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MUUG Monthly Meetings for 2014-15


Please note our new meeting location: 1M28 Manitoba Hall, University of Winnipeg, entrance on Ellice Ave. between Spence and Balmoral St. (Check out the UofW's maps for nearby parking locations.)

September 9, 2014: Sage

Sage is a free open-source program that allows (in the style of Mathematica or Maple) various types of symbolic manipulation.

As described on the web page, Sage is built out of nearly 100 open-source packages and features a unified interface. It can be used to study elementary and advanced, pure and applied mathematics. This includes a huge range of mathematics, including basic algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, exact linear algebra and much more. It combines various software packages and seamlessly integrates their functionality into a common experience. It is well-suited for education and research.

The user interface is a notebook in a web browser or the command line. Using the notebook, Sage connects either locally to your own Sage installation or to a Sage server on the network. Inside the Sage notebook you can create embedded graphics, beautifully typeset mathematical expressions, add and delete input, and share your work across the network.

Michael Doob was our presenter for this topic.

Before the break, as this month's RTFM topic, Rob Keizer talked about the tmux(1) command.

October 14, 2014: Network Hosting - 100% UNIX

This month, Adam Thompson talked about setting up a 100% UNIX- and Linux-based network and hosting environment from scratch. Adam gave a high-level overview of each major component, including Routing with BGP, Firewalling, VM Hosting, DNS, Mail, Monitoring with SNMP and more.

As this month's RTFM topic, Paul Sierks talked about the pv(1) command.

November 18, 2014: LiveCode

This month, Brad Vokey gave a demonstration of LiveCode: an open source, cross-platform, rapid application development language. LiveCode evolved from MetaCard (the original Unix HyperCard clone) into becoming a true cross-platform IDE capable of running on iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, and several variations of Unix including Linux, Solaris, and BSD. It can be used to write mobile, desktop and server/CGI applications and is the most widely used HyperCard/HyperTalk clone.

LiveCode uses a high level, English-like programming language that is dynamically typed and tightly integrated to your program's interface. The language and compile-free work flow generate code that is self-documenting and very easy for casual programmers to comprehend.

As this month's RTFM topic, Wyatt Zacharias compared and contrasted the curl(1) and wget(1) commands.

Meet Your New Board

The MUUG Board for the 2014-2015 year was elected by acclamation at the November general meeting. Your board now consists of 10 members:
  1. Trevor Cordes
  2. Gilbert Detillieux
  3. Michael Doob
  4. Robert Keizer
  5. Kevin McGregor
  6. Katherine Scrupa
  7. Paul Sierks
  8. Adam Thompson
  9. Brad Vokey
  10. Wyatt Zacharias
A big thank you to all the nominees who let their names stand for election, an extra-special welcome to Paul Sierks, and a welcome-back to Katherine Scrupa.

Board Positions

The new board held their first board meeting on November 24th, and elected the following executive officers for the current year: Adam Thompson assumes the role of Past President. The board also appointed a banking committee made up of Brad Vokey, Gilbert Detillieux and Kevin McGregor.

December 9, 2014: Real-Time Mapping with *ouchDB

Mingling and Pot Luck

As 2014 drew to a close, MUUG decided to continue our new tradition of turning the December meeting into more of a social event.

This was a totally pot-luck event. Cookies and pop were provided by MUUG, but members were encouraged to bring their own food to sample and share.

Real-Time Mapping with *ouchDB

After the mingling and munching, Robert Keizer presented how he set up a very simple real-time map using an Android phone and some JavaScript. The talk focused on separating the data layers and some of the nice features in *ouchDB.

Winnipeg Harvest Food Drive

Also as in previous years, we combined our pot luck with a food drive for Winnipeg Harvest. Thanks the the MUUG members who generously contributed to the bin!

January 13, 2015: Arduino Networking

For the main presentation, Wyatt Zacharias presented how to use the Arduino networking shield as either a client or server in your network, and how it can be integrated with other Arduino peripherals. The demonstration included integration of a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor into a web server or client.

This month's RTFM segment featured reposync(1), presented by Adam Thompson. Reposync is used to synchronize a remote yum(1) repository to a local directory.

February 10, 2015: SaltStack for SysAdmins

Theo Baschak presented how to use SaltStack to make your life easier, whether you administer a few hobby servers or an entire fleet of corporate systems. Enforce good SysAdmin (planning/testing/backup) skills by publishing templated configs! Run security updates on all your systems at once. Run pre-defined distributed Nagios host/service checks via the new Nagios module! For those that haven't heard of SaltStack before, it is a configuration management system that enforces state. It is usually compared with Puppet and Chef, and has been gaining popularity over the last few years.

March 10, 2015: Building a Datacenter

The main presentation this month was Les, of Les.net fame, talking about how to build a datacenter.

This month's RTFM segment featured Brad Vokey, who explored the fold(1), fmt(1), and pr(1) commands.

April 14, 2015: Arch Linux

Paul Sierks presented an overview of the Arch Linux operating system, from installing the base system and desktop environment, to updating and managing it. He covered some of the advantages in this distribution. Arch focuses on simplicity, minimalism, and stability. Users can create their own ideal environment, installing only what is needed or wanted. A rolling release model, Arch strives to be bleeding edge, providing the latest stable software. Paul performed a live demonstration of the Arch install process.

This month's RTFM segment was ionice(1), by Adam Thompson. Similar to what nice does for CPU scheduling, ionice gets or sets the I/O scheduling class and priority for a program.

May 12, 2015: GoAccess and AD Integration with SSSD

This month was a double feature, with Wyatt Zacharias presenting the tool GoAccess for real-time Apache log analyzing, and report generation. Adam Thompson then presented how to integrate a RHEL-based system with Windows Active Directory for login authentication using SSSD.

This month's RTFM segment featured units(1), a versatile unit conversion tool, presented by Gilbert Detillieux.

June 9, 2015: Git Bisect Your Way to Fame and Fortune

Hit a bug that no one is fixing? Don't know enough C to debug it yourself? In this month's presentation, Trevor Cordes discussed using git-bisect(1), in a process from bug discovery through to kernel patch commit. This wasn't some dry, isolated git rehash either: we saw how to leverage distro resources and integrate them with "vanilla", all from a non-kernel hacker perspective. We also learned how to get the necessary attention of the appropriate movers and shakers. ('cause it's often about who you know!) Wrapped in a riveting story containing angry wives, Downton Abbey, and a twist ending, this was one presentation you'll be sorry you missed!

Trevor has made his presentation slides available, in both ODP and PDF format.

This month's RTFM segment featured fail2ban(1), a versatile tool for blocking network abusers, presented by Gilbert Detillieux. Gilbert gave an overview of the architecture, described the fail2ban-client(1) command (with a demo of certain sub-commands), and walked us through the confusing (and sometimes elusive) jail.conf(5) man page, and the plethora of configuration files.

July 2015: No meeting this month

August 2015: No meeting this month

Please note our new meeting location: 1M28 Manitoba Hall, University of Winnipeg, entrance on Ellice Ave. between Spence and Balmoral St. (Check out the UofW's maps for nearby parking locations.)

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