December 2005
No topic was scheduled for our December meeting and I was unable
to attend. Paul Visscher provided the following meeting summary.
Thanks Paul!
- Rob Caldwell talked about drive geometry and something about
setting a c/h/s offset helping performance. I didn't really follow
what exactly he was talking about.
- GT talked about some old computer hardware (spurred by the CHS
discussion)
- We talked about a new version of SATA (I think?) and about
hot-swappable SATA enclosures and huge SATA arrays (multiple
terabytes)
- Someone asked about how to get CSS encoded DVDs working in Ubuntu. The
answer is: install libdvdread3 and then run the shell script in
/usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/. That will install the magic
parts that let you decode CSS.
- There was some stuff I'm forgetting.
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November 2005
We started the meeting with Q & A and some announcements. They included the following:
- GT asked about using a printer which has only a proprietary Windows
driver in a mixed OS environment, using Linux as a print server.
Can it be done using raw mode? No clear answer was presented, but a
few possibilities were discussed.
- Moe Albaugh asked for help getting his HP 5c SCSI scanner to work.
Several suggestions were made, but most likely the problem is with
the proprietary SCSI controller that was included with the scanner.
Use lspci to check that SCSI controller is recognized. If not, look
for suitable a module, or replace it with a well supported one, such
as Adaptec. He can probably find one at Midwest Surplus Electronics or
Mendelson's for a reasonable price.
- Gary Turner mentioned the need for an experienced eBay seller to
help sell some unique equipment that we occasionally have donated
to OTAP.
An example of such equipment is a 48-volt UPS rack which we recently
received. Some common equipment, which we have far more of than we
can ever use, will be sold at very low cost. Some of it is listed
in the December issue of The
DataBus.
- Someone asked about using a Winmodem. In general, it's
best to avoid them, but some suggestions included checking Linmodems.org to see if his
particular modem can be made to work with Linux. Someone else suggested
using an external USB modem, but some of them are also Winmodems.
Best to use an external serial modem. There's a fair chance that OTAP
has some available.
- Elliot Lake asked about using an external USB hard drive. They should
be USB Mass Storage compatible and "just work". Dan Tasch suggested
that those with Cyprus chip set work well. Firewire was also suggested.
Do not use USB 1.1 - you will be quite disappointed if you do!
- Grant Root had several Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger"
CD sets (Live CD and Installation CD) for PC Intel x86, AMD64, and even
a couple PowerPC sets to give out. Thanks Grant and Ubuntu!
- GT announced that tickets for the DMA®
Holiday Dinner to be held Wednseday, Dec. 7,
are still available.
- Dave Lundy asked for recommendations for wireless PCMCIA card for
Linux. Grant said the Belkin 802.11g card (part # F5D7010) worked well
for him with Ubuntu. Someone else cautioned that even though brand XYZ
ver. abc 802.11g card works well, there's no assurance the next version
of the same card will work because many vendors have a habit of switching
chipsets from one version to the next.
For our main presentation, we had an excellent Asterisk demo by Jeff Coyle this
month. Asterisk is an open source PBX system that runs on Linux, BSD
and MacOSX. He demonstrated some of the many features of Astersik and
showed some scripting examples and played some sound samples using a
couple of the text-to-speech options. Jeff also had an Asterisk sandbox
for everyone to play with, which consisted of an Asterisk server, and
a wireless router running DD-WRT on the WRT54GS. Attendees were all be
given SSH and Web access to the box. Jeff's presentation slides are at www.darksource.org/asterisk.
We suspect that Andrew Lynch's next project will be to set up an Asterisk
system so he can control his MythTV
system via a phone. 
After the meeting, about half of us adjourned to TGI Friday's for
food and lively conversation.
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October 2005
Ken Phelps talked about ICMP Redirects
this month.
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Three of us tested the waters in 2003 at the first ever Ohio LinuxFest and liked what we saw
and heard. Last year, nine of us made the short trip to Columbus for the
2nd Ohio LinuxFest. It was originally scheduled to be held on the Ohio
State University campus, but due to increased interest, was held in the
Hyatt Regency Columbus in downtown Columbus. Everyone I spoke to agreed
it was an excellent event. This year, at least 14 of us from the Dayton
area attended, and as far as I know, all were very favorably impressed.
The show just keeps getting better each year!
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September 2005
Our last Installfest was held at
Sinclair Community College from
10 am–4 pm Saturday, September 24th,
2005 in the Physics Department. As always, Art Ross, Chairman of the
Physics Department, was an excellent host.
Considering how many fliers we had distributed for the event,
I had expected a larger attendance, but the room was busy all day.
One person showed up wanting a PowerPC distro, which we didn't have.
We would have something available, had he made a request a few days in
advance. On the other hand, a couple people did request specific distros
(Asterisk at Home & Clark Connect), which I downloaded and burned,
but nobody bought any of them. I'll have copies of all of the following
at each Linux SIG meeting for the next couple months.
We had copies of Asterisk at
Home, Clark
Connect, Damn Small
Linux 1.5, Fedora Core 4,
Kanotix 2005-03,
KNOPPIX 4.0.1 DVD, KnoppMyth R5A16,
Mandriva
Linux Limited Edition 2005 (formerly Mandrake). MythDora 1.5 (MythTV 0.18.1 on Fedora Core
3), SimplyMepis 3.3.2.test03,
SimplyMepis 3.3.1-1, & MepisLite 3.3.1-2.test03,
SuSE
9.3 eval, TheOpenCD v3.0,
SmoothWall Express 2.0,
Ubuntu 5.04 (and 5.10
preview), Ultimate Boot CD
3.3, a handy bootable CD full of diagnostics & utilities, and Xandros
Desktop OS Version 3 Open Circulation Edition for $1 / CD and $3 /
DVD, and some other odds and ends for free.
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meeting next meeting
In GT's absence (he and Nancy were at a special DMA board
meeting), Paul Ahlquist led tonight's meeting. Paul described a message
Chuck allegedly sent to our mailing list and subsequent confusion that
ensued in Paul's inimitable style. He announced the upcoming Ohio LinuxFest and suggested anyone wanting
to carpool send a message to our mailing list. He also mentioned
our next Installfest coming up in less
than two weeks. Dave Lundy handed out fliers for the event to
anyone willing to post them at local schools, work, etc. There were
several people here for the first time and Paul asked them to briefly
introduce themselves. Someone asked about a good place to find a used
P3 computer. Paul suggested eBay
and RetroBox. Andrew Lynch
suggested using dealnews.com,
FreeAfterRebate.info, Techbargains.com, and similar
sites to find extremely low prices on new PCs and components.
For our main presentation, Chuck Gelm talked about, and
demonstrated (albeit with some technical difficulties),
Skype, a free
VOIP
solution. A couple of Skype's advantages, in addition
to being free, are that it supports conference calls and can make calls to POTS phones.
We had one new participant in our monthly key
signing event. There was some discussion of GPG fingerprints, since that
was what started the message mentioned previously. There was also
discussion of firewall security, with the consensus that an external
firewall is better than a software firewall running on a desktop
PC, although that is better than no firewall at all. That brought
up questions about OpenWrt,
a Linux distribution for the Linksys WRT54G, and WPA2, the
second generation of WPA security. The mantra of the day was "It's
worse than you can possibly imagine!" by Paul Visscher.
Several of us enjoyed further conversation and food at TGI Friday's
after the meeting.
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August 2005
We had several new people show up this month. Unfortunately,
we had nothing planned. Still, I think almost everyone present
learned something of value. During the first part of the meeting
there was a question about dialing into dmapub. One person was using Kppp, and some things
seemed to work but others, such as mutt
didn't. It just displayed scrambled lines of text. Kppp is a
fine tool, but it is not the correct tool for connecting to dmapub,
since there is no ppp daemon running on dmapub. The correct way to login
to dmapub is either dialing in using a terminal emulator such as minicom for Linux, Tera
Term Pro or comparable for Windows, or ZTerm or similar for
Mac OS X. Or, if you are already online with any
ISP,
use an ssh client.
GT reminded us that our next Installfest is just over a month
away - Sept. 24 at Sinclair Community College. See more info
here. Grant Root talked briefly
about OSCON
2005 which he attended earlier this month and some of the
sessions he attended. One he recommended was Chris Shiflett's PHP
Security. Grant brought a stack of Software Freedom Day CDs
from OSCON. Those CDs are rather unique in that they're both a Live CD
version of Ubuntu Linux and have a
significant collection of open source Windows software on the same CD.
Software Freedom Day 2005 is Sept. 10, and they are expected to have a
presence at Computerfest®.
Both Nancy Christolear and Jason Cook talked about Computerfest
and
DLF and some of the
positions that still need people to help. There was talk of holding a
key signing party at the show, as well as having a talk about why one
would want to do that. There are several speakers already scheduled,
but could use some more. Grant Root donated a remote control for an
iPod mini to one of our new attendees. GT talked about a marathon work
session he, Paul Ahlquist, Mike Carr, Ken Phelps, and Dan Tasch had the
previous night replacing a GEMAIR server.
A few months ago Ken Phelps had volunteered to talk about
ethereal and / or rsync for the June meeting,
but there wasn't time due to a communication mixup. Not having a topic
scheduled for this month, Ken bravely stepped up to the plate when asked.
His presentation wasn't quite a home run, but he described the basics
of rsync, a replacement for rcp
and demonstrated synchronizing files between two different machines.
Thanks, Ken. Hopefully next month we'll all be better prepared. BTW,
Unison, another
file synchronization utility, was also mentioned.
There was some discussion of web browser security. Someone (was it
Paul Visscher?) said he had heard that IE was "safe" to use
only seven days last year while Mozilla was considered "safe"
330 days during the same year. Here, safe means that there were no known
vulnerabilities for that browser that many days. Sheesh! I found this article that
confirms part of that allegation.
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July 2005
This was the first time we tried the new format of having
the first half of the meeting for newbies and the second half
for advanced subjects. We did not have a newbie presentation
scheduled so we entertained questions. We got a lot of them!
If you have any suggestions for future topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team. Some of the topics discussed were:
- Linux distros Most distros are
based on Debian (use .deb packages
and apt-get or some variant), Red
Hat (use .rpm packages and up2date, yum, or similar),
Slackware (.tgz packages),
or some flavor of BSD. Most of the
discussion focused on how distros are similar or different in terms of
system administration based on their parentage.
- There was some discussion of network file sharing between Macs,
Linux, and Windows using NFS,
Samba, and Netatalk. It was
generally agreed that Samba would usually be the preferred method.
There was also some discussion of file sharing via a shared
partition on dual-boot machines. One problem with using FAT32 is the
4 GB file size limitation. Alternate solutions mentioned were
the Ext2
File System Driver for Windows NT and Captive
(first free NTFS read/write filesystem for Linux). Cygwin was also mentioned, but I'm
not sure how it is used for file sharing via a disk partition.
- Sharing Netscape mail on a dual-boot computer. A user reported that
he could access several nested folders in Windows, but could only access
the top level folders in Linux. Much confusion ensued, although many
suspected he was actually reading his mail in Windows from an IMAP server
rather than locally stored files. More investigation is needed.
- There was some question regarding using a combo
video display / capture card vs. separate cards for those
functions. Both ATI and
nVIDIA make
video cards that work well with Linux. An approximately $50 Hauppauge capture card was mentioned,
but no specific model was named.
- There was a fair amount of discussion of DVRs &
PVRs.
Topics included MythTV,
KnoppMyth,
comparison of Hauppauge 150
/ 250 / 350 TV tuner cards, analog vs. HTDV,
over-the-air vs. cable, FireWire,
HDMI, etc.
Between the newbie and advanced portions of the meeting, we had a
few participants this month (the first time for a couple months) in
a GPG key
signing party. That was followed by several announcements.
- GT reminded us that our next Installfest will be Saturday,
Sept. 24 at Sinclair Community College. See more info here.
- Nancy Christolear (co-chairman of Computerfest®)
announced that they are seeking speakers and volunteers for their IT team.
Computerfest will be Sept. 10-11, 2005.
- Gary Turner asked people to contact him if you're interested
in attending Ohio LinuxFest
Saturday, Oct. 1. We'll arrange a carpool.
- Grant Root announced that he had several copies of Ubuntu 5.04 "Hoary
Hedgehog" CD sets for free.
- Dave Lundy mentioned that he had several Linux distros available
for purchase
- Grant mentioned the Samsung
CLP-550N color laser printer and showed several samples of text, text
and graphics, and photos he had printed. They were quite impressive!
The photos weren't as good as most current inkjets can produce,
but were quite good. The text and color graphics were excellent.
It's currently on sale at Dalco
for $389.95 through the end of July. This printer includes drivers for
several Linux distros.
For the advanced topics portion of the meeting, the dynamic
duo of Paul Visscher and Jason Cook collaborated nicely to discuss
"Collaborative System Administration". They described their
methodoligies and how they use off-the-shelf open source tools, plus some
they wrote themselves, to do day-to-day system administration tasks and
simultaneously document what they do. Some of the tools they use are PurpleWiki,
IRC, sudo,
RCS, and "RT: Request Tracker".
Slides of this presentation in OpenOffice 2 format are here.
Someone (sorry - I don't know who) donated a copy of the first issue
of Make: magazine. It was
won by Nancy Christolear. Also, we saw a couple people who had not been
present in quite a while. Welcome back Dave Nevel and David Smith!
Several of us enjoyed food, drink, and conversation at the El Rancho
Grande Mexican Restaurant & Cantina across the street. After they
asked us to leave so they could close, about half a dozen continued
conversing in the parking lot enjoying the very pleasant summer evening.
It had been stiflingly hot before the meeting!
top last meeting next meeting
June 2005
GT suggested a revised meeting structure which would start at 6:30
and devote approximately the first hour of each meeting for topics
aimed at helping get newbies up to speed, followed by a short Q & A
period and announcements. After that would be the main presentation(s)
of more advanced topics. After discussion of this possible new meeting
structure and possibly starting earlier, it was decided to try the new
system, but continue starting at 7:00 pm. Other items mentioned before
our main presentation were:
- GT informed us the next Installfest will be Saturday, September 24 in room 4242 at Sinclair Community College.
- Nancy Christolear reminded us that Computerfest® will be Saturday and Sunday, September 10 & 11. She mentioned that there will not be a Linux Playground at this show and that speakers (people, not magnets and paper cones) are needed.
- Dave Lundy and Grant Root mentioned that Software Freedom Day will be Saturday, Sept. 10. There was some discussion of how that might be included in or promoted at Computerfest. Mark Lotspaih is the leader of the Dayton area Software Freedom Day team. Due to previous committments, Mark was unable to attend our meeting. Please contact Mark via the above link to participate.
- Jason Cook is looking for people interested in networking to join the DLF team.
- GT discussed networking at Hara and is looking for people for a network architecture team.
- Paul Vissher made a plug for Dayton Perl Mongers, which meets at 119 Valley St. the second Wednesday each month.
If you have any suggestions for topics, or would
be willing to make a presentation, please contact the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
Jason Cook talked quite a bit about Xen. Some
links he mentioned were xen.sf.net,
sources.redhat.com/lvm2,
and cfengine.org. He will have
his slides available on-line shortly. Ken Phelps had volunteered
to talk about ethereal and /
or rsync, but we ran out
of time.
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May 2005
Our May meeting featured a repeat presentation by Paul Visscher
about encryption for the benefit of those who missed his presentation
in February and refresh the memories of those
who didn't.
GT talked briefly about progress in getting ready for
Hamvention.
We are providing Internet access for some of the
exhibitors. He also mentioned a new magazine, "Make:" for D.I.Y. geeks.
Grant mentioned a new O'Reilly
book titled "Don't
Click on the Blue E!".
We plan to once again hold a brief GPG key
signing party. If you have already created a set of keys, but have
not exchanged them with our members, please do so at this meeting.
If you haven't yet created a set of keys, what are you waiting for?
;-) You will need to be present to participate and bring at least one
form of photo ID, printed copies (one for each participant) of your Key
ID, Key Type, Hex Fingerprint and Key Size info, and a pen or pencil.
And if you don't have your own set of keys yet, there may be a demo of
how to do that.
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April 2005
At our April meeting Ken Phelps talked about podcasting,
played a few examples, and showed several RSS links to
podcasts at ipodder.org. There was
some discussion of RSS. Perhaps we'll have a more detailed discussion
of RSS at a future meeting.
During Ken's talk about podcasting, someone asked about editing MP3
and other audio files. A very good open source cross-platform audio
file editor is Audacity.
It can edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files. In addition to Linux,
Audacity works on Mac OS X and Windows.
Paul Visscher gave a presentation on anonymity networks -
specifically Tor, and gave examples
of when using such a network might, or might not, be appropriate.
He also contrasted it with other anonymity solutions. See the Internet privacy
article at wikipedia.org and
www.privoxy.org for more info.
Don Corbet talked very briefly about the merger
of Mandrake Linux and Conectiva to form Mandriva. He wasn't able
to tell us much, but indicated more details would be forthcoming
soon. Also, Jason Cook talked very briefly about his experience
with configuring and maintaining a large high-speed LAN for
Dayton
LANfest.
We had planed to once again hold a brief GPG key signing
party, but nobody participated.
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March 2005
Our March meeting returned to our usual location in room 145 of the
Russ Engineering Center. No topic had been scheduled at that time,
so we entertained numerous questions about Linux and other things.
Don Corbet announced that LPI will soon be updating their level 1
exams and is looking for
suggestions. Our SIG could be instrumental in this process. This would
require a group of half a dozen or so people meeting someting in June
or July. Please contact Don if you would like to participate.
We had a couple of Microsoft folks, Matt Hester & Bill Steele,
visit us after their MSDN presentation in Beavercreek eariler that day.
There was a fair amount of discussion of Windows / Linux interoperability
(including Samba
and Windows
Services for UNIX), IE Content Advisor, GhostBuster, RootkitRevealer,
and other security issues. They reminded us that requests
/ suggestions for improving Windows should be sent to the Microsoft
Wish Program.
George Ewing announced
free Linux courses at HP
Learning Center - Linux 101. GT
mentioned that help will be needed setting up Internet access
for ARRL and others before Hamvention May 20—22,
2005. Chuck Gelm mentioned his writeup of setting 802.11b at his web site. Andrew Lynch
gave a brief overview of DAY-MUG, the
Greater Dayton Ohio MythTV User Group. Someone mentioned that they
had found the Hauppage WinTV-GO (not the more desirable PVR250 or
PVR350) for $20 at dealnews.com.
Ken Phelps mentioned the multimedia centric live CD distro dyne:bolic.
The lack of a scheduled topic prompted a query of those present what
they would like to have presented, or be willing to present, at future
meetings. Suggestions included, in no particular order, were:
- Multi-OS interoperability (Samba and / or Windows Services for UNIX)
- Low cost firewall (FREESCO, theWall, ClosedBSD (AKA floppywall), SmoothWall, etc.)
- webmin (It's best to learn how to administer systems using config files, but webmin makes it easier)
- Synching PDAs
- Disk partitioning - A good overview is here
- Virtual laptop: using a "thumb drive" with a "LiveCD" such as Kanotix, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, etc.
- Demo of MythTV or similar PVR installation. Scripted? Seat of Pants? "Franken Myth7quot;?
- GPL and real world (commercial) implications
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meeting
February 2005
Our last Linux Installfest was held in the University of Dayton's
McGinnis Center from 10:30 am — 5:00 pm Saturday, February 26th.
This event was free and open to the public. In spite of the unusually
warm weather for February, several people brought their computer to get
assistance with installing Linux.
We had several Linux
distributions (AKA distros) available, including Fedora Core 3,
Mandrake
10.1 Official, SuSE
9.2 Professional, Ubuntu 4.10, Xandros
Desktop OS Open Circulation Edition 2 and 3,
and others. We also had some "live CDs" such as FreeSBIE 1.1, Knoppix 3.7, and Kanotix 2005-01.
A "live CD" allows you to try Linux without actually installing
anything to your hard disk. They are also very useful for testing
for hardware compatibility - great if you're considering installing
Linux on a laptop, which are often more difficult than on desktop PCs.
We also had VidaLinux 1.1
(AKA Gentoo Done Right).
We also had KnoppMyth
R4V5 (and R5A10 for those who like the bleeding
edge) and help from Andrew Lynch for anyone interested in setting
up a MythTV (think build
it yourself Tivo without the subscription fee). In addition,
we had some utility and special purpose CDs such as SmoothWall 2.0 and
Ultimate Boot CD 3.2
full.
The distros we offered were $1 / CD (some distros we provide consist
of as many as 5 CDs, but most are fewer) or $3 / DVD. The CDs or DVDs
we provide generally have either exactly the same content as, or similar
to, but with fewer included applications, as what you could buy off
the shelf at Micro Center, etc. for $30 to $90. But they don't include
phone or web support, or a printed book. That's what user groups, such
as our Linux SIG, are for! Matt Smith was available to help install Gentoo Linux, for those who wanted to
get faster performance than they would from other distros.
top last meeting next meeting
About 20 folks eventually found their way to our February meeting
in WSU's Health Sciences Building (not our usual location in the Russ
Engineering Center). Andrew Lynch gave an enthusiasticly received
presentation on MythTV,
followed by a lengthy Q & A session. You can see his
slides here.
Andrew started Greater Dayton OH MythTV
User Group last month. Jason Cook suggested using PowerStrip with
(gasp) Windows for setting scan rates.
After a lively review of cryptography and discussion of the flaw found
in SHA-1, we had our
very first GPG
keysigning party, organized by Paul Visscher. Six and a half people
participated. Ask Ken Phelps about the half person. ;-)
I was unable to join those who adjourned to TGI Friday's after the
meeting. I'm sure there was plenty of lively discussion there.
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January 2005
Our January meeting was held in room 140 of WSU's Health
Sciences Building and a few of you actually found us.
Attendance was quite low, but that was most likely due to the rest of
you having the common sense to not try driving that night. The roads
were in quite poor condition due to the snow storm.
Paul Visscher gave an interesting presentation about encryption, as
it applies to hashing, symmetric/asymmetric key encryption, why RSA
works, P and NP, etc. GPG/PGP were briefly discussed in
that context. How to use GPG will most likely be discussed in a
future meeting, but probably not by Paul. You may review Paul's slides
here. Paul offered to conduct a key signing
party at next month's meeting and recommends having one each month
for the forseeable future.
Due to the very small attendance, little else was discussed.
About half of us enjoyed food, drink, and conversation at the El Rancho
Grande Mexican Restaurant & Cantina across the street.
top last meeting next meeting
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