Dec 10: Don Law's Christmas Lights - On Location at Don's House!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday December 1st, 2009 at 6:07 PM

IMPORTANT! This month we will be meeting at Don Law's house! Do not go to our usual meeting place!

About the Presentation:

In the summer of 2007 Don Law gave two talks to the FLUX group on how he built Linux-controlled Christmas lights - synchronized to music - using various FOSS (Free Open Source Software) components. (The slides from that presentation are still online at flux.donlaw.com). For the December meeting, Don and Barbara have invited us to meet at their house to enjoy the final product. This is mostly a social event, but Don will give a brief whiteboard talk on the new features that have been added since the last presentation.

The house is located off University Drive, between Broward Blvd and Sunrise Blvd (near Motorola) at 7730 NW 11th Place, Plantation, FL 33322. Directions and a Google map are available at the website for the light show, lights.donlaw.com

Extra parking is available at a vacant lot about 50 yards to the northwest (see diagram on site).

Don Law has been a Unix developer in South Florida since 1984 and has worked on software for mobile phones, mainframes, high availability clusters, operating systems, storage controllers, nuclear power plants, missile simulators, and security appliances. He sometimes modifies his computer systems with a hacksaw. He has been an electronics hobbyist since middle school. To demonstrate his partial lack of sanity, for fun in college he wrote an arbitrary precision arithmetic program in assembly for a 12 instruction single register CPU that required self-modifying code using punch cards. Don has a BS in Math and Computer Science from Furman University and a MS in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and FAU.

Mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY DECEMBER 10th at Don Law's House!

November 12: Multicore Software & Virtualization

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday November 3rd, 2009 at 6:16 AM

TOPIC:	Multicore Software & Virtualization
PRESENTER:	Jeffrey Fortin of Wind River!
DATE:	Thursday October 12, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

About the Presentation:

Multicore processors provide design teams with more processing power in smaller packages with less power consumption than ever before. Harnessing this compute power effectively can be challenging due to the increased complexity of multicore system design. This presentation will look into the primary multicore software configurations such as SMP, AMP and sAMP and show how virtualization can be used to increase the performance, capability, and reliability of multicore designs. The presentation will present real world examples of effective use of multicore and virtualization in the embedded space.

About the Presenter:

Jeffrey Fortin - SE Director for Field Engineering, Wind River Systems, Inc.

Mr. Fortin has been involved in the embedding computing world for over 20 years. He started his career at Raytheon developing combat control software for the US Navy. He has been with Wind River since 2000 starting as a Field Applications Engineer. Today he manages the SE Field Engineering group. His personal interests include travel, photography and he is an avid runner completing over 15 marathons since 2002. His best time is 3:49:36 at the 2009 Walt Disney World Marathon. Mr. Fortin lives in Orlando and is also a proud new grandfather.

Mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY NOVEMBER 12th at Nova Southeastern University!

October 8: VMWare Server

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday October 2nd, 2009 at 7:20 AM

TOPIC:	VMWare Server Setup
PRESENTER:	Carl Couric, Unix Guru!
DATE:	Thursday October 8, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

About the Presentation:

VMware Server is a free hosted virtualization platform that installs like an application on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines. Carl will discuss the differences between VMWare and similar products and demonstrate how to install and configure a VMWare server. Then somebody gets to take the 1U (and very loud) server home as a door prize!

About the Presenter:

Carl has over 29 years of computer experience. His first PC was a PDP-11 running RT-11 in a back closet of a raised floor computer room at Racal-Milgo in Miami when Racal-Milgo Modems were the hot items. His long term work has been mostly in OpenVMS. In late 80s, Carl worked on a few Unix OS for miniframes, like V7M for PDP-11 and Ultrix for MicroVax, when the internet was mostly UUCP connections between computers and email addresses had "!" (called BANG) in them and news groups ruled the internet. But after meeting a young talented Grad Student from Finland (Linus Torvalds) at the 1995 DEC Users Group convention in Washington, D.C. decided to give a new Unix Operation system a look over, the LINUX operating system. Since then, Carl has been working on integration projects between OpenVMS, Linux and that other M$ brands. Currently, Carl is working for Commcare Pharmacy as their Director of IT which uses Linux, Oracle, MySQL, VMware and other Open Source programs to run all critical business requirements for Commcare

Door Prize Alert!

Carl is bringing a door prize. If you have 1U free in a rack and can tolerate loud continuous noise, you want to be at this meeting!

Mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY OCTOBER 8th at Nova Southeastern University!

September 17: Drupal! - Also Mozilla announcement

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday September 10th, 2009 at 8:30 PM

TOPIC:	Migrating Your Website to Drupal!
PRESENTER:	Mick Weiss, Drupal Guru!
DATE:	Thursday September 17, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

About the Presentation:

Drupal is a highly scalable and extensible open source Content Management System (CMS), and a great choice for a number of applications:

• Corporate / Fortune 500 websites
• E-Commerce applications
• Community web portals
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Wikis
• Video sharing websites
• Mobile website (for iPhones)
• Putting your website or web app "in the cloud" (ex: Amazon EC2)

Mick will be doing a live demo, taking the FLUX website and converting it from its present form, using the MyUserGroup CMS (http://mug.sourceforge.net/) to Drupal.

Some websites that use Drupal:

• Sun Microsystems Java
• Sun's Open Office
• AOL Developer Network
• Yahoo!
• Adobe Inc.
• Nike
• Warner Brothers Records
• Sony
• Universal Music
• Harvard
• Ubuntu
• Novell
• Open Source Initiative (OSI)
• Electronic Fronier Foundation

About the Presenter:

Mick Weiss is a software developer and network administrator and a long time FLUX member!

MOZILLA ADD-ONS EVENT IN MIAMI SEPTEMBER 15

Although it is not a FLUX event, this will be of interest to Open Source software developers in the South Florida area. A number of Mozilla (Firefox web browser, etc) developers are holding a daylong event in Miami. The topic is developing add-ons for Mozilla software. More information about the event is here.

Meanwhile, mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 17th at Nova Southeastern University!

September meeting postponed

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday September 8th, 2009 at 6:44 AM

Hi all,

The September meeting will be postponed one week, to Thursday September 17th. The announcement will be posted shortly.

We also need volunteers to speak at future meetings. If you know about some aspect of Linux or a related topic, please share what you know by doing a talk at an upcoming FLUX meeting. The remaining 2009 meeting dates are October 8, November 12 and December 10. If you would like to volunteer, please e-mail adamglass@gmail.com . Remember that FLUX is an all-volunteer organization, so please help us keep going!

Thanks!

August 13: DNS 101

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday August 5th, 2009 at 9:52 PM

TOPIC:	DNS 101
PRESENTER:	Carl Couric, Unix Guru!
DATE:	Thursday August 13, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

About the Presentation:

DNS lets you type www.flux.org into your web browser instead of 72.35.89.241 . Most medium and large organizations run their own DNS servers to designate certain machines to handle web serving, others for mail, etc. The presentation will give an overview of how DNS works, and then will dive into details of the various kinds of records and how they are used. A couple of free tools that make DNS administration easier will also be shown.

About the Presenter:

Carl has over 29 years of computer experience. His first PC was a PDP-11 running RT-11 in a back closet of a raised floor computer room at Racal-Milgo in Miami when Racal-Milgo Modems were the hot items. His long term work has been mostly in OpenVMS. In late 80s, Carl worked on a few Unix OS for miniframes, like V7M for PDP-11 and Ultrix for MicroVax, when the internet was mostly UUCP connections between computers and email addresses had "!" (called BANG) in them and news groups ruled the internet. But after meeting a young talented Grad Student from Finland (Linus Torvalds) at the 1995 DEC Users Group convention in Washington, D.C. decided to give a new Unix Operation system a look over, the LINUX operating system. Since then, Carl has been working on integration projects between OpenVMS, Linux and that other M$ brands. Currently, Carl is working for Commcare Pharmacy as their Director of IT which uses Linux, Oracle, MySQL, VMware and other Open Source programs to run all critical business requirements for Commcare

Door Prize Alert!

Carl is bringing a door prize. If you have 1U free in a rack and can tolerate loud continuous noise, you want to be at this meeting!

Mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY AUGUST 13th at Nova Southeastern University!

Slides from Credentialing and Real Time presentations

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday July 13th, 2009 at 11:25 PM

Slides from our two previous talks are now online!

• User Credentialing on the Internet by Bill Tabor, June 2009
• Meeting Real-Time Requirements with Linux by Jeffrey Fortin, July 2009

July 9: Meeting Real-Time Requirements With Linux

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday June 29th, 2009 at 9:19 PM

TOPIC:	Meeting Real-Time Requirements With Linux
PRESENTER:	Jeffrey Fortin of Wind River!
DATE:	Thursday July 9, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

About the Presentation:

Linux is being used more and more in embedded devices such as cell phones, networking gear, and even MP3 players. As software engineers work to integrate the Linux run-time into these devices, they often find that there can be several challenges to meeting real-time requirements. So what is real-time and how can we meet real-time requirements using Linux?

About the Presenter:

Jeffrey Fortin - SE Director for Field Engineering, Wind River Systems, Inc.

Mr. Fortin has been involved in the embedding computing world for over 20 years. He started his career at Raytheon developing combat control software for the US Navy. He has been with Wind River since 2000 starting as a Field Applications Engineer. Today he manages the SE Field Engineering group. His personal interests include travel, photography and he is an avid runner completing over 15 marathons since 2002. His best time is 3:49:36 at the 2009 Walt Disney World Marathon. Mr. Fortin lives in Orlando and is also a proud new grandfather.

Mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY JULY 9th at Nova Southeastern University!

June 11: User Credentialing on the Internet

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday June 2nd, 2009 at 1:57 PM

TOPIC:	User Credentialing on the Internet
PRESENTER:	Bill Tabor, Longtime FLUX member and Linux Guru!
DATE:	Thursday June 11, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has created the new Office of Cybersecurity Coordinator and laid out the administration’s plans for bolstering cybersecurity.

Where does this lead us?

The government is pushing us to use PKI (Public/Private Key Infrastructure). Credentials are already on CAC and TWIC cards. The Federation for Identity and Cross-Credentialing Systems (FiXs) card is coming.

Structure has already been put in place. To deal with various Federal entities today, via email or web, you must have and ECA (External Certificate Authority) certificate.

This talk will explain:

1. How PKI works
2. How to set up a secure web server
   • Server credentials and crl
   • Client credentials
3. How to use your client certificate to sign documents and email
4. Using LDAP to store user credentials

About the Presenter:

William Tabor - Vice President of Research and Development, Protexx, Inc.

Mr. Tabor leads Protexx's product development team with the strength and perspective of a proven professional, as someone who has been directly involved with many of the most significant developments in information technology over the past 30 years. He has contributed to the coding that formed the foundation of the Internet, has championed the development and dissemination of open source operating systems, and has created database software so effective that elements of it remain inside virtually every computer operating today.

Now, as Vice President of Research and Development, Mr. Tabor is able to put this breadth of expertise toward a singular goal: the development of secure, leading-edge information solutions for today's growing enterprises. Mr. Tabor is well versed in a broad variety of hardware platforms and operating systems, is comfortable working in real-time production environments, and specializes in the adaptation of new technologies to eliminate long-standing problems.

Mr. Tabor has completed a BSIE in Systems Analysis from the University of Miami and Engineering coursework at Carnegie-Mellon University, as well as Masters-level coursework at Nova University. He is a Protege of C. Gordon Bell, noted developer of early commercial computing systems, and Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, pioneering computer programmer.

Mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY JUNE 11th at Nova Southeastern University!

May 14: Fedora Directory Server - LDAP

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday May 6th, 2009 at 11:03 PM

TOPIC:	Fedora Directory Server
PRESENTER:	Kwan Lowe!
DATE:	Thursday May 14, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Fedora Directory Server (FDS) is a full-featured LDAP directory server available under a GPL/Apache license. This talk will explain the basics of setting up FDS on CentOS 5.3 and configuring clients to authenticate against FDS.

Kwan Lowe is a longtime Flux member. He works in the Royal Caribbean MidRange Systems group managing AIX and Linux servers, and is the co-owner of a small IT consulting company.

Mark your calendar! See you THURSDAY MAY 14th at Nova Southeastern University!

April Meeting Reschedule

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday April 16th, 2009 at 1:30 AM

Hi all,

We originally planned to have the April meeting on the 16th, but it will be postponed. The new date will be posted as soon as possible.

Thanks!

March 26: Android Overview

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday March 24th, 2009 at 12:55 AM

TOPIC:	Android - Nuts and Bolts
PRESENTER:	Raul Salazar of JHL Technologies!
DATE:	THIS Thursday March 26, 2009!
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Android is an Open Source operating system for mobile phones, developed by the Open Handset Alliance. In addition to an operating system, Android includes middleware and key mobile applications. The presentation will introduce the audience to...

• What is Android?
• Why use Android?
• Android Internals
• How Android Works
• Android API, SDK and Tools
• Android Applications

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr. Salazar is President and Chief Technology Officer of JHL Technologies, a global provider of advanced technical training; software, embedded, and multimedia development. Prior to joining JHL he was an assistant professor at Nova Southeastern University where he was instrumental in securing over $800,000 in donated computers and software from Gould, AT&T, Harris Corporation, and Digital Corporation. At Nova, he was instrumental in establishing a successful relationship with industry. While dedicated to academia, industry was demanding more of his time and expertise. In 1993, Raul became a joint owner of JHL. Even so, Raul maintains his roots in academia and continues to teach computer science and computer information systems courses as an adjunct professor.

For over ten years, Raul has designed and developed embedded Linux systems for the cellular and small screen industry. He also designs total home and condominium automation systems based on embedded Linux. This includes design and development of DIY Home and Environmental Monitoring, Control and Automation using Traditional Interfaces and protocols (Panel computers, sbcs, USB ports, Serial ports, X10, Insteon, UPB, etc).

Today, Dr. Salazar has over 27 years industry experience, 22 years university teaching experience, and 24 years technical training and development experience to Fortune 500 companies. He has taught and designed over 150 technical courses, which also include software development, mentoring, and consulting services in these areas. He manages a diverse team of developers and contractors. Given his broad technical and management expertise, coupled with his commitment to excellent customer relations, has garnered him the respect of his colleagues in industry, academia, and from corporations for whom he has provided his services.

Mark your calendar! See you THIS THURSDAY at Nova Southeastern University!

March and April meeting dates

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday March 17th, 2009 at 12:18 AM

Hi all,

We have to change meeting dates for March and April.

This month's meeting will be held on the fourth Thursday of the month, March 26. Dr. Raul Salazar will present a talk on Android, the open source operating system that powers the Google phone!

The April meeting will be postponed one week, so it will be held on April 16.

Details for the March 26 meeting will be posted soon. See you then!

February 19: Nagios

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday February 16th, 2009 at 2:36 AM

Hi all,

We had a little difficulty lining up this month's talk. Fortunately Kwan had already started working on something for a future meeting, and was willing to present it this week. Thank you Kwan!

TOPIC:	Nagios, Open Source Network Monitoring
PRESENTER:	Kwan Lowe
DATE:	THIS THURSDAY, February 19, 2009
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Nagios is a free, open source, widely used software package for monitoring servers and services. Nagios can alert you when something goes wrong. It can monitor network services, server load and more. Kwan's talk will give an overview of Nagios and how to configure it.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Kwan is a longtime FLUX member and Linux enthusiast. He is currently a Unix Engineer in the Mid-Range Systems Group at Royal Caribbean Cruises and is part-owner of a Unix systems consulting company.

Mark your calendar! THIS THURSDAY, February 19, at Nova Southeastern University!

January 8: Open Storage

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday December 23rd, 2008 at 9:37 PM

TOPIC:	Open Storage
PRESENTER:	John McLaughlin
DATE:	Thursday January 8, 2009
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Open Storage is to Storage as Open Systems were to Proprietary Systems.

What's the difference between a "server" and a "storage array"? Are storage devices becoming servers and servers storage devices? If so, which will win out and why? Can Open Source and Open Systems be combined into Open Storage and change the economics of Storage?

Agenda

• Today's Proprietary Storage Solutions
• Trends in the Market place
• Flash/SSDs
• Challenges for disk
• Place for tape?
• Storage services
• file sharing -- NFS and CIFS; pNFS
• block sharing -- iSCSI, FC.
• FCoE
• Tiering and HSM
• Migration, Replication, cloning, snapshots
• Storage Economics
• Existence Proofs - Cypress Storage Appliance, Sun Storage 7000 series

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Since 1998 John has been the editor-in-chief of "System News for Sun Users", a weekly publication with some 45k subscribers and 1.5 million unique web visitors/year. Sun has been pushing the ideas that have evolved into Open Storage for a couple of years and "System News" has been covering that evolution. Sun is now a leader in the Open Storage space, as it was during the emergence of Open Systems in the 1980s and 1990s..

John is also a Server Solutions Architect for Forsythe Solutions Group, a 800-person, $750M/year IT infrastructure firm with nearly 50 office in the United States and western Canada.

John graduated from the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 1982 with BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. John has been a UNIX user since 1980. (PDP 11 with Version 7 and VAX with BSD 4.x)

Mark your calendar! Thursday January 8 at Nova Southeastern University!

December 11: Encryption and Using Certificates in Web Applications

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday December 3rd, 2008 at 11:10 PM

TOPIC:	Encryption and Using Certificates in Web Applications
PRESENTER:	Joel Mussman
DATE:	Thursday December 11, 2008
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

The overall topic of security is very important, impacting system design, software architecture and system administration. One aspect of security that is often blindly used encompasses data encryption technologies. Encryption technology offers many solutions to help build a secure system, but also contains pitfalls where using this technology does not guarantee that the system suddenly becomes secure. Understanding the basics of how encryption works and is correctly used goes a long way to help produce a system that is functionally secure. This presentation will will help architects, programmers and administrators understand:

1. Symmetric encryption basics (data protection and integrity)
2. Asymmetric/public encryption basics (protection and authentication)
3. Digital signatures and repudiation
4. Digital certificates & certificate authorities
5. How certificates are used to establish ssl & ssh connections
6. Building private key insfrastructures with openssl
7. Certificate use and management for services (ie: Apache)
8. Certificate use and management in web applications (PHP and Java EE)

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Joel Mussman works as a consultant with Smallrock Internet in Coral Gables. He a system architect who specializes in mentoring the development of resilient and secure applications and environments across Unix, Linux and Microsoft platforms. Joel splits his time 50-50 between consulting and providing instructional services in software development, object-oriented programming and developing secure architectures.

Mark your calendar! Thursday December 11 at Nova Southeastern University!

Slides from Mathematica presentation

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday December 1st, 2008 at 3:33 AM

Our October 2008 meeting covered Computing and Programming with Mathematica, by Anton Antonov. Those who attended may remember that there were no traditional slides. Instead the presentation was given with actual Mathematica notebooks, which are interactive.

The notebooks are now on the website, along with a link to the free Mathematica player...

Computing and Programming with Mathematica

The page includes Anton's Morse Code Generator!

Many thanks to Anton for providing his speaking materials!

November meeting canceled

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday November 19th, 2008 at 1:17 AM

Hi all,

We were not able to come up with another speaker on short notice, so we won't have a FLUX meeting this month.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and we'll see you in December!

--Adam

November Meeting Postponed / SuSE Slides Posted

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday November 9th, 2008 at 2:52 AM

Hi all,

The November meeting will either be postponed by one week or it will be skipped. The speaker had something come up and will not be able to do the talk this month. If another person from the same organization can take his place we will send out an announcement, and move the meeting to the following Thursday 11/20.

Separately, we have slides posted from a previous talk. This one was done by Anthony Davis from Novell about SuSE and interoperability between Linux and Microsoft. Anthony sent the slides long ago but I just got them online recently. My apologies! Here's a link to them...

http://flux.org/slides/2008-07-SuSE/index.html

Please stay tuned for information about the November meeting.

Thank you!
--Adam

October meeting changed from 9th to 16th

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday October 6th, 2008 at 3:38 PM

Hi all,

It turns out that Nova Southeastern University will be closed on our regularly scheduled meeting night, in observance of a holiday.

The FLUX meeting has been rescheduled for the following Thursday, October 16th.

The original meeting announcement is here.

See you October 16th!

October 16: Computing and programming with Mathematica

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday October 2nd, 2008 at 12:13 AM

TOPIC:	Computing and programming with Mathematica
PRESENTER:	Anton Antonov
DATE:	Thursday October 16, 2008 (NOTE: Changed from the 9th!)
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Mathematica is extremely powerful software used in a wide range of technical and scientific fields, and it runs on Linux.

This talk will demonstrate the power of Mathematica as an environment for technological computations. The topics discussed are Mathematica's mathematical algorithm collection, programming language, graphics, parallel capabilities, database access and file format import/ export, and data collections. Various examples will be given: parallel air pollution simulation, handwriting recognition, music training, graphics / animation manipulation, page ranking / prestige, design pattern implementations.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Anton Antonov obtained his Ph.D. in large scale air pollution simulations in Denmark in 2001. After that he worked for six years as a kernel developer in Wolfram Research, Inc (the makers of Mathematica). Since January 2008 he is a principal engineer at Sezmi Corp.

Mark your calendar! Thursday October 16 at Nova Southeastern University!

Setember 11: Linux on Macbook Pro and on iPod!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday September 8th, 2008 at 1:04 AM

TOPIC:	Linux on Mac Book Pro and on iPod!
PRESENTERS:	Mick Weiss!
DATE:	THIS Thursday September 11, 2008
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

We all know a PC can dual boot into Linux or Windows. These days there are more Macintosh computers out there too. Mick will demonstrate how to install a dual boot Linux and OS X system on a Mac Book Pro laptop.

We also know Linux can be used on embedded devices, but very few people realize it can be installed on an iPod! Mick will show us how to do that, too!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Mick Weiss is a software engineer and Linux guru who has been a FLUX member since his high school days. He has contributed to Open Source projects and presented several topics at FLUX meetings.

Mark your calendar! THIS Thursday at Nova Southeastern University!

Speaker Needed for September Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday August 19th, 2008 at 6:49 PM

Hi all, We do not have a speaker lined up for the September FLUX meeting (or, in fact, for any other meeting at this point). As you know, we are an all-volunteer group and we need your help. If you can share some of your Linux or Open Source related knowledge, please e-mail adamglass at gmail.com . Thank you!

August 14: High Dynamic Range Photography with Linux

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday August 5th, 2008 at 4:54 PM

TOPIC:	High Dynamic Range Photography with Linux!
PRESENTERS:	Kwan Lowe and Adam Glass!
DATE:	Thursday August 14, 2008
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

HDR Photography combines several photos of the same image, each exposed differently, to produce a final picture that captures more light and shadow than the camera is able to gather in one shot. Photoshop and other programs have very expensive software to align, manipulate and combine the images, but this presentation will cover free software that you can run under Linux to do the same thing!

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Kwan is a longtime FLUX member and Linux enthusiast. He is currently a Unix Engineer in the Mid-Range Systems Group at Royal Caribbean Cruises and is part-owner of a Unix systems consulting company.

Adam is not a sysadmin, but he plays one on his Linux box.

Mark your calendar! Thursday August 14 at Nova Southeastern University!

July 10: SuSE 11 and Novell/MS Interop

Posted by Adam Glass on Saturday July 5th, 2008 at 8:56 PM

TOPIC:	SuSE 11 and the Novell/Microsoft Interop Alliance!
PRESENTER:	Anthony Davis of Novell!
DATE:	Thursday July 10, 2008
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

The presentation will cover the brand new SuSE 11 Linux distribution, which has lots of new features. The various versions of the distribution will also be covered. In addition, an overview of the Novell/Microsoft Interop Alliance, where the two companies are working together, with the goal of better integration between Linux and Windows!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Anthony Davis is Anthony Davis Senior Director, IHV Global Alliances at Novell Inc.

Educated in the UK, Mr. Davis spent 10 years at Citrix systems in Asia Pacific. He moved to the US to manage some of Citrix's most critical alliances, such as Citrix's alliance with Dell, Wyse, Novell and Accenture. Mr. Davis now works for Novell managing their global alliance with Dell, and is growing the SuSE Linux business at Dell.

Mark your calendar! Thursday July 10 at Nova Southeastern University!

Software Freedom Day

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday June 30th, 2008 at 1:41 AM

Hi all,

Software Freedom Day is a chance for groups like ours to do a little advocacy for Free / Open Source Software. Here's how the event website describes it...

"Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities."

FLUX tried to participate last year but we started late and were unable to line everything up. If there is sufficient interest, we can participate this year. The date is Saturday September 20th, and more details are on the event website, http://softwarefreedomday.org .

If you can volunteer that day, please send e-mail to adamglass at gmail dot com. Please volunteer only if you are reasonably sure you can keep the commitment. Many events have fallen apart because people drop out at the last minute.

Please also e-mail if you have suggestions for a location. It needs to be someplace with a lot of people around on a Saturday, it needs to have access to electricity and preferably the internet, and it needs to be free.

Thank you!

June 12: The Mono Project - .Net on Linux!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday June 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 AM

TOPIC:	The Mono Project - .Net on Linux!
PRESENTER:	Ricardo Richardson!
DATE:	Thursday June 12, 2008
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

The Mono Project is a software development framework, built upon the Microsoft .Net ECMA specification. Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux,Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. An overall overview of the framework with an example will be performed to show the capabilities of it.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Ricardo Richardson, is a System Engineer from the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC). Currently working as a Software Developer for the Humana Corp., developing in C# and .Net framework. A Linux Enthusiast since 2001, he's favorite distribution is Slackware cause he truly believes in the beauty of simplicity.

Mark your calendar! Thursday June 12 at Nova Southeastern University!

May 15: High Availability Server Clustering on Linux

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday May 12th, 2008 at 11:57 PM

We are fortunate that some of our long-time members step up over and over to share their knowledge. Kwan has done so, and saved us from skipping two months in a row. PLEASE consider doing your part as a speaker, and helping others expand their Linux knowledge at the same time!

TOPIC:	High Availability Server Clustering on Linux!
PRESENTER:	Kwan Lowe, long-time FLUX member and Linux guru!
DATE:	THIS THURSDAY, May 15, 2008
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

This is a brief introduction to High Availability (HA) clustering on Linux. There is a short presentation on some clustering concepts and a demonstration of HTTP failover.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Kwan is a longtime FLUX member and Linux enthusiast. He is currently a Unix Engineer in the Mid-Range Systems Group at Royal Caribbean Cruises and is part-owner of a Unix systems consulting company.

Mark your calendar! THIS Thursday at Nova Southeastern University!

Mar 20 Meeting: Blender

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday March 13th, 2008 at 11:57 PM

TOPIC:	Blender: Free, Open Source 3D Content Creation!
PRESENTER:	Sean Novak, 3D Artist and Blender guru!
DATE:	Thursday March 20, 2008 (NOTE: 3rd Thursday of the month!)
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Blender can do 3D modeling, rendering, animation and more. The presentation will give an overview of the software suite and show some of the cool stuff that has been made with it. Installation will be covered, and then a step-by-step demo of how to make a 3D version of your company logo!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Sean Novak, FAU Alumni and experienced 3D Artist, started his career as a graphic designer 10 years ago and quickly advanced himself more and more toward the World Wide Web. Some of his art has entered the US Senate as visual aid used by Senator Mandy Dawson, from the state of Florida. His remarkable talent has allowed him to work for many companies from private to public, non-profit, for-profit, as well as educational institutions such FAU Center for Ocean Engineering and the FAU Center for Electronic Communication. Sean continues his advancement by diving in deeply into Blender. His passion, motivation and dedication toward a truly understanding of this application give him the title of Guru in today's world. Today, Sean utilizes his skills and knowledge of Blender to produce state-of-the-art animations for the concept visualization industry and the web. For more information please visit his website at www.snovak.com.

Mark your calendar! Thursday March 21 at Nova Southeastern University!

Feb 21 Meeting: MythTV

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday February 11th, 2008 at 11:47 PM

TOPIC:	MythTV: Build your own Tivo-like PVR!
PRESENTER:	Mick Weiss, longtime FLUX member and Linux guru!
DATE:	Thursday February 21, 2008 (NOTE: 3rd Thursday of the month!)
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

MythTV is a GPL licensed suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems.

Using a PC, video capture card and MythTV software, you can record TV shows, pause, rewind, skip commercials and all kinds of cool stuff.

Mick will show a demo of MythTV and talk about hardware and software choices for creating your own system!

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Mick Weiss is a software engineer and Linux guru who has been a FLUX since his high school days. He has contributed to Open Source projects and presented several topics at FLUX meetings.

Mark your calendar! Thursday February 21 at Nova Southeastern University!

January: No meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday January 16th, 2008 at 12:03 AM

Hi all, Unfortunately the guest speaker lined up for January was not able to do the presentation.

Fortunately we do have a couple of great topics lined up for the coming months: MythTV in February and Blender in March!

Meanwhile, is there any interest in an informal dinner gathering this month? Some time ago a bunch of us met at an Olive Garden after work and had a pretty good time. Maybe we can do that again, or something like it.

Let's use our old slamspam list to see if we can put something together. If you're interested, please sign onto the list in the next day or two and then we'll start talking about when and where.

One more important item: we need volunteers to speak at future FLUX meetings. We are an all-volunteer group so please consider giving some of your time and sharing some of your knowledge. You don't have to be a guru or a slick public speaker. As mentioned above, we have volunteers for February and March, but that's all. Topics at any level from beginner to advanced are welcome.

See you on the slamspam list!

December: Running a Really Big Data Center

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday December 7th, 2007 at 4:15 AM

TOPIC:	Running a Really Big Data Center
PRESENTER:	Mike Marschall, longtime FLUX member and Yahoo employee!
DATE:	MONDAY December 17, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

This talk will cover a wide range of materials from the perspective of a Yahoo! Production Engineer - as a member of a team that is responsible for the production systems generating 90% of Yahoo's revenue. Mike will also talk about what it is like to work at Yahoo!

Procurement
Build-out Automation
Asset Tracking
Automation Tools
Configuration Management
       Network Hardware
       Systems Hardware
       Operating Systems
       Application Software
               Development
               Test
               Staging/QA
               Production Code Releases
Change Management
       Change Tracking
       Change Scheduling
       Emergency Changes
Problem Tracking
       Tracking Software
Problem Resolution Strategies
       Least Impact
       Automation
       Root Causes Analysis
       IRC Teaming
Alerting
Trending
Business Continuity Planning
Capacity Planning
       System Hardware
       Networking Architecture
       Application Architecture
       Storage
       Measurements
       Application

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Mike is a long time member of FLUX who has bounced around in the .com world and finally ended up at his dream gig with Yahoo! Search in California.

Mark your calendar! MONDAY December 17 at Nova Southeastern University!

November: Build Your Own Web Browser!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday November 5th, 2007 at 1:45 AM

TOPIC:	Building a custom web browser using Mozilla XULRunner
PRESENTER:	Dr. Phil Smith, Software Developer and Linux Guru!
DATE:	Thursday November 8, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

It has often been stated that the "next" version of Firefox will run under XULRunner. Dr. Phil got tired of waiting and set out to build something that is a lot like Firefox but without some of the Firefox features that personally annoy him, and with some new features that would normally require installing Firefox extensions (which are usually written in XUL). PhilZilla (new name desired) has the ability to do full page zoom (text and graphics) which has not been added yet to Firefox, and auto scrolling, which is not enabled by default in Firefox. F11 enables a "true full screen" browser.

The end result allows using the 'latest' nightly Gecko Runtime Engines with the ability to fall back to more stable versions when the need arises.

Other topics covered:

Core XULRunner application technologies: XUL, JavaScript, SVG, XBL, CSS.

Installing plugins (Flash, Java, Mplayer/VLC) in Mozilla products under Linux.

Strategic direction of Mozilla core products: Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Lightning, and XULRunner.

Demos of other XULRunner applications including clocks, stopwatches, games, Point of Sale, Currency Trading. In theory these applications run identically on Linux, Windows, Mac, and any other platform that someone has been able to build a working XULRunner on.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Originally intending to be an auto designer, "Dr. Phil" obtained a PhD. in Mechanical Engineering, in the process becoming a 'C' programmer doing numerical simulations. Worked with IBM and Fujitsu for the next 15 years, focused on writing drivers for cash registers. Recently assisted S. FL law firms and others migrating from Windows to Linux host/Windows guest VMWare virtualized servers. Deployed Samba, CUPS printing, and other Linux-based solutions in large law firms with essentially zero downtime.

Current interests: Linux advocacy and education, XUL/AJAX/PHP/LAMP/socket programming, Linux/Windows interoperability, developing cross platform Asterisk PBX and financial trading systems, Linux multimedia convergence, PXE imaging.

Mark your calendar! This Thursday evening at Nova Southeastern University!

October: Single Sign On / OpenLDAP

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday October 9th, 2007 at 2:49 AM

First of all, many thanks o our friends at JHL Technologies for the fantastic cake at last month's FLUX 10th Anniversary celebration!

This month's presentation will be given by two longtime FLUX members:
Kwan Lowe and Mick Weiss.

TOPIC:	Single Sign-On / Intro to OpenLDAP!
DATE:	Thursday October 11, 2007 (THIS THURSDAY!)
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Single Sign On is a buzzword. The technical term for it is centralized authentication. Each person on your network uses one username and password to access many applications, such as e-mail, secure web applications and instant messaging. LDAP is the technology that makes this possible, and OpenLDAP is its Linux implementation.

This talk demonstrates the server and client configuration of OpenLDAP to allow centralized authentication, adding/removing users and deploying an OpenLDAP server. As more physical and virtual machines are deployed across the enterprise, central authentication becomes a necessity, and it might just save your sanity.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Kwan Lowe is a Unix/Linux system administrator.
Mick Weiss is a software developer and network administrator.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU THIS THURSDAY AT NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY!

FLUX 10th Birthday!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday September 11th, 2007 at 1:37 AM

Wow, FLUX is 10 years old this month!

Come out and celebrate!

Thursday September 20th from 6:30pm

Nova Southeastern University, our usual room (directions)

Our friends at JHL Technologies are sponsoring a cake!

This will be a social evening, no technical presentation. Let's remember our history and talk about our future and have some fun!

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday September 20th at Nova Southeastern University!

August: Embedded Systems Using Linux

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday August 2nd, 2007 at 2:11 AM

TOPIC:	Embedded Systems Using Linux!
PRESENTER:	Dr. Raul Salazar of JHL Technologies and Nova Southeastern University!
DATE:	Thursday August 16, 2007 (NOTE! THIRD THURSDAY OF THE MONTH!)
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

In this presentation, Dr. Salazar will give an overview of what is embedded Linux, tools, bootloaders, filesystem, as well as the steps needed to configure and create a small root filesystem from scratch for an embedded device using Linux. All of this in 90 minutes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr. Salazar is President and Chief Technology Officer of JHL Technologies, a global provider of advanced technical training; software, embedded, and multimedia development. Prior to joining JHL he was an assistant professor at Nova Southeastern University where he was instrumental in securing over $800,000 in donated computers and software from Gould, AT&T, Harris Corporation, and Digital Corporation. At Nova, he was instrumental in establishing a successful relationship with industry. While dedicated to academia, industry was demanding more of his time and expertise. In 1993, Raul became a joint owner of JHL. Even so, Raul maintains his roots in academia and continues to teach computer science and computer information systems courses as an adjunct professor.

For over ten years, Raul has designed and developed embedded Linux systems for the cellular and small screen industry. He also designs total home and condominium automation systems based on embedded Linux. This includes design and development of DIY Home and Environmental Monitoring, Control and Automation using Traditional Interfaces and protocols (Panel computers, sbcs, USB ports, Serial ports, X10, Insteon, UPB, etc).

Today, Dr. Salazar has over 27 years industry experience, 22 years university teaching experience, and 24 years technical training and development experience to Fortune 500 companies. He has taught and designed over 150 technical courses, which also include software development, mentoring, and consulting services in these areas. He manages a diverse team of developers and contractors. Given his broad technical and management expertise, coupled with his commitment to excellent customer relations, has garnered him the respect of his colleagues in industry, academia, and from corporations for whom he has provided his services.

Mark your calendar! Remember, the THIRD Thursday, this month! See you August 16 at Nova Southeastern University!

July 2007 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday July 6th, 2007 at 1:30 AM

And now for something completely different...

As we all know, FLUX is a completely volunteer organization, and that includes the people who speak at our meetings. Unfortunately we do not have a volunteer to speak this month.

So, in the spirit of making lemonade when life hands us lemons, we will turn this month's meeting into a social networking gathering. There have been requests in the past for purely social meetings, so let's give it a try and see what happens.

DATE:	Thursday July 12, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

We will have refreshments as usual, but sometime after 7 perhaps we will decide to go somewhere for dinner. Let's see what happens!

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! THURSDAY JULY 12! SEE YOU AT NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY!

Solving Problems with FOSS, Part 2

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday June 12th, 2007 at 1:32 AM

This month Don will present the second part of his talk...

It seems like stores put up holiday decorations earlier every year. Well, FLUX is going to go beyond even that by starting the holiday season this month!

TOPIC:	Solving Problems with FOSS - Using GNU/Linux to control holiday lights!
PRESENTER:	Don Law, Software Developer and Longtime FLUX Member!
DATE:	Thursday June 14, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Part Two will cover the following topics...

• Using GLADE to build a C based GUI
• Programming with GTK+
• Using sox for audio processing
• Using perl for special effects
• Putting it all together with a live demo

About the speaker:

Don Law has been a Unix developer in South Florida since 1984 and has worked on software for mobile phones, mainframes, high availability clusters, operating systems, storage controllers, nuclear power plants, missile simulators, and security appliances. He sometimes modifies his computer systems with a hacksaw. He has been an electronics hobbyist since middle school. To demonstrate his partial lack of sanity, for fun in college he wrote an arbitrary precision arithmetic program in assembly for a 12 instruction single register CPU that required self-modifying code using punch cards. Don has a BS in Math and Computer Science from Furman University and a MS in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and FAU.

See you this Thursday at Nova Southeastern University!

Solving Problems With FOSS, Part 1

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday May 2nd, 2007 at 2:41 PM

It seems like stores put up holiday decorations earlier every year. Well, FLUX is going to go beyond even that by starting the holiday season this month!

TOPIC:	Solving Problems with FOSS - Using GNU/Linux to control holiday lights!
PRESENTER:	Don Law, Software Developer and Longtime FLUX Member!
DATE:	Thursday May 10, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

IMPORTANT NOTE! This will be a two-part presentation with part two covered next month at our June 14 meeting. In addition, we will organize a Saturday event (date to be determined) where anyone interested in doing this project themselves can get help with the hardware!

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Part One will cover the following topics...

• Circuit design with gschem, a tool from GPL Electronic Design Automation (GEDA)
• Circuit board fabrication with the pcb tool (from GEDA)
• Using open designs from a community website (computerchristmas.com)
• A Linux device driver from scratch
• A sample C program that uses the above driver
• Problem yet to be solved: how to fade
• Show and tell with hardware component

About the speaker:

Don Law has been a Unix developer in South Florida since 1984 and has worked on software for mobile phones, mainframes, high availability clusters, operating systems, storage controllers, nuclear power plants, missile simulators, and security appliances. He sometimes modifies his computer systems with a hacksaw. He has been an electronics hobbyist since middle school. To demonstrate his partial lack of sanity, for fun in college he wrote an arbitrary precision arithmetic program in assembly for a 12 instruction single register CPU that required self-modifying code using punch cards. Don has a BS in Math and Computer Science from Furman University and a MS in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and FAU.

See you this Thursday at Nova Southeastern University!

Ubuntu / Debian Package Management

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday April 13th, 2007 at 1:13 AM

TOPIC:	Ubuntu/Debian Package Management!
PRESENTER:	Phil Smith, Software Developer and Linux Guru!
DATE:	Thursday April 19, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Phil will cover Debian/Ubuntu package management, daily system management, local repositories, and building clean system installs from the daily tree, and also building a minimal bootable system from the repository!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Originally intending to be an auto designer, "Dr. Phil" obtained a PhD. in Mechanical Engineering, in the process becoming a 'C' programmer doing numerical simulations. Worked with IBM and Fujitsu for the next 15 years, focused on writing drivers for cash registers. Recently assisted S. FL law firms and others migrating from Windows to Linux host/Windows guest VMWare virtualized servers. Deployed Samba, CUPS printing, and other Linux-based solutions in large law firms with essentially zero downtime.

Current interests: Linux advocacy and education, XUL/AJAX/PHP/LAMP/socket programming, Linux/Windows interoperability, developing cross platform Asterisk PBX and financial trading systems, Linux multimedia convergence, PXE imaging.

Mark your calendar! This Thursday evening at Nova Southeastern University!

April date, speakers needed

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday March 19th, 2007 at 8:12 PM

Hi all,

Our meeting place will be in use the second Thursday next month so the meeting has been moved to a week later, April 19th.

However, we are still in need of a speaker for the meeting! FLUX is a volunteer organization. We are fortunate to have a few of our regular members who give two and sometimes three talks every year, but we cannot keep calling on them over and over.

We need some new faces to step forward, and it's not a hard thing to do. We can have two short presentations in one meeting or one longer one. If you are familiar with some aspect of Linux or Open Source software, please volunteer.

Please contact me directly at adamglass at gmail dot com with your topic.

FLUX is getting close to its 10th anniversary. Linux is more widespread than ever. Please step up and do your part as a member of FLUX and of the Linux community.

Thank you!
--Adam

Linux Citrix ICA client

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday March 4th, 2007 at 2:18 PM

TOPIC:	Citrix ICA Client for Linux!
PRESENTER:	Anthony Davis, Linux guy and Citrix Director of Strategic Alliances!
DATE:	Thursday March 8, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Anthony will cover the Linux ICA client and how Novell customers are using it (though of course it is available for other distros too). He will also present a technical overview of Citrix's Linux based SSL/VPN product.

The Citrix ICA Client is a UNIX application that provides access to a Windows session running on a high-performance Citrix server. Once the connection to the Citrix server is established, you can access Windows applications and work with files in a similar way to working on a local PC. Because the Windows applications are running remotely on a Citrix server you get excellent performance, even on a low-performance UNIX workstation.

The ICA Client displays the Windows session in a separate window on the UNIX workstation screen, and is fully integrated with your other UNIX X applications. You can cut and paste text and graphics between Windows applications in the ICA Client window and your other X applications.

Your UNIX workstation's mouse and keyboard can be used with Windows applications in the usual way, and you can set up key mappings to enable you to enter PC keys not available on your UNIX workstation's keyboard.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Originally from London in the UK, Anthony graduated from Portsmouth University with a Bsc (Hons) in Computer Science and worked as an IT manager for a UK based software company for 3 years. Anthony went to Australia 10 years ago and started working for Citrix Systems. He has been with Citrix for 9 years and is now Director of Strategic Alliances, managing Accenture and Dell and Novell.

Mark your calendar! This Thursday evening at Nova Southeastern University!

Firewall Basics

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday February 4th, 2007 at 5:16 PM

TOPIC:	Basics of Firewalls!
PRESENTER:	Bill Tabor, Long-time FLUX member and Unix guru!
DATE:	Thursday February 8, 2007
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

Kwan Lowe has graciously volunteered to fill in as host this month!

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Bill will cover the basics of firewalls and show how to set up tables for ipchains!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Bill Tabor has been writing code for various operating systems since the 1960s. He specializes in computer security and has been a FLUX member for a really long time :)

Mark your calendar! This Thursday evening at Nova Southeastern University!

January 11, 2007 Meeting: Basics of MySQL!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday January 8th, 2007 at 3:45 PM

TOPIC:	Basics of MySQL!
PRESENTER:	Carl Couric, Long-time FLUX member!
DATE:	Thursday January 11, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

MySQL is one of the most widely used open source software packages. It runs databases all around the world in all kinds of organizations. This month's talk will give a quick intro of basic database concepts, then talk about MySQL itself. There will also be a demo of graphical database management tools available for free from the MySQL site!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Carl Couric - Native Floridian!
By Day - Director of IT at FHP (Florida Heat Pump) Manufacturing
By Night - CarlC Internet Services/CarlC Computer Corp.

Carl started computing back in 1978 with a TRS-80 and then DEC a.k.a. "Digital" type computers. He moved into OpenVMS around 1984 and began specializing in that, and then began working with Unix based OS.

Carl met Linus Torvalds at a DECUS (DEC Users Symposium) while Linus was still a Grad Student. He took Linus's advice to get a copy of Linux [circa 1994] and loaded it on a 386 33Mhz. He has been using Linux OSes in many forms since then.

Mark your calendar! See you this Thursday evening at Nova Southeastern University!

December meeting: Software development for mobile phones

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday December 10th, 2006 at 9:46 PM

TOPIC:	Software development for mobile phones!
PRESENTER:	Rob Lembree, very long-time Unix/LINUX guru from New Hampshire!
DATE:	Thursday December 14, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

This is not a commercial talk. Rob helps run a Linux user group in New Hampshire, and works with mobile phone technology. He happens to be in town the evening of our meeting and has agreed to share a unique look into this growing part of the software industry. Here's more information from Rob...

Rob Lembree from JumpShift, LLC in Nashua, NH will discuss the components and processes involved in the development of a modern mobile phone, from the processors and radios to the operating system technology, middleware and applications that bring the package together. He will also discuss the peculiarities of the mobile industry that make bringing a handset to market a unique challenge.

Rob will also talk about phoneME, the new open source Java project sponsored by Sun Microsystems based on the newly-GPL licensed Java Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME).

Rob will bring lots of mobile platforms with him in various states of completion for show and tell.

Rob has two decades of experience in operating system technology, many of it in the embedded computing space, with three and a half years applying this experience to the mobile platform industry. When Rob grows up, he'd like to start a research and development company, hire smart people, and develop cool stuff that scares the heck out of big companies.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU DECEMBER 14th AT NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY!

November meeting: WGET!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday October 30th, 2006 at 12:28 PM

TOPIC:	Wget: Retrieve files from the web!
PRESENTER:	Peter Willis, long-time FLUX member!
DATE:	Thursday November 9, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Wget is a freely available network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web. Its uses vary from downloading a single file to mirroring entire websites onto a local disk. In this talk we will discuss the applications for wget and different ways to apply its options, as well as troubleshooting for undocumented problems in past and current releases

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Peter Willis started working on Linux and Open Source projects in school and has continued to work in the IT industry for the past 6 years. He is currently a Systems Administrator for CBS Digital Media and in his spare time works on embedded Linux projects such as media centers and auto navigation systems.

Mark your calendar, tell your friends! See you at Nova on November 9th!

October 2006 Meeting: Large Environment Automation at Yahoo!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday October 3rd, 2006 at 11:56 PM

TOPICS:	Large Server Environment Automation. REALLY large.
PRESENTER:	Michael Marschall, long-lost FLUX member and employee of Yahoo!
DATE:	Thursday October 12, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Michael Marschall, long-time (but currently long-distance) FLUX member, is now working at Yahoo! He will be speaking about large environment automation - Tools, scripting, and massively automated server buildouts.

• System Deployments/Build-outs
• Configuration Management
  • Versioning
  • Pull vs. Push
  • Conf File pre-post processing
• Core Infrastructure Services (DNS, SMTP, LDAP)
  • Sizing
  • Management
• Automation
  • Build-out automation and the little tools that save the day.

If there's time, we may also hear a little about what it's like to work at Yahoo!

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Mike Marschall was born in Massachusetts, raised and schooled in Connecticut, spent the last 10 years in Miami, Florida and now resides in Los Angeles, California.

Mike has been working in the Dot Com world since 1998 at companies including MarsMusic.com, Foreclosure.com and Edmunds.com. Mike is now working for Yahoo! in it's Search Marketing division in Los Angeles, CA where he heads a team responsible for the build-out of Yahoo's next generation search marketing and monetization platform.

Mike is a long-time FLUX member and presented several topics to the group including "Exchange Killer:Replacing Exchange with Open Source". Mike has also volunteered in the FLUX booth at several technology trade shows.

Mark your calendar, tell your friends! See you at Nova on October 12th!

Musician Distro Notes Online

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday September 27th, 2006 at 12:48 PM

Hi all,

Apologies for the delay. Bob Daggit's extensive notes and comparisons about Linux distributions and applications for musicians is now on the FLUX website!

Here's the URL...
http://flux.org/slides/musician/

Many thanks to Bob for all the time and effort he put into this project!

We have a speaker lined up for October (announcement coming Real Soon Now), but need a couple of short presentations for the November 9th meeting. There's been a lot of routing and security discussion on the FLUX list. Would anyone like to do a short talk on one of those topics, or perhaps show off one of the Linux firewall distros? Please contact adam at gmail dot com if you're interested!

September: Music Distro, Possible Volunteer Event!

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday September 6th, 2006 at 1:11 AM

TOPICS:	APODIO, the Musician's Linux Distro, and a possible volunteer event!
PRESENTER:	Bob Dagit, Longtime FLUX member!
DATE:	Thursday September 14, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 First presentation
	7:30-ish Break & Networking
	7:45 or 8:00 or so Part Two
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

Using a Linux Audio Distro: APODIO

Linux audio applications for authoring and performing music are coming of age with specialty distros of their own, like APODIO, Studio-2-Go, Musix, Agnula and more. These specialty distros often come as installable liveCD's which can be test-run on your hardware, and installed by scripts if your hardware is suitable. Bob will be demonstrating some of the 'noteable' applications that are commonly shared by these distros, using the APODIO distro.

Bob Dagit has been experimenting with Linux audio distributions, inspired by his interest in synthesized new age music like Tangerine Dream's. He did a presentation on windows midi software, and wrote a review of a goodly number of those programs for Broward Personal Computer Association several years back before switching to Linux. After a few years, it seems, Linux music software has become user-friendly enough for a newbie with a 3 years of piano lessons when he was a kid!

POSSIBLE VOLUNTEER EVENT!

Software Freedom Day is set for Saturday the 16th of this month! Let's see if we can find a suitable venue and enough volunteers to participate. Our friends at Novell have been in touch and have offered giveaways for the event.

Since the event is only a couple days after the meeting, we will kick off discussion on the FLUX Linux list now. If we are able to participate, the second part of the meeting will be for planning the event.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU AT NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY ON THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 14th!

August 10 meeting: Second topic!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday August 8th, 2006 at 1:29 AM

Hi all,

Samuel Greenfield has jumped in to save the day, and give us a second short presentation!

The topic: GNU Screen

GNU Screen is a VT100 terminal program which can be used to turn one text terminal window into several, detach a text window from any active outer session and then reattach to it later, and share a text terminal screen amongst users, among other things.

Samuel is a long-time FLUX member and I don't have his bio but since the meeting's in a couple days I am posting this as-is :)

See you August 10 at Nova Southeastern University!

August 2006 Meeting Announcement

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday August 4th, 2006 at 2:49 AM

TOPICS:	Back up your DVDs with PerlDVDRip, and [your presentation here]
PRESENTERS:	Kwan Lowe, long-time FLUX member, and [your name here]
DATE:	Thursday August 10, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 First presentation
	7:30-ish Break & Networking
	7:45 or 8:00 or so Second presentation, or we go home
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

BACKING UP DVDS WITH PERL DVDRIP
Perl DVDRip is a great way to backup your favorite DVDs to a more convenient medium. This talk will introduce the more common options of Perl DVDRip.

Kwan is a longtime Flux member. His interests include Linux, mathematics and film.

We still need a volunteer to do a second presentation!

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU AT NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY ON THURSDAY JULY 13th!

July 13 Meeting: Security and DVDs

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday July 2nd, 2006 at 12:09 AM

TOPIC:	Security and DVD Backups!
PRESENTERS:	Mario D. Santana and Kwan Lowe!
DATE:	Thursday July 13, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm Refreshments & Networking
	7:00 First presentation
	7:30-ish Break & Networking
	7:45 or 8:00 or so Second presentation
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

We're going to try out some of the stuff we talked about at last month's brainstorming session! One of them is having two shorter presentations instead of a single longer one. Another is having topics for both beginners and more advanced folks. A third is adding a break in the middle, and a fourth is name badges to make it easier for new folks to meet everyone! About the talks...

SECURITY WITH METASPLOIT AND NESSUS
Nessus is a freely available, though no longer open-source, security scanner from the folks at Tenable Security. It's fairly powerful, and easy to use and install. Mario will show you how to run a check for known vulnerabilities on your home or business network. He will also use the Metasploit vulnerability exploitation tool to show you how easy it is for attacker to compromise networks that don't plug holes found by Nessus!

Mario D. Santana is a security consultant with the Secure Information Services group at Terremark Worldwide, doing security research, risk assessments, incident response, and related work.

BACKING UP DVDS WITH PERL DVDRIP
Perl DVDRip is a great way to backup your favorite DVDs to a more convenient medium. This talk will introduce the more common options of Perl DVDRip.

Kwan is a longtime Flux member. His interests include Linux, mathematics and film.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU AT NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY ON THURSDAY JULY 13th!

The Future of FLUX - June 8 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday May 26th, 2006 at 1:15 AM

Hello all,

FLUX got a great writeup in the New Times Best Of 2006, but we shouldn't rest on our laurels, because from what I've heard, they are not comfortable to sit on.

FLUX was founded in 1997. Linux, Free/Open Source Software, and the community surrounding them have changed drastically since then. One of our main strengths, the Linux e-mail list, is and will continue to be one of the great resources for Linux users looking for help with their technical problems. All the web pages in the world are nice, but the folks who reply to messages on our list give personal help to solve one person's issues at a time, customized for each situation, and for free. Some of our members have been doing that for years and years, and they deserve a great deal of credit for it. I hope it continues for many years because their help will always be needed.

But attendance at our meetings has been in a slow decline for awhile now, despite the fantastic presentations we have been privileged to host. We have a small but excellent group of local members who generously give their time and effort to share their knowledge in front of the group. We have also been able to take advantage of our status as a tourist destination to host many of the Linux/Open Source community's biggest names and brightest talents.

But for some reason, fewer people are showing up. The highest attendance we had this year, when the inventor of the Asterisk PBX spoke, was about the number that showed up to regular meetings long ago. When Novell went to great expense to send three people to our meeting, one of whom flew in for the occasion, a tiny crowd was there. Hey, at least everybody got a hat :)

Special events have become another challenge. Years ago we had a booth in three or four trade shows and events per year, some two or three days long, and were always able to staff the booth with plenty of people. The last time we did an event it was very hard to get enough folks for one day.

There is no obvious, single reason for the change. There is no obvious, single thing to do about it either. So in the grand Linux tradition, let's talk about it on an e-mail list!

BUT ... an endless discussion won't help much. So here's an idea: We will use our old "slam-spam" list to discuss ways the Linux community has changed and ideas for the future of FLUX. The ideas must be realistic. After all, we have no money or resources -- other than time that people choose to volunteer. The list will be open for a week or so, until our June 8th meeting. The list will be turned off (but archived) that day.

Then, the June FLUX meeting will be devoted to planning and figuring out who will volunteer to implement the ideas we come up with. Perhaps someone will volunteer to work on posting notices in free newspapers, and someone else will volunteer to do ... well, I'm sure a group like ours will figure out something by then.

A duplicate copy of this message will be posted on the slam-spam list shortly, and the discussions can begin. Anyone who had been subscribed to slamspam has been unsubscribed, to avoid unwanted messages. To join the list, just go to http://www.flux.org/mailman/listinfo/slamspam

I've always been impressed with the usually civilized behavior on our lists, and am sure we will keep that up on this list too.

FLUX will be nine years old this September. Let's figure out how to make our tenth birthday huge!

--Adam

MEETING DETAILS

DATE: Thursday, June 8, 2006

TIME: 6:30pm refreshments, meeting begins 7:00pm

PLACE: Nova Southeastern University, our regular room (directions)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU THERE ON THE 8TH!

New Times Best Of Award!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday May 15th, 2006 at 6:43 PM

Hi all,

A few weeks ago someone from the New Times newspaper contacted me and said he was writing an item about local usergroups, and wanted to know about FLUX. For those who don't know, New Times is a free newspaper that has been published weekly in the area for many years. Originally a Miami-Dade paper, they have published a Broward/Palm Beach edition for several years now.

I exchanged a few messages with the reporter and that's the last I heard about it. Well, this morning he wrote again:

Adam,

We corresponded several weeks ago about FLUX and getting an item in New Times. I could not tell you at that time because we are not allowed to disclose Best Of winners before our annual Best Of issue is printed, but we gave FLUX a Best Of this year: Best Place to Escape Bill Gates.

You can find it here:

http://www.newtimesbpb.com/bestof/award.php?oid=oid:72270§ion=oid:12229&year=2006

It is also, of course, in the print edition, which is on the street now. Thanks again for your help. Your organization is the type of positive community-based group we like to publicize, so we're glad we could get FLUX in the paper.

For those who pick up the print edition, there's actually a whole big Best Of section stuffed inside the regular issue, and our entry is on page 26 of that section (not page 26 of the main newspaper).

Lots of people read the New Times, and this mention in the Best Of issue might bring us a bunch of new people in the coming month or two. A thread about helping newbies has, coincidentally, been going on in our Linux list for the past week or so. Happily it has been a very positive thread. With any luck, we'll soon be able to practice what we preach on a bunch of new Linux enthusiasts.

Many thanks to everyone who has made FLUX a success over the years!

--Adam

May 2006 Meeting: Distro Tours

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday May 8th, 2006 at 1:43 AM

TOPIC:	Two (or Three) Distro Tours!
PRESENTERS:	Kwan Lowe, Larry Kagan, and hopefully Carl Couric!
DATE:	Thursday May 11, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentations begin 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

This Thursday we will have a tour of two (or three) Linux distributions by two (or three) long-time FLUX members!

• A tour of Ubuntu Linux by Larry Kagan
• A tour of Fedora Core 5 by Kwan Lowe
• A tour of Gentoo Linux by Carl Couric (tentative)

Both (or all three) of these presenters are very knowledgeable, and great speakers. Come out this Thursday evening and see two (or three) of the most popular Linux distributions!

April Meeting: Xen Virtualization!

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday April 2nd, 2006 at 12:19 AM

TOPIC:	Introduction to Xen Virtualization!
PRESENTER:	Kwan Lowe, longtime FLUX member!
DATE:	Thursday April 13, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)

About the Talk
Virtualization is a hot old topic. Virtualization can more efficiently utilize today's powerful processors and solve the data center space and power issue. In this talk we will discuss the advantages of virtualization technology and demonstrate building and managing xen virtual machines.

About the Presenter
Kwan Lowe is a longtime Flux member. His interests include mathematics and Linux.

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday April 13 at 6:30pm, at Nova Southeastern University!

FLUX March 2006 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday March 1st, 2006 at 3:24 PM

TOPIC:	DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service Attacks!
PRESENTER:	Haim Dimer, longtime FLUX member!
DATE:	Thursday March 9, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, back in our regular room (directions)

About the Talk
Internet Security is a hot topic, especially when your router sees 5,000,000 packets per second and 6 gigs of incoming traffic. If the router gets warmed up by these numbers, chances are there is a Distributed Denial of Service going on, a.k.a DDoS Attack.

What is a DDoS?
How does it work?
Who is attacking who?
For what purpose?

Haim Dimer will attempt to answer these questions, as well as yours on March 9th 2006. See you there!

About the Presenter
Haim is a long time Flux member and guest speaker. He is responsible for the web site at http://www.flux.org and actively participates in the group's board, Flux core. Haim has participated in two War at the Shore events, debating Microsoft on issues related to the use of an operating system in the business world. He was appointed by Sun Microsystems to travel to Colombia and present Linux and Open Source technologies to members of the Colombian government.

Haim currently works as a systems administrator for Prolexic Technologies. His blog is available at www.dimer.org

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday March 9 at 6:30pm, at Nova Southeastern University!

February Meeting - Novell!

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday February 3rd, 2006 at 5:03 AM

TOPIC:	Novell's Open Source Offerings!
PRESENTER:	Doreen Christiani, Novell Linux Specialist!
DATE:	Thursday February 9, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University Medical School(directions)

This presentation has been a long, long time in the works. Novell was planning to visit us a few months back, but there was some kind of big rainstorm or something, and we had to cancel the meeting. Fortunately Novell was able to reschedule, and they'll be here this week!

We will be meeting at the Nova Southeastern University medical school ... same building as last month's meeting, though probably in a different room.

For those who don't know, Novell has become a Linux company over the past few years. They own SuSE and have hired several prominent Open Source developers. Novell is one of the few big companies to see and embrace the potential of Linux and help it take the next steps toward world domination :)

Ms. Christiani is a Linux specialist with Novell. A couple of years ago she spoke at Tech Galaxy and told us about the big Brain Share conference they had just held ... the surprise keynote speaker was Linus Torvalds! Since then Novell has expanded their contributions to the Open Source community, and Ms. Christiani will speak about that very topic.

Mark your calendar and tell your friends and co-workers about this meeting!

See you Thursday evening at the Nova Medical School!

Security conference wrap-up

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday January 23rd, 2006 at 2:59 AM

Hi all,

FLUX attended the South Florida chapter ISSA security conference last week, and it was a great success! Many thanks go to our very hardworking crew for the time they spent not only at the event but also preparing for it to provide a great set of demos! A round of applause to...

Carl Couric
Haim Dimer
Brandon Kovacs
Kwan Lowe
Bill Snow
Bill Tabor
Peter Willis

Thanks also to Bill Snow, Pete Nicolletti and Elizabeth Bates of ISSA for inviting us!

There were several highlights to the event. One was the volunteer work we did, since the ISSA folks were nice enough to give us a free booth. We spent part of the day inflating helium balloons and tying them to the centerpieces for the ending keynote session. The centerpieces were "bombs" ... three marine flares tiewrapped together with coiled wires and a kid's digital watch or a toy cellphone attached to each.

One of our members, who may remain semi-anonymous if he so wishes, also helped the ISSA folks by agreeing at the last minute to play "Mister Black" during the final keynote panel. It was his job to portray a virus writer or spyware writer and basically hassle the security professionals who were arguing the other side in the discussion. Our Mister Black did a great job and scored some serious points!

We also participated in the very last part of the event during the closing remarks. All during the day FLUX members were watching unencrypted packets go through the wireless access point set up for the conference. The conference organizers said that the access point was unencrypted. One would think that security professionals would know better, but our effort, led by Carl Couric, snagged one person's login information, discovered that another company's representative had his laptop more or less set up as an open FTP site, and more. We passed the information along to the conference organizer and he "outed" them in public!

All in all a good time was had by everyone and we got to tell lots of security folks in our area about FLUX, and about our meeting this Tuesday where we hear from Asterisk founder Mark Spencer.

 
Thanks again to everyone who helped make this event a success! See you this Tuesday at 6:30pm at the Nova medical school!

January meeting - Asterisk Founder!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday January 10th, 2006 at 2:38 AM

Hi all,

We're kicking off 2006 with a bang. Our first speaker for the year will be Mark Spencer, inventor of the Asterisk Open Source telephone PBX software!

Thanks to longtime FLUX member Mick Weiss, Mr. Spencer has agreed to speak to our group while he is in town late this month. For that reason the January meeting will be rescheduled to TUESDAY JANUARY 24th in the Nova Southeastern University medical school.

DATE:	Tuesday January 24, 2006
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University Medical School(directions)

We'll have a big auditorium because we expect a whole lot of people to attend!

About Mark Spencer

Mark Spencer founded Linux Support Services in 1999 while still a Computer Engineering student at Auburn University. When faced with the high cost of buying a PBX, Mark simply used his Linux PC and knowledge of C code to write his own! This was the beginning of the world-wide phenomenon known as Asterisk, the open source PBX, and caused Mark to shift his business focus from Linux support to supporting Asterisk and opening up the telecom market. Linux Support Services is now known as Digium, and is bringing open source to the telecom market while gaining a foothold in the telecom industry.

Mark strongly believes that every technology he creates should be given back to the community. This is why Asterisk is fully open source. Today that model has allowed Asterisk to remain available free of charge, while it has become as robust as the leading and most-expensive PBXs.

The Asterisk community has ambassadors and contributors from every corner of the globe.

Mark Spencer holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Auburn University, and is now president of Digium, Inc. He has also led the creation of several Linux-based open source applications, most notably Asterisk, the Open Source PBX, and Gaim Instant Messenger.

So ... Mark your calendar ... TUESDAY JANUARY 24 ... See you at the NSU Medical School!

Volunteers for Security Conference

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday January 5th, 2006 at 1:17 PM

Hi all,

We are working on arrangements to participate in a local security conference put on by the south Florida chapter of ISSA, the Information Systems Security Association. The conference will be held on Thursday January 19th at the Signature Grand in Davie. Setup begins at 7am and the booths are open until 5pm.

Details about the show are at http://sfissa.org

We need volunteers to staff the booth. Unlike most shows, this time we need volunteers who know about security as well as Linux... folks able to talk to other security professionals about Linux from a security standpoint.

If you can volunteer for all or part of the day on Thursday the 19th, please e-mail Adam Glass (adam at usdtv dot com). It would be great for FLUX to have a presence at the ISSA event!

Thank you!

December 2005 Meeting Announcement

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday December 2nd, 2005 at 5:01 PM

TOPIC:	The State of iSCSI Storage
PRESENTERS:	Neil Youshak and Mike DiMeglio of Intransa!
DATE:	Thursday December 8, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University (directions)

Our first post-Wilma meeting will cover iSCSI technology for storage solutions! Presenters from Intransa will cover an overview of iSCSI storage and basic storage design techniques. They will also demonstrate an Intransa IP SAN device which uses Linux based storage controllers to provide a network-centric storage grid architecture.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:

Neil Youshak, Senior Systems Engineer, Intransa Inc Neil Youshak is responsible for providing on-site technical support and technical account management to customers, channel partners, and OEM's, leading the execution of the Intransa iSCSI storage strategy.

Neil Youshak brings nearly a decade of technology experience with a focus on storage and networking heterogeneous systems in medium-to- large business environments. Prior to joining Intransa, he spent seven years at Siemens Medical Solutions serving in roles from senior network consultant to technical project manager for large healthcare development projects. Neil departed as a storage architect in Siemens' Consulting practice.

Mr. Youshak currently holds the (BCFP) Brocade Certified Fabric Professional certification as well as Cisco, 3Com, SUN and Novell certifications. He also holds the SNIA Fibre Channel Level 1 Storage Area Network (SAN) and the SNIA Qualified Sales Professional certifications. His educational background includes a M.B.A. in Management Information Systems from the Long Island University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the SUNY of Farmingdale.

Mike DiMeglio - Director US Sales, Intransa, Inc. Mike DiMeglio is responsible for leading the Sales and Systems Engineering team in the United States for Intransa. Mike has over 25 years of high technology and storage experience, as an Electrical Engineer with a focus on architecture; he is a skilled storage architect with a unique ability to design product architectures to solve a company's specific need. Prior to Intransa, Mike was the VP of Sales for a Network Attached Storage vendor, ran his own high technology sales management company for 8 years and was the first sales person for Silicon Graphics on the East Coast. His educational background includes a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU AT NOVA ON DECEMBER 8!

FLUX was down but not out!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday November 1st, 2005 at 3:41 PM

Hi all,

Some of us were affected by Hurricane Wilma more than others. The USDTV Florida office, which hosted the FLUX servers, was in the more category. Parts of the roof came off and rain fell inside. The bad news is that the building is trashed. A UPS and huge generator are nice, but when water pours out of the circuit breakers they don't help much. The good news is that the FLUX server lives and has a new temporary home at CarlC Internet Services.

Many thanks go to Nick Seidenman for posting a temporary page while access to the server was impossible, to Bill Mooney for helping extract the machine and get us going again, and to Carl Couric for providing DNS and hosting services!

There's not much time before our next regular meeting date, and many of us don't even have electricity to read meeting notices. So our friends at Novell have kindly agreed to postpone their visit.

We may be able to arrange some kind of informal gathering on our regular November 10 meeting night, so please check back to the FLUX site periodically. If we can put it together, this will be a good time to swap disaster preparation and recovery lessons, not to mention and tall tales.

The FLUX e-mail lists are also back online. Please remember to keep non-Linux-related hurricane tales on the talk list, but please do share your stories there. You may notice some DNS hiccups as the latest IP address of our server propagates through the Internet, so (as we are all used to hearing by now) please be patient.

This period of time has been rough on everyone. Now that we're back online, let's share the lessons learned and help each other out as best we can!

Two Events in October - Novell in November!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday October 10th, 2005 at 11:20 PM

Hi all,

Our October meeting is this Thursday!

DATE: Thursday October 13, 2005

TIME: Refreshments 6:30pm, presentation begins 7:00pm

LOCATION: Nova Southeastern University, see flux.org/directions

TOPIC: Distro Demos!

PRESENTERS: Jason Kurtz, Ken Scott, Peter Willis!

This month we feature short presentations about Linux distributions you may not have used before.

- Jason Kurtz will show off Centos, which is "an Enterprise-class Linux distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Vendor" (*cough*RedHat*cough*)

- Ken Scott will show off both Knoppix (running WINE and WinMX) and Debian on a PowerPC machine!

- Peter Willis will show off Slackware!

Come and see Linux in a new way!

===========================================================

LAN Party and Swapmeet: Saturday October 29th!

Want to buy some old computer junk?
Want to sell or give away some old computer junk?
Want to frag somebody?

SWAP MEET
Saturday, October 29th at USDTV - Near I-95 and Cypress Creek Road - 9am to 11am!

Followed by a LAN party at Florida Heat Pump, a few blocks away - 10am to 5pm!

Both are open to the public, even non-Linux users. Look for more info on this event Real Soon Now!

=============================================================

Novell in November!

Novell will be there in November to share all the cool Linux stuff they are working on! They are sending three people to our meeting. To accomodate their schedule the November meeting will be held a day early, Wednesday 11/9. Look for more details soon.

Mark your calendar! See you this Thursday at Nova!

September meeting - Location, Sponsor

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday September 7th, 2005 at 6:59 PM

Hi all,

Tonight's FLUX meeting will be held at the Nova Medical school, NOT our usual room! [DIRECTIONS]

Park in the garage and then follow the FLUX/Linux signs.

We would like to thank Nova Southeastern University for providing a great meeting space.

We would also like to thank our good friends at JHL Technologies for sponsoring refreshments!

See you this evening at the Nova Medical School!

September 2005 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday August 18th, 2005 at 3:23 AM

One of the most discussed topics in our group is spam and ways to reduce it. We generally talk about technical solutions, but there is also the possibility of anti-spam laws.

Unfortunately the nationwide CAN-SPAM act has, er, not lived up to our hopes. But what if each state individually passes stronger anti-spam laws?

Well, two Florida legislators are moving our state in that direction. State Representative Ari Porth, and a colleague in the state Senate, are introducing bills to do just that.

Rep. Porth's district represents a large portion of Broward County, and he has graciously agreed to come speak to FLUX about his new "Slam Spam" bill!

This presentation will be of great interest to many I.T . professionals who don't often attend FLUX meetings, so our friends at Nova Southeastern University are providing a larger meeting room, most likely in the medical school.

IMPORTANT: The date of the meeting has been changed! Rep. Porth has other obligations on our usual 2nd Thursday of the month, so our meeting will be held on

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7th!

More details will be posted as the date approaches and when the exact room location is finalized.

This is a great opportunity to invite non-Linux users to one of our meetings. Florida is about to be on the leading edge of an effort to keep spammers from operating within our nation's borders. Some might move their operations overseas, but many will just close up shop. It's an important and a significant step. Tell your friends and colleagues about this chance to hear about it directly from Representative Porth on Wednesday, September 7th!

Tech Show Florida August 18

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday August 17th, 2005 at 1:02 AM

Hi all,

As you know, FLUX will be an exhibitor at Tech Show Florida, a local technology trade show put on by the Internet Coast.

The show is held at the Broward County Convention Center in Port Everglades (I-95 to State Road 84; SR84 East into the Port).

The exhibit hall is open from 9:30am to 11:30am, then again from 2:00pm to 5:00pm. Various luncheons and presentations will be going on in the middle of the day.

Admission (not parking) is free but you need to register on the show website, http://techshowflorida.com

Come out and see the show! Tell your friends and co-workers!

August 2005 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday August 2nd, 2005 at 9:05 PM

TOPIC:	Installing a Linux computer in your car!
PRESENTER:	Peter Willis, longtime FLUX member!
DATE:	Thursday August 11, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University (directions)

Here is Peter's overview of the presentation:

My presentation will be on installing a Linux computer in your car. I'll be going over car-specific issues such as power consumption, heat, space and time. I'll then show how to take an ordinary distribution of Linux and customize it to boot quicker and run automated applications to do things like play MP3's and speak to the user using free text-to-speech software. I'll have pictures of the process but also after the meeting i'll have my car for display in the parking lot.

Peter Willis is a programmer and system administrator for a medical device company in Hollywood, FL (MAKO Surgical Corp). During the day he does everything from troubleshooting the PBX to updating the website and writing custom applications to maintain the company's all-Linux servers. In his free time Peter contributes to the Open Source community by releasing most of his useful programs under the GNU GPL and trying to help new users fix problems with a variety of distributions. Peter also contributes to the 2600 and Defcon hacker communities by assisting in talks and researching new areas in Information Security.

Mark your calendar! See you at Nova Southeastern University on Thursday the 11th!

July 2005 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday July 1st, 2005 at 1:46 AM

TOPIC:	Asterisk and Voice Over Internet Protocol
PRESENTER:	Jason Kurtz, Linux Guru and Radio Show Host!
DATE:	Thursday July 14, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:
Setup / Configuration and best practices for Asterisk, a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Jason Kurtz has been working with Linux since 1994 and Unix since the mid 80's. He holds Linux Professional Institute Certification Level 1 and Level 2. He's helped fortune 500 companies convert from Microsoft shops into Linux based ones. In that time also done security work for financial institutions. He also hosts a weekly radio show called "Call the Computer Guys". Recently he created kasterx, a live Linux CD with asterisk to help new users jump into the world of Asterisk.

COOL DOOR PRIZE!
In addition to giving his time and expertise for this presentation, Jason is donating a t100p single pots line voicemail card as a door prize! Click below and drool...

http://www.digitnetworks.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=28&osCsid=d8ffa172e67edd9e14978cca18e4d2c1

Slides for Thursday Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday June 7th, 2005 at 12:58 AM

Hi all,

As you know, this week's presentation will be a little different. We will be helping improve a talk rather than just listening to it. In order to give folks a chance to look things over beforehand, the slides from John McLaughlin's "starting point" presentation are now available on the FLUX website as a PDF file.

You can download the slides at http://flux.org/slides . If your browser wants to just display them, right-click the PDF link. PDF files can be read with Macromedia Acrobat reader or with xpdf; one or both of these are generally included with Linux distributions.

IMPORTANT: These slides are being distributed early so they can be discussed AT THE MEETING ... not beforehand on our e-mail lists... after all, we need to have something to do at the meeting :)

If you cannot attend the meeting but have a comment or information to include, please send e-mail DIRECTLY to Adam Glass or to John McLaughlin, at these addresses: adam@usdtv.com or flash@systemnews.com . We will make sure it's presented during the meeting.

See you Thursday evening at Nova Southeastern University!

June Topic Change

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday June 5th, 2005 at 11:28 PM

TOPIC:	Free and Open Source Software Advocacy
PRESENTER:	John McLaughlin!
DATE:	Thursday June 9, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University (directions)

Hi all,

We have a last minute change of plans for this week's meeting. Our planned guest speaker is unable to attend. Fortunately we can use this unexpected chance to do Something Pretty Cool.

Free and Open Source Software is continuously improving. It is being used in many places but not everywhere ... yet. The word has started to spread in recent years and most of us have fielded questions about this topic from friends, co-workers or our bosses. In part, this month's presentation will show how one expert has answered them ... but it will also be a chance for you to add your own insights to enhance a set of slides that we, and anyone else in the world, can use when the opportunity to speak about Linux and other free and Open Source software arises.

We will go through a talk that John McLaughlin gave on the subject at Tech Galaxy. He will be giving the talk again in August and will include improvements we suggest during the meeting. Just like any Open Source software project, we will all collaborate during the meeting to enhance and improve the slides so they are more effective. This is one way all of us can participate in the Open Source movement!

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
John J. McLaughlin CTO/Editor-in-Chief, System News, Inc. (SNI)

John has been a UNIX and Open Source user and advocate for 25 years. John helped start then run the South Florida UNIX Users Group in 1987. He was also elected Board Member, VP, then President, of the Sun User Group, Inc. John has been a participate in several of the "War at the Shore" events in South Florida.

John published "The Florida SunFlash", pre-Internet email newsletter and distributed it to a large, distributed email list from 1988 to 1996. As Editor, SunWorld New Products Column (1995-1998), John produced a weekly column for this Web magazine.

In 1998, John helped found System News, Inc. (SNI) (Coral Springs, FL), an ASP with the mission of producing newsletters and web sites for Sun Resellers. SNI now publishes the weekly news report, "System News for Sun Users" to which 55,000+ people subscribe. SNI's unique, custom publishing system is built on UNIX and Open Source platforms. With it, a unique news report and web site is delivered to each subscriber based on their profile.

As SNI Editor-in-Chief, John is responsible for keeping the staff of writers producing content that is relevant to the $10billion/year Sun marketplace. As SNI CTO, he is looking for ways to improve the system and leverage the SNI technology into new markets.

As a Systems Engineer and "Visioneer" for Sun Microsystems for 15 years, John worked with many companies to help them use technology to provide value to their share holders, customers, and partners. John also helped Sun Partners grow their business by solving the business and technical problems of their customers with appropriate products and services.

John, flash@systemnews.com, is a major user of the on-line business referral system called LinkedIn.com. With direct connections to 2,300 people, John is the 12th most connected person in the network of 2 million+ members.

John graduated with a B Sc (Hons) in computer science from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

June 2005 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday May 24th, 2005 at 12:26 AM

TOPIC:	The Current Anti-Spam Landscape
PRESENTER:	Hal Pomeranz, Unix Guru of many hats!
DATE:	Thursday June 9, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University (directions)

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:
Black lists (both automated and not), white lists, keyword/regexp/ Bayesian filters, SPF, and "greylisting"-- where will the continuing anti-spam arms race take us next? This talk looks at the history of the war on spam and includes an overview of current anti-spam techniques with some thoughts on their relative pros and cons.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Hal Pomeranz is the technical lead and official spam eradicator for Deer Run Associates, a small high-tech consulting firm. But this is merely his "mild-mannered secret identity" that hides his exploits as a Faculty Member and Senior Unix Instructor for the SANS Institute, Technical Advisor for the Center for Internet Security, and Technical Editor for Sys Admin Magazine.

Mark your calendar!
See you Thursday June 9th at Nova Southeastern University!

Slides from May Meeting available

Posted by Adam Glass on Saturday May 14th, 2005 at 8:07 PM

Bill Tabor gave a great presentation on Linux Security at the May 2005 FLUX meeting. The slides from his presentation are now available for download at http://flux.org/slides

An extra bonus is there too. Bill brought a second presentation to the meeting and let the audience decide which talk he would give. Slides from the other presentation are available for download too, from the same page!

Web host wanted for special event

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday May 8th, 2005 at 6:33 PM

Hi all,

Those of you who attended Steve Wozniak's talk last November know that we heard a unique, first-hand account of computing history. Now, thanks to the cooperation and work of many people, we are getting ready to share it with the world.

Nova Southeastern University videotaped the presentation. This recording is even more valuable because Mr. Wozniak later mentioned that he won't be doing much public speaking in the future.

Our friends at JHL Technologies turned the tapes into a 2-disc set of DVDs, complete with very cool Apple ][ looking menus and a photo gallery. All involved, including Mr. Wozniak, have given permission to freely redistribute ISO images of the DVDs so we can share this historical record with the entire world.

We're happy to have aboard the best possible place to keep such a significant document: the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org . They don't usually make ISOs available, but have agreed to do so for Mr. Wozniak's talk.

One piece remains: We are going to put a website together to tell the world about our event, to acknowledge the people and organizations who gave so much to bring it about, and to show how a little Linux user group can occasionally help in bigger things. This site will NOT host the ISOs themselves, but rather will point visitors to them at archive.org .

We're looking for someone who really wants to stress-test their servers by hosting this site :) When everything is ready we expect this to be posted on Slashdot and other computing news websites and RSS feeds. More than a few people will visit, and we need a host that won't buckle under the load.

As was true for the Woz event itself, we are looking for volunteer hosting. We have no money to pay for the bandwidth, but whoever hosts the site will be acknowledged on the site as a sponsor/contributor.

Mr. Wozniak mentioned that he won't be doing much public speaking in the future, so this recording is a real contribution to the history of computing.

If you are interested in being the host of this site please contact me off-list at adam@usdtv.com.

Thank you!

--Adam

FLUX May 2005 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday May 8th, 2005 at 5:56 PM

DATE:	Thursday May 12, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
TOPIC:	Security and Linux!
PRESENTER:	Bill Tabor, longtime FLUX member!
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University(directions)

Bill's presentation will cover internet security, Linux use as a fire wall, new security setups, how to use iptables to secure access, use of squid as a contact filter and for contact caching, tools available to build Virtual Private Networks and tunnels, and some thoughts on where security needs to go.

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday evening at Nova Southeastern University!

Tech Galaxy volunteers needed!

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday April 17th, 2005 at 8:14 PM

Hi all,

Many thanks to the three FLUX members who have volunteered so far to help staff our table at Tech Galaxy next Saturday, April 23rd.

Since the event runs from 9am to 4pm we need more volunteers. The Linux community is based on volunteers pitching in when necessary, doing everything from writing software to legal work, advocacy and documentation. Here at the local level we can do our own advocacy at events like Tech Galaxy, so this is your opportunity to help.

You don't need to be a guru. If someone asks a technical question to which you don't know the answer, it's a great opportunity to tell that person about our fantastic e-mail lists where they can post the question for all to see.

With enough volunteers each shift will only be an hour or two long and there will be two people at the table at all times.

Our friends at JHL are printing badges and would like to get the exhibitor badges done in the next couple of days, so please write as soon as possible to help us at the event. This is going to be a very cool day and we want you to be part of it.

To volunteer, send e-mail to Adam Glass, adam@usdtv.com
Please volunteer now!

April Meeting - Tech Galaxy - 4/23

Posted by Adam Glass on Sunday April 3rd, 2005 at 7:43 PM

Instead of our regular April meeting, FLUX is participating in Tech Galaxy 2005, the annual gathering of South Florida's technology community!

Date	Saturday, April 23rd
Time	9am to 4pm
Cost	Free, except parking
Place	Nova Southeastern University Library (directions)

Tech Galaxy is a free all-day Saturday event featuring many South Florida usergroups, seminars from local and out-of-town experts. This year's event promises to be much bigger than the first one was a year ago. Many companies have donated door prizes and several are sending speakers to share their technical knowledge. Every attendee will receive a goody bag too :)

We want to have a very strong Linux presence at this event, so please be sure to register at this URL...

http://techgalaxy.org/registration.html

Our friends at JHL have put together a great flyer for the event. A copy is on our website. Please send this URL to friends and co-workers. Please print a few copies too, and post them at your local computer and book stores!

http://flux.org/techgalaxy

See you at Nova's library on Saturday April 23!

Please register now!

March 10 Meeting Announcement

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday March 1st, 2005 at 2:12 AM

DATE:	Thursday March 10, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
TOPIC:	Data Backup and Safety!
PRESENTER:	Haim Dimer of Green Backup and longtime FLUX member!
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, usual room, see directions

As we rely more and more on computer systems, we increase our dependency on the data these machines hold. It is important to keep in mind that computers do fail, often without warning.

This presentation is about the 3 major steps needed in keeping our data safe:

• Security
• Anti Virus
• Backups

We will look into the best industry practices related to each topic. From firewalls to automated tape rotation, from social engineering to honeypots, this presentation will take the audience into what makes sense in the business world as well as what solutions are available for the regular user. This 45 minute talk is aimed towards advanced beginners and intermediate audience. The computer guru might even learn a thing or two."

About the presenter:

Haim Dimer is a known icon in the Linux community. He has written numerous technical documents on subjects ranging from system administration to integrating Linux in the enterprise. Haim has participated in two War at the Shore events, debating Microsoft on issues related to the use of an operating system in the business world. He was appointed by Sun Microsystems to travel to Colombia and present Linux and Open Source technologies to members of the Colombian government.

He is the founder and President of Green Backup, a company offering an online backup solution for businesses of all sizes. Haim is a long time Flux member and guest speaker. He is responsible for the web site at http://www.flux.org and actively participates in the group's board, Flux core.

When he is not cooking, or taking care of his dog, Lizo, Haim enjoys exploring the depth of open systems and technology in general. His blog is available at http://www.dimer.org

Mark your calendar! See you March 10th at Nova Southeastern University!

Tech Galaxy 2005 - April 23

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday February 25th, 2005 at 12:36 AM

The second annual Tech Galaxy event is coming on Saturday April 23rd!

Tech Galaxy is a free event by and for South Florida's technical community. There will be technical seminars, display tables, and this year a keynote speaker ... announcement on that coming soon.

The event will be held at Nova Southeastern University and will also be our April meeting (that is, no regular meeting in April).

One of the great things about Tech Galaxy is that it's a gathering of lots of technology usergroups. You can discover all kinds of new stuff there.

Mark your calendar - Saturday, April 23 - Nova Southeastern University!

February Meeting - LVM

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday February 8th, 2005 at 1:42 PM

Hi all,

Apologies for the short notice. Our plans for the February meeting fell through, but fortunately Kwan Lowe was able to put a talk together based on some work he's doing. So we are able to have the meeting on our regularly scheduled night. Thank you Kwan!

FLUX FEBRUARY 2005 MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT

• DATE: Thursday, February 10, 2005

• TIME: Refreshments 6:30pm, presentation begins 7:00pm

• SPEAKER: Kwan Lowe, Linux sysadmin & longtime FLUX member!

• TOPIC: Introduction to the Linux Volume Manager (LVM)

• LOCATION: Nova Southeastern University, usual room (see website)

This presentation discusses, LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager. LVM is an abstraction of physical volumes that allows great flexibility in managing filesystems and on-line storage. We will discuss LVM concepts and demonstrate typical administration tasks.

Mark your calendar! See you at Nova this Thursday evening!

Details for FLUX January meeting - Also Java meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday January 12th, 2005 at 3:20 PM

Hello all,

Remember that this month's FLUX meeting will be on the THIRD Thursday, January 20th. Some additional details...

Location:
We will meet in Nova's medical school instead of our usual location because a large group is expected. We will be in the HPD Assembly building room #2105. Signs will show the way from parking areas to the room.

About the presenter:
Mark Chin
Technical Specialist
Desktop and Mobility Practice
Sun Microsystems

Mark has been active in multiple areas of IT technology at Sun Microsystems. Joining Sun Microsystems in 1994 as a Systems Engineer, Mark's first major efforts centered around architecting the deployment of large technical desktop environments at some of Sun's largest customer sites. Mark's experience in PC interoperability technologies led to his later role as Product Technical Specialist for the entire Mid Atlantic area. In this role, Mark promoted and provided technical guidance for Sun's fast growing volume server and desktop product lines.

Since then, Mark has specialized in Java middleware infrastructure and more recently architecting alternative desktop environments. In his new role, Mark is excited about the possibilities and current impact of Sun's thin-client and alternative desktop technologies.

Please tell your friends and co-workers about this meeting. See you at Nova Southeastern University on January 20, 6:30pm!

The SOFLOJUG Java user group is holding a meeting the evening before ours and it also features a speaker from Sun Microsystems. The presentation will be about Tiger, a major update of the Java programming language. The meeting is free but attendees are asked to register in advance at the SOFLOJUG web site. This meeting is Wednesday January 19th at 6pm. Attend both meetings if you can!

FLUX January 2005 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday January 11th, 2005 at 2:50 PM

DATE:	Thursday January 20, 2005
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
SPEAKER:	Mark Chin, Senior Technologist, Sun Microsystems, Fort Lauderdale
TOPIC:	Sun Microsystems and Linux!
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University Medical School, HPD assembly building #2105

Mr. Chin will demonstrate a Linux thin client network using a regular PC running Linux for the server and Sun Microsystems Sun Rays for the thin client hardware.

The network uses Sun's Linux Desktop Software called Java Desktop System (JDS). Sun will provide evaluation disks of JDS at the meeting.

Mr. Chin will also talk about Sun's relationship with the Linux community including strategy. He will also speak about Sun's Linux products including software, hardware, support, training, etc.

Sun has been selling AMD and Xeon servers running Linux for some time now, and their goal is to be price competitive with other major vendors.

NOTE: Remember that you can borrow books from the FLUX library! Just send e-mail to our librarian and receive the book at the meeting. Keep it for a month and return it at the next meeting. A list of available books can be found on the FLUX website. Check it out!

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday the 20th at 6:30pm!

FLUX in 2004 and 2005

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday December 15th, 2004 at 11:01 PM

Hello all,

FLUX has had a great 2004! We were fortunate to have a whole lot of big events this year:

• We co-founded and helped organize Tech Galaxy in March
• Haim Dimer, Larry Kagan and Robin "Roblimo" Miller fielded a great team for the Gladiators of Code competition in March, and Haim and Larry somehow put the current FLUX site together as part of that huge effort
• Jon "Maddog" Hall, executive director of Linux International and one of the Linux community's founding fathers, visited us in April
• We helped organize a visit by Steve Wozniak, inventor of the first personal computer, in November

Our regular meetings had their share of out-of-town visitors too:

We were even more fortunate to have a bunch of our own FLUX members give fantastic presentations:

Reminder: Meeting Thursday Evening!

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday December 8th, 2004 at 9:51 PM

Hi all,

Remember to join us Thursday evening for our monthly meeting!

Our presenter is Carl Couric, who will be showing us a great web-based sysadmin tool called Webmin!

Refreshments begin at 6:30 and the presentation starts at 7pm, back in our usual location.

See you Thursday evening!

Woz at the Shore Pictures

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday December 2nd, 2004 at 9:22 PM

Photos from the Steve Wozniak event are on the web!

http://www.wozattheshore.org/gallery.htm

Many thanks to all the great people who worked on this event!

The December FLUX meeting is a week from tonight, announcement coming Real Soon Now :)

No meeting tonight - Steve Wozniak on Sunday!

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday November 11th, 2004 at 7:07 PM

Just to head off any confusion, our regular second-Thursday-of-the -month meeting will not be held tonight. Instead we are making the Steve Wozniak event this Sunday into our November meeting.

If you haven't registered yet, please do so at the event site, http://www.wozattheshore.org

Remember that this is not in our usual meeting place. Follow the signs from University and 30th to the library parking area, then more signs to the refreshments :)

When you get there, find the Tech Galaxy 2005 table so you can enter a drawing to win an iPod mini, donated by JHL Technologies!

See you Sunday at 4:30pm!

Volunteers needed for Sunday Nov 14

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday November 8th, 2004 at 6:40 PM

Hi all,

Part of the Steve Wozniak event provides table space for each of the 15 or so usergroups participating in the event. We need a few people to staff the FLUX table, hand out flyers and talk to folks about the group. If we get a bunch of people it will be possible to switch off so those not at the table can wander around to look at the other tables and enjoy the refreshments which will be in the same area.

We also need volunteers to staff the Tech Galaxy table. That will take more people because that table will be handing out and collecting cards for the iPod Mini drawing.

Nobody will miss out on Mr. Wozniak's talk by volunteering. This part of the event will end before the talk begins.

If you would like to volunteer, please send me e-mail at adam@usdtv.com.

Thank you very much!

Help post flyers for Woz event!

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday November 5th, 2004 at 11:37 AM

Hi all,

The big Steve Wozniak event is just over a week away, so this weekend is the time to spread the word about it!

Our friends at JHL Technologies have created a great flyer about the event.

This weekend, it's up to us to make sure every computer store, book store and coffeehouse in town proudly displays a copy!

Please download the flyer and print a few copies. Bring them to your neighborhood technology stores, book stores. and wherever else you can think of.

Since we want these flyers to stay in sight, please find the store manager and ask permission to put a few flyers up. Explain that this is a volunteer community event and completely non-commercial.

Mention that local usergroups are participating, and that this is a really big event.

If the store has a bulletin board for such things, ask to post a flyer there. If not, ask to tape it to the inside of a front window or somewhere else where it can be easily seen. Ask bookstores if you can put a few copies around the computer books.

The flyer is in color so it's a fairly big download, but it will look fantastic if you have a color printer. It looks great in black-and- white, too. The PDF is about 4MB and it takes about a minute to download over a high speed connection. Download it here, or right-click the link and choose save...

Woz at the Shore flyer

We need your help to spread the word and make this a successful event. Please take a little time this weekend to post flyers around your neighborhood.

Thank you!

Steve Wozniak event - Register!

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday October 29th, 2004 at 1:03 AM

Hi all,

Thanks to our friends at JHL Technologies, the Woz at the Shore website is up and running!

We are trying to get an idea of how many people will attend, not least to figure out what amount of refreshments to order.

There is a registration form on the site and we ask that you please register if you're coming.

The site also has event details, the location, and other stuff.

http://www.wozattheshore.org

This event also serves as the FLUX November meeting.

Mark your calendar -- Sunday November 14th, 4:30pm at Nova!

Computers donated to FLUX!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday October 18th, 2004 at 8:30 PM

Hi all,

Six computer systems have been donated to FLUX!

On behalf of the group I would like to say thank you to Mariella Cardinale, Information Technolgy Manager at Summit Brokerage Services, Inc for arranging the donation of six Pentium-II computers and ten monitors!

Another thank-you goes to Harmony Craft for helping to load, move and unload all of the machines and monitors.

These machines will be perfect for demonstrations. We can set up clusters, show Linux installations without changing our personal machines, give new users hands-on experience and more!

Thank you Mariella, Harmony and Summit Brokerage Services!

--Adam

October 14 Meeting - Project Management

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday October 6th, 2004 at 4:47 PM

DATE:	Thursday October 14, 2004
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
SPEAKER:	Connie Maldonado, PMP - Project Management Consultant!
TOPIC:	Project Management in Software Development!
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, our usual room

Most of us work in the technical side of a business. As important as it is to keep up our computing skills, it's equally important to learn about the folks we work with and their expectations of us. This month a professional project manager will talk about what it's like to deal with us! By understanding each other better, everyone can benefit!

Title: "Project Management in Software Development" This presentation will review software development from a project manager's perspective. The objective is to understand why project management is important in software development and why a project manager does the things he/she does. The presentation will examine project management issues in software development as well as lessons learned. The presentation will also present best practices to improve project management practices in software development.

About the Presenter Connie Maldonado, PMP is a technology project management consultant and trainer for SoftKey, Inc., a technology project management training and consulting firm. She is a fully certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and has over 10 years of project management experience.

Ms. Maldonado has worked on projects in many areas including information systems, business and project process reengineering, software application development, financial systems, travel reservation systems and project management offices. She specializes in system development, implementation planning, project management office development, and project management training. Ms. Maldonado also has over 7 years of financial experience in the banking and actuarial arenas.

Ms. Maldonado has extensive project management training experience and has conducted training for the University of Miami, Florida International University, and Nova Southeastern University. She has taught a wide range of project management courses including Project Management for the Executive, Fundamentals of Project Management, Practice of Project Management, and Advanced Project Management. She is currently providing two courses to prepare students for the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification exam. Ms. Maldonado has also written and conducted courses in other topics relevant to project management such as scheduling, procurement, and business requirements, including a seminar for the Project Management Institute Annual Seminars and Symposium.

Ms. Maldonado is the current President of the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute. She has served on the board for six years and has held the Vice President Finance position and the President-Elect position. During Ms. Maldonado's tenure on the board, the Chapter grew from 200 members to its current membership of over 900 members. Recently, in 2004, the Chapter was awarded the prestigious Chapter of the Year award by the Project Management Institute. During her tenure the Chapter also won numerous other awards including Chapter President of the Year. Ms. Maldonado is also a past board member of Toastmasters International.

Ms. Maldonado holds a double degree from the University of Rochester in Mathematics and Economics

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday 10/14 at Nova Southeastern!

September 9 Meeting: Basic Packet Analysis

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday September 1st, 2004 at 1:33 AM

FLUX September 2004 Meeting Announcement

DATE:	Thursday September 9, 2004
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
SPEAKER:	Kwan Lowe, longtime FLUX member, frequent presenter!
TOPIC:	Basic Packet Analysis!
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, our usual room

TCP. OSI. DNS. EGR. SYN. PCV. ACK. BOV. So many acronyms, so little time. This talk will look at TCP/IP and other networking protocols from the trenches. We will discuss various packet analysis tools including tcpdump and ethereal, packet injection tools, and security scripts.

Kwan Lowe is a longtime FLUX member, Linux enthusiast and consultant. He breaks AIX, SunOS and Linux machines at Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and manages to get paid for it. In his leisure time, he breaks AIX, SunOS and Linux machines at his house and ends up paying for it.

Mark your calendar!
See you Thursday September 9th at Nova!

PHP/Zend Meeting Location

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday August 11th, 2004 at 4:05 PM

We're expecting lots of people at our meeting Thursday night, and the folks at Nova Southeastern University have come through for us by finding a larger meeting room.

We will be meeting at Nova's medical school, which is located a block or two north of our usual location. Basic directions:

• I-595 exit University Drive southbound
• Continue a few miles to Abe Fischler Blvd, also called 30th street
• Turn left (eastbound) onto 30th street
• Turn right at the first driveway and continue into parking garage.

the Terry Auditorium (Rm.2101) of the Assembly I Building. - HPD

Remember to spread the word to anyone who uses PHP or wants to learn! See you at Nova Southeastern University Thursday the 12th at 6:30pm!

August 12th Meeting: Zend/PHP5

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday July 27th, 2004 at 7:59 AM

Date:	Thursday, August 12, 2004
Time:	6:30pm refreshments, program begins 7:00pm
Topic:	PHP 5 !
Presenter:	Daniel Kushner, Director of Training and Certification, Zend Technologies !
Location:	Room to be determined! We will meet at the Nova Southeastern University main campus, but may use a larger auditorium to accomodate more people.

Thanks to the efforts of FLUX member Larry Kagan, the folks at Zend Technologies will be here to talk about the recently-released PHP version 5! For those who don't know, PHP is a widely used, free scripting language that is powerful and easy to use for dynamic web pages that interface with databases, as well as lots of other tasks. Zend Technologies was founded by two of the major authors of PHP and the company strongly supports the Linux community.

TELL YOUR FRIENDS! Remember that PHP is cross-platform, so this event will be of interest to folks outside the Linux community too.

Here is a description of Mr. Kushner's talk:

PHP 5, released on July 13th provides tremendous benefits to PHP developers. Come hear Daniel Kushner, Zend's Director of Training and Certification, talk about what is new in PHP 5 from web services and enterprise-class XML support to support of an object-oriented paradigm within PHP. Daniel will also cover what is new in Zend Studio 3.5 and Zend Performance Suite 4.0, Zend's latest products; and discuss the Zend PHP Certification Program and the value of being a Zend Certified Engineer.

Daniel Kushner, Director of Training and Certification, Zend Technologies:

As Director of Training and Certification, Daniel is responsible for the Zend PHP Certification program. In addition to designing the certification program he developed the Zend PHP Training program, which provides the necessary study guide and classes to help PHP developers become Zend PHP certified. As part of the program, Daniel also initiates and maintains business relationships and partnerships with worldwide PHP training facilities. Prior to Zend Technologies, Daniel was a Senior Software Engineer at DynamicLogic, responsible for developing integrated research recruitment solutions for name brand websites including Yahoo!, AOL, and Lycos. Previously, he was a PHP freelancer, developing front and backend web applications, including e-commerce integration, member services and personalization, auction management, email delivery systems, and online file manipulation services for companies such as MTV, Arista, Viacom Outdoor, Accuweather and Dell Computer Corporation. While freelancing, Daniel was also a PHP Training Instructor where he worked with developers from highly acclaimed universities such as Harvard and Columbia and with companies like Google, The New York Times and the American Museum of Natural History. Daniel holds a BS in Computer Science from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzlyia, Israel.

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday August 12, 6:30pm at Nova!

July 8th Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday July 1st, 2004 at 3:10 PM

We all know about Linux, but convincing business types to use it can be a challenge. This month's topic addresses that!

DATE:	Thursday July 8th
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
SPEAKER:	Paul Kavanagh, FLUX member and author!
TOPIC:	Selling Open Source!
LOCATION:	Nova Southeastern University, our usual room (see directions)

Selling Open Source (90 mins) by Paul Kavanagh:
The presenter is a FLUX member and a former IBM and Microsoft manager. His book "Open Source Software: Implementing and Managing" will be published in August by Digital Press. The book is aimed at introducing open source software to managers and professionals who are not using it yet.

This talk looks at some of the best approaches and arguments for open source advocates when dealing with organizations who don't get it yet. Hopefully the slides and arguments, drawn from the book, will be useful to other members in persuading their customers and employers to use open source software.

Agenda:
Open source history in 1 slide
Open Source Successes
Five Things Everyone Should Start Doing Today
Linux distributions and packaging for new corporate adopters
Open source development tools and methods
Linux Server Applications: Apache, databases, mail/ groupware, etc.
Linux on the Desktop: How real, best opportunities
Costs of open source software
Licensing and other risks
Getting started, resources, Q&A

Mark your calendar! See you next week at Nova Southeastern University!

Preparation for 6/10 Keysigning

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday June 3rd, 2004 at 12:37 PM

Hi all, Our guest speaker for the June 10 FLUX meeting, Anibal Monsalve Salazar, has put together a page with information about the keysigning that will be held at our June 10th meeting. You will need to do a couple of things in advance in order to participate, so please read:

http://www-personal.monash.edu/~anibal/keysigning/

Remember that we will also hear about two Open Source conferences taking place in Brazil right now, and about the Debian auto-tools!

The meeting is a week from today, but you need to send e-mail to participate in the keysigning by Tuesday. See you at the meeting!

June 10, 2004 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Saturday May 22nd, 2004 at 8:32 PM

SPEAKER: Anibal Monsalve Salazar, FLUX member from Australia!

TOPICS:

• Open Source conference reports,
• Debian autotools,
• and a keysigning party!

DATE: Thursday, June 10, 2004

TIME: 6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm

LOCATION: Nova Southeastern University, our usual location (see directions)

Anibal Monsalve Salazar may just be the FLUX member who lives the longest distance from our meeting location, but he will be here in June after attending two Open Source conferences in Brazil! A system administrator and programmer at Monash University in Australia, Mr. Salazar is also involved with the Debian project and working his way through the long process of becoming an official Debian developer.

This will be a three-part meeting!

• We will hear about Mr. Salazar's experiences at DebConf4, the fifth annual Debian Conference, and at FISL - Software Livre Forum 2004
• We will learn about a set of Open Source programmer utilities called the autotools (autoconf, automake and libtools), which allow software to run on many different platforms.
• In addition, Mr. Salazar is going to organize a keysigning party for FLUX! This is a way for people to exchange e-mail and files in a trusted environment, knowing for sure that the sender of a message is genuine and not someone just forging a from line. This involves participants bringing some form of ID to the meeting to show to the other participants. We will be sending more information about this in the coming weeks.

Mark your calendar! See you at the meeting on June 10 at 6:30pm!

May 13 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday May 11th, 2004 at 2:34 PM

DATE: Thursday May 13, 2004

TIME: Refreshments 6:30pm, presentation begins at 7:00pm

PLACE: Nova Southeastern University, our usual location (see map at http://www.flux.org)

SPEAKER: Mick Weiss, longtime FLUX member!

TOPIC: SSH - Secure Shell

This month, Mick Weiss will come and speak about SSH!

SSH stands for Secure SHell. This presentation will cover many aspects of SSH and related tools, going over both the fundamentals and more advanced topics with plenty of real world examples.

SSH and it's suite of tools help provide a secure connection to remote computers. If you currently use FTP, telnet, or any or the "r" commands (like: rsh, rcp etc.) come and find out how to replace them with a secure alternative. We will also go over tunneling various protocols through SSH. Come learn how to keep your data safe, in a "hands on" environment.

Mick Weiss is a software developer and network administrator as well as a longtime FLUX member!

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! See you Thursday May 13 at Nova!

Directions to Tuesday 4/27 event

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday April 26th, 2004 at 2:17 PM

Hi all,

One last reminder that Jon "Maddog" Hall, executive director of Linux International, will be here tomorrow evening!

We will meet at Nova Southeastern University's medical school with refreshments at 6:30pm followed by the presentation at 7pm.

Since we didn't have much time to publicize the event, PLEASE spread the word today to your friends and colleagues.

As always there is no charge and the event is open to the public.

Here are driving directions to find the medical school parking:

1. Take I-95 or I-75 to I-595.

2. From I-95, go west on I-595 to University Drive, OR From I-75, go east on I-595 to University Drive.

3. Exit I-595 onto University Drive, southbound. From the east this will be a left turn onto University, OR From the west this will be a right turn onto University.

4. Continue south on University Drive about 1 mile, to SW 30th Street, also called Abe Fischler Blvd. There are two left-turn lanes at the light. Get into the rightmost left-turn lane.

5. Turn left onto SW 30th Street / Abe Fischler Blvd.

6. Turn at the first possible right, which enters the Nova campus near the Health Professions building complex. Follow the small road into the parking garage.

After parking, follow the LINUX signs to the auditorium.

SPREAD THE WORD! SEE YOU THERE TUESDAY EVENING!

April Meeting Rescheduled - Maddog!

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday April 5th, 2004 at 1:02 PM

We have a fantastic opportunity to hear Jon "Maddog" Hall speak this month, and we're rescheduling the April meeting to do so!

For those who haven't heard of him, Maddog is the Executive Director of Linux International and one of the Linux community's most influential people. He has both an engineering and a business background, and he travels the globe advocating Linux. Maddog is able to convince people in the business world that they should use Linux, and he knows all the latest cool stuff going on in the Linux community too.

Maddog is a fantastic speaker, and we are fortunate that he offered to speak at FLUX while passing through South Florida on his way back from an international trip.

The meeting will be the evening of TUESDAY APRIL 27th

The location will be at Nova Southeastern University's medical school, but we do not yet know which auditorium. Since we will probably have lots of people we are looking for a big room.

Time and location details to follow, but for now, mark your calendar!

New Poll

Posted by Haim Dimer on Friday March 19th, 2004 at 5:07 PM

In anticipation for next week's big event, the War at the Shore, Gladiators of Code, we put a new poll on the website. Come vote for your favorite Gladiator!

March 11, 2004 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday March 3rd, 2004 at 8:55 PM

DATE: Thursday March 11, 2004

TIME: 6:30pm refreshments, presentation 7:00pm

TOPIC: Basic Linux Troubleshooting Part II

PRESENTER: Kwan Lowe, longtime FLUX member!

LOCATION: Nova Southeastern University, see driving directions

This month Kwan Lowe will conclude his Basic Linux Troubleshooting presentation! Part 1 was covered at the January FLUX meeting, and the slides are available at the Digital Hermit.

Come see Part Two for an excellent overview of the most common Linux technical issues and learn how to solve them!

Kwan Lowe is a longtime member of FLUX, a professional system administrator and Linux consultant. Get to the presentation early for a seat in the front row!

REMINDER: The FLUX library is now available! Browse the collection of books on the FLUX site and e-mail the librarian to reserve one that interests you. Pick it up at the meeting and keep it for a month!

Go to the FLUX Library!

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU THURSDAY MARCH 11 AT NOVA!

Slides from Basic Linux Troubleshooting

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday February 27th, 2004 at 12:46 AM

Slides from Kwan Lowe's presentation, Basic Linux Troubleshooting - Part One, are now available on his site:

http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/trouble_shooting/

Kwan gave that presentation at the January 2004 FLUX meeting, and Part Two is on the schedule for March!

The meeting announcement will go up next month, but mark your calendar. The meeting will be Thursday March 11. See you there!

Exchange Killer Slides

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday February 23rd, 2004 at 12:46 PM

Slides from the Exchange Killer presentation by Michael Marschall are now available for download!

The slides are in PDF format and the file size is about 992K.

Exchange Killer presentation slides

Many thanks to Michael Marschall for a great presentation!

Tech Galaxy '04 on March 27!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday February 10th, 2004 at 1:04 PM

Tech Galaxy '04, March 27th!

FLUX, along with Nova Southeastern University and the SOFLOJUG Java user group, are going to start a new annual event! It's a one-day gathering of all of South Florida's tech-oriented user groups! The name of the event is Tech Galaxy, and it will be Saturday March 27th at the Nova library.

Each group that attends will have a table and one or more 45-minute seminar slots in one of five rooms. We hope to offer lots of interesting topics to attend, as well as a chance to meet people from other user groups. Free to exhibitors and attendees!

If you know someone who helps run another tech-oriented user group in the area, please ask them to contact Adam Glass, adam@usdtv.com so their group can participate!

War at the Shore: Gladiators of Code

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday February 10th, 2004 at 8:14 AM

FLUX will be participating in the next War At The Shore event, called Gladiators of Code! It will be held the evening of Thursday March 25th at the Nova library auditorium. This is the same series as the debate last year, but this one will be much friendlier. In this case three teams will show how to solve the same business problem using different technologies. Admission to this event is free, but a donation is suggested.

FLUX Library Grand Opening!

Posted by Adam Glass on Tuesday February 10th, 2004 at 7:56 AM

The FLUX Library is now open! Request your book (limit 1 per person please) by Wednesday evening, then pick it up at the meeting Thursday evening! Click the Library link in the Main Menu to enter!

You can browse the listing of books on our website, then request one via e-mail. Ronnie will bring the book to the next FLUX meeting for you. Then you bring it back to the next month's meeting. You can request books up to 24 hours before the Thursday meeting.

This is a bit of an experiment ... no library card, it's free, and we have over 50 books in the library.

SHHHH! No Talking!

February 2004 Meeting Announcement

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday January 21st, 2004 at 3:11 PM

DATE: Thursday February 12, 2004

TIME: 6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00

TOPIC: Exchange Killer! -- Replacing MS Exchange

SPEAKER: Michael Marschall, longtime FLUX member

LOCATION: Nova Southeastern University (directions)

About the presentation
This talk will discuss replacing a Windows/Exchange server with Linux, Postfix, Courier-IMAP, OpenLDAP, Spamassassin, Horde, Unison and OpenSSL. This solution gives about 80% of the functionality of Exchange without the Exchange headaches. The solution also adds spam filtering to the mail environment with Spamassasin, superior web mail with Horde (IMP and Turba) and superior task automation (i.e. removing SPAM and "Deleted Items" older than 14 days). A combination of SSH and Unison allows replication of .pst files to the server for Outlook Contacts, Journal and Calendar centralization.

Everything uses SSL for communications and is therefore infinitely safer than Exchange. Finally, since most, if not all, variable data is kept in LDAP the setup is extremely scalable (horizontally as well as vertically) and fault tolerant.

About the presenter
My Background:

• Graduated from the University of Connecticut (Go Huskies!!!)
  • BA in Economics
  BA in Political Science
• President of Pipeline Networks consulting and solution firm
• Past Consulting jobs include:
  • Citrix Systems
  • Mars Music
  • Foreclosure.com
  • Voicerite, Inc.
  • Avanti Products
• I have been a sysadmin for 8 years, Started with AIX and then moved to Windows, Solaris and Linux.
• Presently I am working on app update/install/patch automation tools for both UNIX and Windows.

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday February 12 at 6:30pm!!

January 8 2004 Meeting Announcement

Posted by Adam Glass on Friday January 2nd, 2004 at 3:37 PM

DATE: Thursday, January 8, 2004

TIME: 6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm

PLACE: Nova Southeastern University, usual room
-----> (see directions)

We're going to get 2004 started in a very cool way! This month we will have two speakers!

Reinhard Wiesemann will be visiting from Germany, and will tell us about the Linux community in Europe! Mr. Wiesemann runs the Linux Hotel in Germany. It provides seminars and training, and also houses the Gnu Project in Europe!

The second part of the meeting will be presented by our own Kwan Lowe, a local Linux consultant and trainer and a long- time FLUX member. Kwan will present the first part of Basic Linux Troubleshooting! He will then finish the presentation at our March 2004 meeting, so there will be time to cover lots of ground within the topic.

Let's make 2004 a great year for FLUX and for Linux!

Mark your calendar! See you Thursday January 8th!

Tonight's meeting location moved!

Posted by Adam Glass on Thursday December 11th, 2003 at 8:56 PM

Hi all,

Apparently our meeting room has been changed, and unfortunately the Java user group received the e-mail about it. Many thanks to Jeanette of the Java group for passing the information along.

SO ... Tonight's meeting location is changed to the Nova medical school "HPD B in the assembly II building".

I'm not exactly where that is in the medical school but will put up signs as soon as I figure it out. Remember that the medical school is just north of our usual location, at the corner of University Drive and Abe Fischler Blvd (I think something like 30th street ... there is a traffic light there).

From University Drive, turn east at that light, then take the first right into the medical school parking garage.

Here are directions to the medical school from a previous event. The part about finding the room is probably different, but this will get you to the campus...

Directions to NSU Medical School

See you there tonight! See you tonight! --Adam

December 11 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Monday December 8th, 2003 at 10:33 PM

Something a little different this month!

========= LINUX OPEN MIC NIGHT! ==========

Bring your Linux questions and your Linux knowledge! Ask questions and help answer the ones posed by others!

This will be a lot less formal than our usual meetings. It gives everyone a chance to learn about stuff they might not have been thinking about. Maybe we will all be surprised!

DATE: This thursday - December 11, 2003!

TIME: Refreshments 6:30pm, event starts about 7ish :)

PLACE: Our usual location at Nova (see driving directions)

We need lots of people to come out in order for this event to be successful, so mark your calendar and join us Thursday!

November 13, 2003 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday October 29th, 2003 at 7:50 PM

DATE:	Thursday November 13, 2003
TIME:	6:30 Refreshments, Program begins 7:00pm
TOPIC:	RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
PRESENTER:	Garet Cammer of ARCO Data Protection Systems
PLACE:	Nova Southeastern University, our regular room. See driving directions

RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks - is a fantastic way to ensure the safety of a computer's data. This presentation will discuss the various levels of RAID, Hardware versus Software RAID, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and how RAID pertains to the Linux OS. This will be a technical presentation, with some information on ARCO's DupliDisk RAID hardware at the end.

About the presenter: Garet Cammer is a software engineer with ARCO Computer Products in Hollywood Florida. Previously he has been CTO of Industrias Filizola in Sao Paulo Brazil, and member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Mr. Cammer holds a bachelor of electrical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a master of electrical engineering degree from Columbia University.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU THURSDAY NOVEMBER 13 AT NOVA!

Slides from Enterprise Monitoring by Moti Levy

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday October 22nd, 2003 at 11:15 PM

Moti Levy gave a great talk at last month's FLUX meeting. The topic was Enterprise Monitoring with Open Source tools.

Moti has kindly made the slides from his talk available!

Download the slides here!

The slides have been converted to a PDF file, about 330K in size.

Thank you Moti!

New web site

Posted by Haim Dimer on Friday October 10th, 2003 at 12:18 AM

After months of development, the new FLUX.org website is live. Check it out! You can send us suggestions through the box on the lower left corner. Enjoy the ride!

October 2003 Meeting

Posted by Haim Dimer on Saturday September 20th, 2003 at 9:52 PM

DATE:	Thursday October 9, 2003
TIME:	6:30 Refreshments, Program begins 7:00pm
TOPIC:	Enterprise Monitoring with Open Source tools!
PRESENTER:	Moti Levy!
PLACE:	Nova Southeastern University, our regular room. See driving directions

"Hey, is the system down?" Nagios is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program. It will allow you to monitor Windows and Unix Servers and will notify you about any problem. Swatch is a simple log watcher combined with a centralized syslog server. It will notify you of any events that might need your attention.

Combined together these tools (both running on Linux of course) will allow you to take control of your computing environment and help you prevent the above question !

We Will Cover:

• Basic nagios setup.
• Installing nagios clients on Linux and Windows.
• Setting up monitoring for standart web services.
• Setting up a syslog server.
• Setting swatch and some basic rules.

Moti Levy's bio :
There was always something strange about him, said my MCSE class of 1996 in the 2000 reunion. I was home battling Isdn4Linux on Slackware with 2.1.18 kernel .....

When not doing that, I provide System/Network support for various companies in the Broward County area.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! SEE YOU OCTOBER 9 AT NOVA!

FLUX booth at Computer & Technology Showcase!

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday September 10th, 2003 at 8:55 PM

Computer & Technology Showcase
September 23 and 24, 2003!

FLUX September 11 Meeting

Posted by Adam Glass on Wednesday August 27th, 2003 at 1:51 AM

DATE:	Thursday September 11, 2003
TIME:	6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm
PLACE:	Nova Southeastern University
TOPIC:	XML!
SPEAKER:	Mick Weiss, longtime FLUX member!

XML is eXtensible Markup Language. This presentation will cover many aspects of XML, Covering both the fundamentals and more advanced topics regarding XML and related technologies with plenty of real world examples.

Mick Weiss will uncover the hype, clear up the myths about XML, and show you how it is being used in applications. He will point out when to use XML and perhaps more importantly, when not to use it.

This presentation will be helpful to the XML novice, the experienced programmer and network admins alike. If any of these topics interest you, then you should definitely attend: XML, XSL (FO), XSLT, XUL, MathML, XML Databases, XML messaging, Web Services, emerging technologies, l18n (internationalization), XML implimentations in various languages (PHP/Perl/and if we have time - Java). If you don't know what the hell any of that means, come find out!

Mick Weiss is a software developer for Lenmark Communications in West Palm Beach. He has been using Linux since the advent of the 2.2 kernel and has been a FLUX member for over a year.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!! SEE YOU THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 11 AT NOVA!!

August presentation - Slides available

Posted by Haim Dimer on Saturday August 16th, 2003 at 9:57 PM

The slides for Haim Dimer's presentation are available here

August Meeting

Posted by Haim Dimer on Wednesday July 23rd, 2003 at 5:33 PM

FLUX August 2003 Meeting Announcement
=====================================

Date:     Thursday August 14th, 2003

Time:     6:30pm refreshments, presentation begins 7:00pm

Place:    Nova Southeastern University, our usual location

Topic:    Linux Enterprise Security!

Speaker:  Haim Dimer, longtime FLUX member!


Linux is powerful networking platform. It is known to be an agile
operating system for serving web pages, emails and other Internet
related tasks. But Linux can also provide a very secure environment.
From VPN to firewalls, Linux can be used to keep the bad guys out
and let the good guys in.

In this presentation, Haim Dimer will explain how one can build a
total security solution for the enterprise based on Linux. The talk
will not assume any knowledge in the computer security field.
Beginners are more than welcome to attend. The presentation will go
into the details as to how an engineer can configure the system to
get a powerful firewall with all the bells and whistles.

About the speaker:
Haim Dimer is a long time Flux member and guest speaker. When he is
not cooking, writing poetry or singing, Haim enjoys exploring the
depth of Open Source systems and technology in general. Haim keeps
a log available on his website at 

   MARK YOUR CALENDAR!!!  SEE YOU THURSDAY AUGUST 14 AT NOVA!!!