[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: OpenVAS, NixOS (April 2019) (repost)

[Paul Nijjar]

(Apologies for the re-post. Apparently the mailing lists are acting
up, and a bunch of people are not getting emails from Yahoo addresses.
So I will try from this address.)

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April Fools! No, wait. Monday may be April 1, but we are still having
our meeting. 

Computers are scary, and you would have to be an April Fool to avoid
thinking about computer security. OpenVAS is a tool (forked from
Nessus) that you can use to scan a network for vulnerabilities. Bob B
will lead us through a walkthrough on OpenVAS. Along the way he might
tell us a few things about Proxmox, the virtualization distribution he
used to set up his test environment.

It is usually better to be functional rather than dysfunctional, and
as the cool Haskellers will tell you, functional programming languages
have a lot of advantages over their imperative competitors. The Nix
package manager takes a functional approach to package management --
you write a specification of the system you want and then Nix carries
it out. In addition, package upgrades on Nix are atomic, so you will
never be left with half-configured things. Victor Kofia is excited
about Nix the package manager and NixOS the distribution, and will
tell us a little about them both. 

Our meeting will start at 7pm. It will be held in our new home:

TriOS College
110 King St E
(At Frederick, in Market Square)
Kitchener

It seems that the staff lock the doors awfully early, so please arrive
by 7pm if you can. If you are late there should be a phone number you
can text or call to get in, but better safe than sorry. See
https://kwlug.org/trios-college for maps and photos of the location.

- Paul