SOLUG

Thanks Eric for writing up the minutes for this months meeting:

It’s been a while since we’ve posted minutes from the meeting. Sorry about that; I’ve missed a lot of meetings…

Bob started by demoing a live CD that will replace a lost Windows password. The site is http://www.pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

and gives you instructions on how to use it. The website claims that the method works on every version of Windows since NT3.5 (all the way to 7…including 64-bit).

Backing up data was next on the menu. Neil wanted to know what various backup solutions were being utilized in the group. Instead of providing a play-by-play I’ll just list some of the ideas/packages that were thrown around:

Bash scripts (tarball)
rsync

automysqlbackup

Git

repository for configuration files
Bacula

Amanda

Arkeia

fwbackups

Dirvish

CrashPlan

NimbleStorage

Some other points that came out of the discussion was that RAID configuration should not be used as a backup solution because replicating corrupt data is still corrupt data.

Buying a group lot of Yubikeys was brought up. It looks like we’ll get a bunch. Let me know if you want in. There will be 10 in the lot available however at least 5 have been spoken for. They’ll likely end up in the $11-12 for each (incl tax and shipping).

Doing a mall presentation and install fest was discussed. A public install fest was generally discouraged, however, the idea of supporting a non-profit organization was put out there. If you know of any speak up on the mailing list.

A couple of other ideas: having an entry in the Peachfest parade distributing various forms of material (maybe get sponsors if need be), working with school-age kids in some way or another.

A great idea of doing a joint video unified meeting with another LUG was suggested. Perhaps Bellingham, Calgary, Victoria…etc…

I believe that wraps up this month’s meeting. Cheers.

Our next meeting is:

November 2, 2011
7:00 PM
Windward Software
Please note that we enter through the back (Northwest) corner meeting room. Not at the front door of Windward. If you turn left off Yorkton into the parking lot we’re at the door near the chain link fence. Just look for the geeks.

Nick has offered to do a presentation on the newest release of Ubuntu. Featuring all that is new and exciting.

John will talk about YubiKey.

Anything else that people would like to discuss?

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions please join our mailing list and post there.

LONG LIVE THE PENGUIN!

(Sorry about the late update to the meeting notification)

Nathan has offered to do a presentation on Chef and Puppet.

Fergus and John will show off our Notion Ink Adams. Fergus is running the EdenX ROM which is basically the stock ROM with some customizations. John is running what is known as Beast ROM.

If you have anything you’d like to see discussed or have a presentation you’d like to do, please post it in the Mailing List (link at the top of the site).

April 6, 2011
7:00 PM
Windward Software

Thanks Eric for taking minutes during the meeting.

John did a presentation on Bacula (or the commercial site here). He chose Bacula over Amanda only because he’s played with it before. Bacula is an open source network backup/restore product that runs on BSD, Linux, MacOS, Unix, etc. You can restore specific files or restore to a point in time and can scale to 10,000 machines. The Bacula are as follows:
Director: is the brains of the operation (handles schedules, authentication and controls backup operations)
Console: command line interface that controls the director
Storage: is what writes to the actual devices (tape, etc)
Catalogues: handles the storage of the catalogues
File (or client): is what sends the information to be backed up
These daemons can be parted out onto individual machines for larger scale installs but they could also be installed on one machine for smaller installations.

John went on to demonstrate a Bacula installation and went through the configuration files. The configuration seemed fairly straight forward however John pointed out that the various passwords which allow the daemons to communicate to each other can get confusing. If decide to give this a try this diagram should help in that respect. Using Bacula console John showed how to force jobs out of schedule or perform a specified job configurable at the time you want the job to run. During the course of his demonstration John also managed to travel to the future, perform a backup, and return to current time (at least that’s what his Bacula job history told us) in front of our very eyes.

Bacula-bat is a GUI for the Bacula console that seemed fairly user friendly, so if you prefer being a mouse jockey than being a keyboard cowboy then this might be a good tool to check out.

Other features include a Linux Bare Metal Recovery USB Key which, if your hard drive fails, would allow you to install a clean hard drive and, using the bootable USB key, allow you to pull an image onto the hard drive. There’s Bacula Web, a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003/2007 plugin and data encryption.

If you just want to backup your single PC you may want to consider other options that are simpler (ie. rsync, scripts, bup, etc.).

The random things mentioned included:
Pentadactyl – a Firefox add-on to make browsing more efficient and keyboard friendly
Clonezilla – liveCD cloning utility
Linux Fest Northwest – …just to please John…
LibreOffice – forked from OpenOffice and which seems to be the way to go now that OpenOffice is owned by Oracle

Next month’s topic will be “System Administration”. Nathan has already volunteered to talk about Chef and Puppet.

See you March 2nd at 7:00 PM at Windward Software in Penticton!

From the mailing list:

As part of our discussions at the meeting last night, we talked about
the idea of having a topic/theme for each monthly meeting.

Some ideas (off the top of my head) and in no particular order:

- System Administration
- Backups and Disaster Recovery
- Security - firewalls, system lock down, secure distros, monitoring,
logging, etc
- Window Managers / Desktop Environments
- email (server and/or client)
- Alternatives to Microsoft/proprietary products - e.g. Exchange
Server, Photoshop, etc
- Web hosting
- Programming/scripting
- multimedia
- Embedded Linux
- Linux for newbies
- NAS/SAN options

Can you think of any other topics that would be interesting? Please
reply with them.

The consensus was that this was a good idea. For February we will do
"Backups and Disaster Recovery". Possible presentations:

- Enterprise level backup solutions - Amanda, Bacula, etc
- Home products
- Backing up a mixed environment network
- tape backups
- Scripts you've written yourself to backup your PCs
- Backing up to the cloud - Anybody doing this? Do you encrypt data?
- Bare metal recovery - Clonezilla? others?

I'm going to do a presentation on Bacula (or Amanda) for February.
Anybody else? It could be as simple as a 2 minute talk about a script
you wrote.

See you all February 2nd.

If you have any suggestions or comments please post them on the mailing list.

November 3, 2010 at Windward Software 7:00PM – 3547 Skaha Lake Rd, Penticton.

Nathan will be doing a presentation on the Smalltalk programming language and the Seaside web framework.

We’ll also continue our discussion of the solug.org site and anything else that tickles our fancy.