Capital Area BSD Users Group

This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, July 29, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

Jason Dixon will be giving a presentation on the mod_security Apache module.

Afterwards, Dustin Mitchell will give an introduction to Amanda ‘mini-talk’.

Following the talks, we’ll have food and drinks at a local food/drink establishment.

Please RSVP to the list (or to me) if you are attending so I can have an approximate head count.

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This month, Patrick Thomasson gave an interesting talk about ‘wiring down’ devices in FreeBSD. The gist of the talk was: when Patrick added a fiber channel card to the system with existing SCSI disks, FreeBSD changed the order in which the drives were detected. This temporarily broke his ZFS Pools. By ‘wiring down’ the devices, he was able to for FreeBSD to load the SCSI disks in the order necessary to maintain continuity with his drives and ZFS Pools.

Following that, I gave a demonstration of tmux and how it compares to screen.

This month, we had an extremely small crowd: four (including me). An interesting thing happened with such a small crowd… the entire meeting was completely interactive. There was MUCH discussion during Patrick’s talk.

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This month we’ll be meeting on Thursday, June 26, 6:30pm EST at SRA/Raba in Columbia, MD (Suite 205).

This month, Patrick Thomasson will talk about “wiring down” devices in FreeBSD. After that, I’ll give a demonstration of a BSD-licensed screen-like tool called tmux.

Then, we’ll head over to a local watering hole for some beers and grub.

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This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, May 27, 6:30pm EST at Raba in Columbia, MD. Directions

I will be talking about and demonstrating Bacula.

Afterwards, we’ll congregate at a nearby water hole for food and drinks and wish a fond farewell to one of our CapBUG members from Day 1: blambert@.

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April’s meeting consisted of a slightly larger than normal crowd. Having a guest speaker must have had something to do with that.

The meeting opened with Todd Carson talking about his experience finding and submitting a bug which turned into an OpenBSD Errata entry.

Following Todd’s talk, Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI Computer Consulting, gave live demonstrations of both ZFS and DTrace. Theo showed some of the many features of ZFS while demonstrating some of them on live Solaris systems and his Apple laptop, including snapshotting. Then, he showed and described how to use DTrace to see what a process is doing. Without concrete problems to solve, it’s difficult to show DTrace in all of its glory, but Theo managed to give a great demonstration. To paraphrase: the hard part is coming up with good questions to ask DTrace.

Then, as an aside, Theo showed us how valgrind (on Linux) can point you to exactly where the bugs in your code are.

Thanks to both Todd and Theo for taking the time to talk to us. See you next month.

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This month we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, April 29, 6:30pm EST at Raba in Columbia, MD. Directions

Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI Computer Consulting, will give a talk on ZFS and Dtrace.  Both of these are available in FreeBSD, although many of the useful features are not integrated yet.  Theo will introduce both technologies and give practical examples (on OpenSolaris) for using them in engineering environments.

Todd Carson will also give a brief talk on how his diff became OpenBSD 4.2 Errata entry 008.

Afterwards, we’ll congregate at a nearby water hole for food and drinks, and to celebrate the release of OpenBSD 4.3!

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The March meeting consisted of a brief presentation (given by me) about using CVS for Configuration Management. We had a fairly light crowd comprised of most of “the regulars”. After talking about CVS, we also discussed Nagios and I gave a demo of how I’m using it to monitor my home network.

Following the meeting, most of us convened at the Dog Pub for some pizza and beer (or soda, as the case may be).

Thanks to everyone that made it out.

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This month, we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, March 25 at Raba in Columbia, MD.

Todd Carson will give a brief talk on how his diff became OpenBSD 4.2 Errata entry 008. Todd will talk about his Errata submission next month. I will talk about using CVS to store your configuration files.

As usual, we’ll grab a beer and food after the meeting at either Green Turtle, Nottingham’s or the Dog Pub.

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Our February meeting consisted of Sysadmin Games (the brainchild of Jason Dixon). Jason brought with him a “server” (beige box) running some form of Linux and VMware Server. He had prepared blank VMware guest systems ready to be loaded with Open, Net, Free or Dragonfly BSD. After a quick trivia contest to choose which team was assigned which BSD, we got started.

The goal was to install your assigned BSD, configure networking, a web server with HTTPS and the firewall. While we were allowed “shout-outs” for help, no one seemed to use that and preferred to use their 10 minute “web search” lifeline. All of the teams fared very well, running into small problems along the way. Only one team completed the task with perfection.

All in all, Sysadmin Games was a huge success. We will have to start planning for future competitions.

Update: (notes from Jason)

I took notes during the meeting to track how teams were doing, how well the server was holding up, and what can be done better in the future.  Surprisingly, everything went very smoothly except for the host platform (VMware on CentOS) choking at times.  It seems that VMware doesn’t behave nicely when you have four teams beating on the vmware console over the network.  Regardless, we managed to clear those minor obstacles and every team finished with a “passing” score.

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This month, we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, February 26 at Raba in Columbia, MD. Jason Dixon will be serving as BOFH for our first SysAdmin Games. As usual, we’ll grab a beer and food after the meeting at either Green Turtle, Nottingham’s or the Dog Pub.

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