The next ALE-NW@SPSU meeting is being held
Thursday, Feb. 9th, 2012 at 7:30pm in room J131
of the Atrium (J) building on the SPSU campus.
The feature presentation will be
Seat Belts and Airbags for Bash
with Michael Potter
Abstract:
– bash (and scripting languages in general) act as the glue that hold other
system components together. This presentation will focus on the underutilized
features of bash that are critical to building production quality scripts, Demos
will show you how to turn on options that expose the hidden timebombs in
the code.
– Turning these features on should be considered a requirement much like
turning on strict and warnings are considered a requirement for Perl.
– Much of the bash syntax is redundant; I will also explain which syntax to
use and which syntax to avoid.
– Knowledge of any of the common UNIX scripting languages will be sufficient
to attend this meeting. Scripters at all proficiency levels will get value from
attending this presentation. Although I do not address differences between
Korn shell and bash, much of what I talk about also applies to Korn shell.
– I developed this presentation after getting frustrated with bash’s default
behavior of continuing to process after an error occurred. I was determined
to find a way to make bash a more reliable language.
———
Bio:
– Michael has been working in IT since 1989 when he switched from
programming automotive embedded systems. Since that time he has
been involved in projects related to moving mainframe applications to
UNIX and Linux using open-source technologies.
– Recently Michael incorporated Tapp Solutions, LLC. A company
dedicated to serving the insurance industry with mobile, desktop and
web applications. Including handheld quote calculators and scanned
document handling.
– You can reach Michael at michael@potter.name
=======
For a campus map and a link to directions please see
http ://www.spsu.edu/visitspsu/campusmaps/index.htm
Parking in non reserved spaces in the P60 deck is best.
building J, the Atrium building, is a short distance east
of the parking deck.
======
ALE-NW@SPSU meetings are open events and we hope
you will join us! Also remember that topic suggestions
and presentation offers the meetings can be emailed to
[ jdp (at) algoloma ]
PLEASE NOTE DATE, ROOM AND PARKING!
No rooms were available to accommodate our regular third
Thursday meeting schedule, so we have moved the meeting
date to Thursday, January 26th.
Due to a large fundraiser party event being held outside our
usual room on the 26th, we will be using a different room:
7:30pm at Emory Law School, Gambrel Hall, Room 5E.
Please use the free parking deck adjacent to the
Law School building. The deck entrance is on the EAST END
off of Gambrel Drive, the farthest side from the Law School entrance.
See detail map at: http://ale.org/?page_id=2
=======
Our featured presentation will be a reprise of the popular
talk offered at the Jan. 12 meeting of ALE-NW@SPSU:
Network and Systems Management
with OpenNMS
presented by Jeff Gehlbach
Abstract:
— Whether your organization’s network has a dozen nodes or twelve-thousand, it
sucks when some of those nodes go down or have performance problems. A whole
discipline of network and systems management has evolved to deal with this
problem, resulting in many software platforms both free and proprietary aiming
to solve it. One of these, OpenNMS (Open Network Management System), brings a
100% free and Open Source software approach with massive scalability as its key
operational goal. This talk will present a gentle introduction to network
management concepts along with a tour of OpenNMS’ architecture and, provided the
stars align, a live demo!
Bio:
— Jeff Gehlbach discovered Linux in 1994 when a friend shared with him a box
of floppies containing Slackware 2.3, and has been hooked ever since. He has
subsequently worked as a network engineer, Solaris and Linux systems admin,
network management consultant, and network management software developer
among others. Today he pays the bills by helping organizations manage their
networks and systems using free software including OpenNMS.
=============
Our ALE Central meetings are usually held at Emory
Law School in the Gambrel Hall lecture room 1C.
Our meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
http://ale.org/?page_id=2
Due to Emory student activities at our regular venue and
time, the December 2011 ALE CENTRAL Meeting
has been MOVED to the ALE NW venue:
SPSU Campus, Atrium “J” Bldg. rm J110,
7:30pm on THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8TH.
(directions link and parking notes below)
Activities will include:
An ALE GPG/PGP Keysigning Party
followed immediately by our
2011 Solstice Season Social
Synopsis:
Our December ALE NW Meeting and ALE Central meetings are being
combined as a PGP/GPG Keysigning Party (7:30pm to ~9:15pm) followed
by an ALE Solstice Season Social at a nearby eatery (starting by 9:30pm,
location to be announced).
For those unfamiliar with PGP or interested in learning more about the
GnuPG implentation of PGP cryptography and the value of protecting
your privacy and your identity with PGP signatures, we suggest you
review David Tomaschik’s March 2011 presesntation on the topic.
Video of this presentation is available for download or streaming under
the file name “ale-20110317-gpg-tomaschik.mp4” at these URL’s:
http://arxion.net/ale/ and http://jimkinney.us/downloads/
A torrent is also available at
https: //s3.amazonaws.com/datalore/ale-20110317-gpg-tomaschik.mp4?torrent
The video file is ~443MB as h.264 encode in an mp4 wrapper.
For those who wishing to participate, the key signing party serves to
confirm the identity of other PGP Key users by connecting them to a
“key ring” and including them in the “web of trust” needed to validate
their keys, signatures and identitiies.
Internationally recognized I.T. cryptography and security expert
Michael Warfield will present the GPG/PGP introduction and will
direct the key signing process.
COMPREHENSIVE DETAILS FOR PREPARATION AND PARTICIPATION
IN THE GPG/PGP KEY SIGNING PARTY ARE AVAILABLE AT:
http://ale.org/static_pages/keysign_party_111208.html
The documentation includes links to step by step GPG How To’s
and other helpful information on public key encryption, including:
http://ale.org//static_pages/gpgstepbystep-111208.html
========================
DIRECTIONS
Southern Polytechnic State University
Room J110 of the Atrium (J) building
Campus map and a link to directions please see
http://www.spsu.edu/visitspsu/campusmaps/index.htm
Parking in non reserved spaces in the P60 deck is best.
building J, the Atrium building, is a short distance east
of the parking deck.
The feature presentation for our ALE Central Meeting at
7:30pm on Thursday, Nov. 17th, 2011 will be:
A Pioneering Introduction to Puppet
with Matt Urbanski
Synopsis:
— Puppet is a configuration management tool written in ruby that
allows a sysadmin to wield their influence and expertise over far
more machines than one could without it. It uses a simple but
powerful DSL which I would like to introduce to everyone who is
not familiar with it, and open a dialogue about how our role as
admins is changing with the scalability problems we are faced with.
Bio:
– Matt Urbanski is a functional programmer turned sysadmin. His last
awesome job was in high frequency trading, administrating a super
low latency MAN and optimizing trading algorithms. He also worked for
an advertising firm in Europe administrating hundreds of cloud based
apache instances for serving ads where they were needed, when they
were paid for, using puppet.
– Matt is currently working for a medtech/bioinformatics firm, selling
data to oncologists and the pharma industry. He is also involved in
a new professional group focusing on agile system administration
tools and techniques:
=============
Our ALE Central meetings are usually held at Emory
Law School in the Gambrel Hall lecture room 1C.
Our meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
http://ale.org/?page_id=2
The next ALE-NW@SPSU meeting is being held
Thursday, Nov. 10th, 7:30pm in room J110
of the Atrium (J) building on the SPSU campus.
The thematic banner for the meeting is
BACKUP-APALOOZA
with discussions focused on the practical considerations of data
backup through some compare and contrast overviews of a few
popular backup tools from the Linux / FLOSS universe.
Scheduled talking points include:
* Backup Religion – Get Saved Before Your Data Apocalypse
* Rsync
* Rdiff-backup
* Visit Snapshot City with Back-In-Time
* Duplicity
* Amanda
With Presenters:
* JD
* Aaron Ruscetta
* David Tomaschik
If you aren’t happy with your current backup solutions, one
of our featured tools will probably fit your needs nicely.
=======
For a campus map and a link to directions please see
http ://www.spsu.edu/visitspsu/campusmaps/index.htm
Parking in non reserved spaces in the P60 deck is best.
building J, the Atrium building, is a short distance east
of the parking deck.
======
ALE-NW@SPSU meetings are open events and we hope
you will join us! Also remember that topic suggestions
and presentation offers the meetings can be emailed to
[ jdp (at) algoloma ]
======
DECEMBER MEETING NOTICE:
ALE-NW will NOT have a meeting for December, so
this will be the last meeting of 2011.