Capital Area BSD Users Group

This month, we met at our office and talked about some SysAdmin best practices and tricks. We talked about different tricks to manipulate output of commands using awk in for loops in the shell and several other things.

Then, the big announcement: DCBSDCon 2009! Jason Dixon is organizing the event, with my (and others’) help. If you’d like to be involved, please send us email.

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Sorry for the late meeting wrap-up email.

At this meeting, Jason Dixon spoke about network accounting and some general network troubleshooting. His talk included a demo of his Netflow Dashboard project. In his talk, he also talked about NetFlow and OpenBSD’s new pflow and pfflowd.

Afterwards, we headed to The Green Turtle for dinner and drinks.

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I started the meeting with a presentation on using OpenBSD as a remote MP3 player using OpenBSD, mpd, icecast, ssh and mplayer. I use this to listen to music on my laptop wirelessly (in a DMZ) and the MP3 files are on my OpenBSD server on my LAN. It’s secure and easy to use.

We followed this up with Patrick’s suggestion for a round table discussion on some “Best Practices.” This was a very informal discussion that covered things like shell configuration files, using OpenSSH’s multiplexing and dynamic port forwarding, shell command history using, set -o emacs/vi and more.

We then made our way to The Green Turtle for more casual BSD discussions and food (and drink). Thanks to everyone that made it.

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Jason Dixon started the meeting with a demo of mod_security. He was followed by a brief introduction and a demonstration of Amanda from Dustin Mitchell. I am proud of myself for not bringing up Bacula even once (ohai, Jason).

We followed the meeting up with some pizza and drinks at Pub Dog (or is it Dog Pub).
Thanks to Jason and Dustin for presenting and everyone else for attending. See you in August.

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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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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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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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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.

Read more »

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Our January 29, 2008 meeting marks CapBUG’s one year birthday. We celebrated with a great Samba talk me Johan Huldtgren, a GNU/screen talk by me and a special BSD Cake that Patrick Thomasson brought for the group.

After the meeting, we tried the Dog Pub for some pizza and beer. I thought it was OK.

Thanks to the CapBUG members and contributors for making our first year a great one. I hope the next year will be just as good (or better).

See you next month!

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This month’s meeting was once again at Raba in Columbia. We had nine attendees, but with two presenters, that’s not all that great! In a BSD Users Group, it’s the Users that make the group great! I hope we have more participation next month.

To start us off, Johan Huldtgren gave a short talk about FreeBSD’s GEOM ([PDF Slides]). He discussed the basics behind the software RAID framework and explained how he uses it.

To close the meeting, Bret Lambert (tbert) gave a talk about contributing code to the OpenBSD project ([HTML Slides]). He talked about learning C, finding a place to start, kernel hacking and being patient waiting for interest in your diffs.

Audio versions of the meeting are also available as part of MetaBUG: OGG and MP3. (Thanks to Newt0n for hosting the files)

Many thanks to Johan and Bret for their great talks!

We adjourned the meeting across the street at the Green Turtle.

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