KWLUG Meeting: Monday, May 7, 2018, 7pm

Backups with dump; Mail-in-a-Box

Meeting Date

Khalid Baheyeldin will talk about the backup strategy he uses at home. He achieves versioned, incremental, off-site backups without relying on third-party services, using the dump utility. This presentation is intended to be accessible to new users.

Update: Khalid has posted his slides on his website: https://baheyeldin.com/linux/presentation-incremental-backup-linux.html

Colin Knapp will demonstrate the setup and use of Mail-in-a-Box.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, April 9 2018

An End User Journey, VoIP Security

Meeting Date

Update: Sandeep's slides are here: 2018-04-Linux_and_Me.pdf;, and Mike's presentation is linked here: http://telium.ca/?a:dd~id:kwlugpresentation.

Sandeep Johri is a non-technical end-user of Linux and free software. He will talk about his journey: how he bounced from distro to distro, how he landed where he is now, where he sees himself going in the future, and lessons learned from the experience. This talk is intended to be accessible for beginners.

Steve Walker (the CTO at Telium)  will discuss the challenges facing the operators of VoIP based PBX equipment,  and how to secure the PBX from hacking and fraud.  The presentation will examine how and why hackers / fraudsters want to attack your PBX, and the risks and costs associated with these attacks.  The presentation will then focus on the attack surface of the PBX, review common vulnerabilities, and describe detection of hacking / fraud, with an emphasis on Asterisk based PBX's.  Finally Steve will take us through best practices in securing the PBX (and telephony environment), including the tools and techniques you should implement to protect your business (or home) system.                   
                                                                              
Since VoIP PBX technology is now within reach of the small business and home user, this presentation should be of interest to anyone involved with VoIP.  If you already operate VoIP equipment and are wondering if this applies to you, here is  a video showing a company that had to pay a $400,000 USD telephone bill after a single weekend attack on their VoIP PBX.

File Attachments

Attachment Size
2018-04-Linux_and_Me.pdf 1.91 MB

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, March 5 2018

Laptop installation, Kubernetes

Meeting Date

Jim Kelsh will demonstrate how to install Linux on a laptop. He may cover different installation methods and different distributions. This presentation is intended to be friendly to beginners to Linux.

Update: Jim's slides are here: 2018-03-05-linux-installation.odp

Charlie Drage will discuss his work (and contributions) to Kubernetes.

File Attachments

Attachment Size
2018-03-05-linux-installation.odp 5.39 MB

KWLUG Meeting: Monday February 5 2018, 7pm

Data Visualization with ElasticSearch

Meeting Date

Mary Loubele will lead an interactive demonstration of how to use Elasticsearch to visualize the Twitter API. Bring your laptop loaded with VirtualBox. You will also need a Twitter login to access the API.

To participate, please follow these instructions: http://loubele.org/instructions.pdf

The virtual machine for you to download is here: http://loubele.org/Elastic.ova

The demonstration will cover the following topics:

  • How to install Elasticsearch and Kibana on a virtual machine.
  • How to get Twitter data from the Twitter API into Elasticsearch.
  • How to build insightful visualizations with Kibana.
  • How to perform text classification with Elasticsearch.

 

 

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, December 11 2017, 7pm

Curv, Mattermost

Meeting Date

Note: We have shifted this meeting a week forward. Cory Doctorow will be giving a talk on Dec 4 at the University of Waterloo, and there is some chance that tickets will be made available to the public. In this case many KWLUG members would prefer to attend that talk rather than this meeting.

Doug Moen will tell us about Curv, a 3D modelling language he is developing for making art using mathematics. Jonathan Fritz will tell us about his work on Mattermost, an open-source alternative to Slack.

Doug writes:

Curv is an open source 3D solid modelling language, oriented towards 3D printing, procedurally generated art, and mathematical visualization. It's a pure functional language where geometric shapes are first class values, and are constructed by transforming and combining simpler shapes using an unusually rich collection of operators.

Instead of polyhedral meshes or other boundary representations, Curv represents shapes as pure functions (Function Representation or F-Rep). This is a volumetric representation, where a function maps every point (x,y,z) in 3D space onto the properties of a shape. This representation is powerful, supporting a wide range of shape operators, and is a good match to the volumetric nature of 3D printing.

F-Rep is well suited to being directly rendered by a GPU. To achieve this, Curv code is compiled into GPU shader programs or compute kernels.

Jon writes:

Mattermost is an open source alternative to popular enterprise chat applications like Slack, HipChat, and Microsoft Teams. It can be used on the web, your desktop, or your mobile device. The project is MIT-licensed, with an enterprise version available for paid customers that need additional functionality.

Special Event: Cory Doctorow in KW: Monday, Dec 4 2017

Booksigning and evening lecture

Meeting Date

Note: This visit is being organized by the University of Waterloo Cheriton School of Computer Science;, as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations, but the organizers have kindly opened the evening talk to the general public as well as the UW community.

Blogger, activist and author Cory Doctorow will be giving two events in Kitchener-Waterloo on Monday, December 4.

  • At 3pm Doctorow will be doing a reading and book signing at the central branch of the Kitchener Public Library. The event is free but tickets are required. See http://www.kpl.org/85-queen-afternoon-cory-doctorow-ticketed-event to get tickets.
  • At 7pm Doctorow will be giving a talk at the Modern Languages building of the University of Waterloo. It is titled "Dead canary in the coalmine: we just lost the web in the war on general purpose computing" This event is also free, but tickets are required (and the event is expected to sell out). See https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/events/cory-doctorow for the talk description and a link to get tickets.

 

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, November 6, 2017, 7pm

Large-scale Open Source Storage and Filesharing

Meeting Date

Lori Paniak will describe a project he worked on at the University of Waterloo. He writes:

The University of Waterloo School of Computer Science (SCS) recently undertook a project to provide several hundred TB of redundant, multi-building distributed high-performance storage for SCS users and infrastructure use. The first part of this talk will recount the non-linear trajectory of the project from the formulation of goals through to the delivered Ceph system.

The design of this system allows for the modular addition of services utilizing the storage. The first such service, SCS Nextcloud, provides a DropBox-like functionality across all popular client platforms. We will give details of a high-availablity implementation of Nextcloud built using haproxy and containers.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, October 2, 2017, 7pm

Open Source for Astronomy

Meeting Date

Khalid Baheyeldin has been dabbling in a new hobby: amateur astronomy. In this talk he will share some of the surprisingly capable open source software he has found for astronomy, and has been using. This includes: planetarium applications, drivers for telescope control, astrophotography, astrometry, object databases, and more.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, Sept 11 2017, 7pm

Shell Script Ruination, JOSM OpenStreetMap Editor

Meeting Date

Tim Laurence will talk about "How to ruin your life using shell scripts".

Andrew Cant has been playing with JOSM, the Java-based OpenStreetMap editor. He will discuss his experiences thus far.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, August 14 2017, 7pm

FreeSWITCH and FusionPBX

Meeting Date

Bob Jonkman has been playing with the FusionPBX frontend to the telephony system FreeSWITCH. He was asked to set up a telephone conference and was surprised at how easy it was. In this presentation he will lead a live demo of the system. Bring your smartphone or laptop to be part of the demo.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, July 10 2017

Rust and Kernel Development

Meeting Date

Having recovered from his illness, Theo Belaire will deliver his long-awaited Rust presentation.

Rust is a new systems language designed by Mozilla, who are using it to develop their next generation browser. What else could it be used for?

Theo Belaire will describe his experiments using Rust for low level kernel code, building a Linux module and developing a time operating system. In the process he will review the basics of the language and what benefits it can give low-level developers.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, June 5 2017, 7pm

SaltStack, XMPP

Meeting Date

Update: The digital literacy and inclusion talk had to be postponed. Stay tuned for rescheduling details.

Nathan Fish will tell us about the configuration management system SaltStack. He will give us an overview of configuration management, show us the components of SaltStack, lead us through some examples, and offer troubleshooting advice.

Bob Jonkman will demonstrate the XMPP setup he uses for the KW VoIP group.

File Attachments

Attachment Size
Nathan Fish's Salt Stack slides 320.63 KB

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, May 1 2017, 7pm

Introduction to Functional Programming and Haskell

Meeting Date

* * *
Aden Seaman will give us an introduction to functional programming.
He will cover the following topics:

  • What functional programming is all about, and how it differs from imperative programming.
  • Commonalities and differences between Erlang, Scala, Clojure and Haskell.
  • A deeper exploration of Haskell, including its famous type system, functional purity, laziness.
  • Implications of the type system on language safety, programming style and constraints, and concurrent programming.

File Attachments

Attachment Size
Slides from the talk 123.31 KB

Laptop (and Router) Rescue Mission: Saturday, April 22, 2017, 4pm

Meeting Date

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

Also this month: we will look at donated routers. We will match them up to power supplies, test them and see whether we can install OpenWRT on them.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, April 3 2017, 7pm

OSSIM + A Brief History of Linux and Open Source Technology

Meeting Date

Having recovered from his germ attack, Mark Steffen will give us a talk on OSSIM, an open source SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system. Mark says that this system is appropriate for small organizations or paranoid home users. He will cover the following topics:

  • Traffic analysis (Suricata), including OSSIM's limitations in this area.
  • The OSSEC HIDS agent, which looks for bad behaviour and reports back to OSSIM for logging.
  • OSSIM alerts and tickets
  • Open Threat Exchange
  • SIEM correlation engine
  • OpenVAS vulnerability scanner (Nessus)

Jason Eckert will revisit his KW Linuxfest talk with a brief history of Linux and open source. It promises to be a fun and interesting talk about where the Linux operating system came from, why it succeeded, and how Open Source has shaped technology today and how it will continue to do so in the future.

Laptop Rescue Mission: Saturday, March 18 2017, 4pm

Meeting Date

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, March 6 2017, 7pm

Meeting Date

Update: Theo has also been attacked by germs, and he will likely not make this meeting. We will reschedule this presentation and hold a roundtable instead, or fill in an emergency presentation. Watch this space.

Update 2: Theo is not feeling up to giving his Rust presentation, so we will hold a roundtable. We will reschedule the Rust presentation.
* * *

The host for this meeting was acant.

Saturday, Feb 18: Laptop Rescue Mission

Meeting Date

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

KWLUG Meeting: Monday, February 6 2017, 7pm

Lets Encrypt, Canadian eCoin project, maybe more

Meeting Date

UPDATE: Unfortunately Mark was attacked by germs over the weekend, and won't be able to present today. His OSSIM presentation has been deferred.

Joff Voskamp will also review his recent experience with Let's Encrypt SSL certificates to secure his websites. He will describe the groups background, how the certificates work, and demonstrate how he is using it.

At the last minute, Jason Zvaniga has heroically volunteered to give a short introduction to cryptocurrencies and the Canada eCoin Project.

Presentation notes for Let's Encrypt

A few quick points:

  • if you can point DNS to your webserver you can get a certificate.
  • if you're pretty quick with DNS you don't need the webserver. :-)
  • individual certificates are only good for 90 days, but the tools make renewing very easy
  • there are limits, but they're very high

Year in Review:

Cert in Brief:

  • Self signed -
    • Trust it if you trust the issuer
    • $0 certs. Great for internal use
  • Domain Validation - you control the machine (DNS|webserver|etc)

    • Easy to verify - no guaranttees that they are anyone in particular
    • Easy to automate, "easy" to do for free
    • Only usable for externally visible sites
  • Organizational Validation - you run the company that runs the machine

    • Harder to verify but they are who they say they are
    • You can't really automate verifying paperwork
  • Extended Validation - you run the company that runs the machine
    You are vetted by the issuer
    Hasn't really caught on

Let's encrypt went to public beta in December 2015.

Features:

  • ACME DNS challenge enabled January 20, 2016. Support in certbot is coming (harder to automate)
  • ECDSA signing enabled February 10, 2016 - full ECDSA chain hopefully by the end of March
  • IPv6 enabled July 26, 2016
  • Internationalized Domain Names enabled October 20, 2016
  • Windows XP interoperability enabled March 25, 2016.

Annual budget for 2017 is expected to be about $2M (USD)

See also:

Interested in helping:

Presentation notes for Let's Encrypt

Jason has posted his slides at https://f9ekkdjyuja1sh4cel2o.koad.sandcats.io/index.html#/