With apologies…
Our regular Central Meeting venue wasn’t available for
December 16th, thus our December meeting took the
form of the “Solstice Social” held December 4th.
We’re back on our regular schedule starting January 20th
when we’ll have a presentation on IPV6 with Michael Warfield.
One that is not to be missed! Full details coming soon!
‘Tis the season where our regular Emory Law School venue is
commandeered by students taking finals, thus providing our
group with a great excuse to get out of our “shells” and party…
Announcing the third annual
ALE SOLSTICE SOCIAL
a Family Friendly celebration taking place
7:00pm to 11:00pm on
Saturday, December 4th, 2010
Our event is being hosted by Geoffrey Myers at the
Chestnut Hill Community Clubhouse
5184 Lupine Ln NW
Acworth, GA 30102-6940
(near i75 at i575 in Cherokee county).
This is a BRING YOUR OWN WHATEVER event,
so all contributions of beverages and munchies for
yourself or for the sharing will be most welcome.
Note that the facility has a large gas grill that will
be fired up and available to satisfy the cooking needs
of both carnivores and fans of charred veggies.
Also, as a followup to November’s ALE Central
presentation on Classic Computing with David
Greelish, the evening will feature an
ANTIQUE TEQUENOLOGY SMACK DOWN!
Party goers are encouraged to bring along the
most obscure and antiquated systems, peripherals
and gadgets they can dig out of their piles of
old school techno-junk for a little “Stump the
Graybeards” show and tell contest of
“What the heck IS that thing, anyway?”
The three owners of the items judged most unique by
the crowd will win a KURO BOX PRO Linux NAS
(or whatever you want) box, courtesy of David Hamm.
RSVP helpful but not required. Also, help
with setup at 6pm, cleanup at 11pm, as well
as donations of $5 to $10 toward the $70 venue
rental will all be greatly appreciated. Please
email Geoffrey Myers to RSVP or volunteer
to assist with setup or cleanup.
Our Featured Presentation at the ALE Central meeting
for Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 at 7:30pm will be
Practical Server Security Management with SELinux
as presented by rabid Linux fanboy and security guru,
James Kinney
Synopsis:
— Running a Linux server with SELinux in enforcing targeted
mode is quite daunting for many, if not most sysadmins.
SELinux really needs to be a part of the toolkit used to
address security issues, but a toolkit that admins will use
and not just turn off by default. Over the course of a 1+
hour seminar, we will demonstrate various tools, both gui
and command line, and consider the analysis process for
resolving SELinux “Access Denied” problems on servers
running in “Enforcing Targeted” mode. If time permits, a
brief look at the concepts of higher security methods like
MCS and MLS will also be covered.
(Full Frontal) Bio:
— James (Jim) Kinney became an over-zealous GNU Linux
fanboy the first time he saw a discarded Next Cube running
Slackware in 1992. Several thousand installs later his
enthusiasm has escalated to “rabidly over-zealous Linux
fanboy advocating for the total world domination process
to speed up!” He is actively involved in helping this process
by promoting that “fdisk solves all windows problems
universally” and that “apple is one byte shy of a whole fruit”.
— In the 18 years since his introduction to Linux goodness,
James has turned an obsession into a living. First at Emory
University where he converted a Mac lab to Linux (and
ultimately used the same lab machines for a proto-type
Beowulf cluster in nice +5 mode so the students wouldn’t
notice) and helped co-found LUGE (Linux Users Group of
Emory). Next followed a 10+ year stint as a Linux
consultant (note to self: windows consultants make money
because things break all the time; Linux consultants only
make money setting things up so they never hear from
the client again until the next time they want a new
machine) with a few notable projects like making Linux
systems run thin clients in schools despite the technical
obstacles and political chaffing, a stint at “We’re not evil,
We just archive EVERYTHING FOREVER” Google, an
appearance at a travel booking company, and a ride with
“we wanna be just like Comcast” Cox Communications,
which all led Jim to realize that he really likes craft and
Belgian beer and Linux security systems (and Linux
fanboy activities like trash-talking other OS wannabes
from Redmond and Cupertino).
— Currently at GTRI, Jim works with some really bright
people who are actively involved in extending SELinux
policy to protect all aspects of critical path communications.
============================
We will be meeting in our usual Gambrel Hall room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found
HERE (or via the side bar link).
The highlight presentation at the ALE Central Meeting
for 7:30pm on Thursday, Sept. 16th, 2010 will be:
“The Joy of Sox:
a tour of command-line sound processing”
as presented by the very soxy and alluring Charles Shapiro
Synopsis:
— This short talk will include some rather silly sox stunts, an
explanation of the sox command line with plenty of runnable examples,
and a show-off of my very own simple but effective batch-mode
vinyl/cassette album processor, done in bash(1), sox(1), and lame(1).
bio:
— Charles Shapiro is a fan of fencing, gadgetry, juggling, gizmos,
beer brewing, obscure weaponry, radio control (in all it’s connotations),
and most anything else the that lesser world might consider “geek”.
Consistent to these avocations he has been a professional programmer
for over 14 years, specializing in C and Unix with a couple years of
C++, Perl and a plethora of Python in the mix. He can type faster than
most people can talk, is a Linux Lunacy Cruise alumnae, a liberty
minded friend of the EFF, an officially sanctioned Richard Stallman
impersonator for the FSF, and a seriously committed GNU Linux
zealot since 1996.
=============
We will be meeting at Emory Law School in our
usual Gambrel Hall, room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found
[here]
The feature presentation at the ALE Central Meeting
at 7:30pm on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 will be:
“Grepping GRUB 2”
with Michael Trausch
Synopsis:
— GRUB 2 is the new major release family of the GNU GRUB bootloader,
which is extensively rewritten to be more feature rich, robust and portable.
GNU GRUB 2 is used by current versions of Ubuntu as the default boot
loader, and the next major release of the Debian project is adopting it as
well. It supports booting from a large number of file systems and
partition types, and can be considered an extensible boot environment
that can launch any number of operating systems. Our presentation
will look at the changes from the GRUB 1 environment and explore the
configuration and use of some of the popular new features of GRUB 2.
Bio:
— Michael B. Trausch is an independent consultant performing
programming and administration services using free software.
He works from home (when everything is going well…) and rears
his 4 year old son, Benjamin. He is an advocate for free software,
and uses Ubuntu as his normal desktop environment and Ubuntu,
Debian, or *BSD on servers. Oh, and he wants to get into building
little electronic doohickeys and stuff. :-)
=============
We will be meeting at Emory Law School in our
usual Gambrel Hall, room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found
at http://ale.org/?page_id=2