) Parking might be an issue this month; the parking lot for the thrift store is under reconstruction. I think there will be some parking available, however. There is also a parking lot at the bus station kitty-corner from the building. Bicycle parking will still be available alongside the side of the building. See http://kwlug.org/sjk for maps and information. The meeting starts at 7pm. The doors open at 6:30pm or so, and setup helpers are always appreciated. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Nov 28 18:25:14 2014 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 18:25:14 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday (NOTE LOCATION CHANGE): Ansible, Puppet Message-ID: <20141128232513.GA8261@nb-heartburn.theworkingcentre.org> Important: our usual meeting location is under renovations next week, so we are moving the meeting. Monday's meeting will be held at The Working Centre 58 Queen Street South Kitchener (on Queen between King and Charles) If you go to the regular location then you will be sad, and that will make the rest of us sad as well. So please go to the right location! There is more location information here: http://kwlug.org/node/634 I really hope that people are able to find 58 Queen, because this month's meeting is all about configuration management systems, and if there is one thing that IT people like it's TOTAL CONTROL, which is what these systems offer. (On the other hand, it makes it more difficult to make ad-hoc changes to servers, which is kind of the point?) Joe Wennechuk will tell us about Ansible, which is the new hotness. Tim Laurence will tell us about Puppet, which is the old hotness, but is still fairly warm. This part of the meeting will start at 7pm or so, after meeting announcements. In addition to the presentations Hubert Chathi is organizing an informal keysigning. If you are a GPGer and would like to swap keys and build your web of trust, bring along the appropriate materials (fingerprints, your identity, etc.) Some guidance for key signing parties can be found here: http://sobac.com/wiki/index.php/Guidelines_for_Key_Signing_Parties In other news, some of us are refurbishing old laptops for sale at Computer Recycling (with Linux on them, of course). Our next laptop-fixing day is scheduled for the afternoon of Saturday, December 8. If you want to participate then get in touch with me. I want to get this meeting message out ASAP, so that's all for now. As mentioned above, the meeting will be held at an UNUSUAL location: The Working Centre 58 Queen Street South Kitchener (on Queen between King and Charles) Parking will likely be an issue. There is a bit of free parking along side streets, and a relatively cheap pay lot off of Ontario street between Charles and King. There is bike parking beside the CIBC building on Queen street. Doors will open somewhere between 6:30pm and 6:45pm. There will be some need for setup help, but probably not as much as usual. Nonetheless helpers are welcome. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org