High Altitude Balloon Flights to Near Space Presented by Jonathan R. Trappe & Tanner Lovelace

Recently, several LUG members competed in a challenge to gather pictures of the curved horizon of the Earth from near-space... not with rockets and elaborate gear, but on the cheap, using a balloon and consumer-grade equipment.

Jonathan Trappe and long-time LUG member Tanner Lovelace will talk about the challenge rules, and how the team assembled and weighed ideas quickly, launching their balloon after just three weeks of planning. Then we'll hear how things did not quite go as planned, but how these quick-thinking geeks recovered to achieve their goal.

After the launch and recovery of their high-altitude balloon, this team was featured on WRAL, NPR news, and on the front page of the News & Observer! But NOW, they're hitting the big time -- speaking at a TriLUG meeting!

The IPv4 address space is running out, and the future has arrived. IPv6 is the new standard for the Internet, and the time to adopt it is now.

Long time TriLUG member Kevin Otte is a Linux Systems Administrator and a Network Engineer, and he has more IP addresses in his home than some countries have.

Come hear Kevin give us not only the "what it is" and "the end is nigh" parts of the IPv6 puzzle, but also the "how can I tinker with it" and "why would I want to" parts, as well.

Meeting logistics on the wiki.

We all love free software. We think it should be used everywhere, right? And that means Linux... Linux everywhere, right?

Not always. Actually, there are times when Linux is not such a great fit for the task. There are other solutions...

Wesley Shields will be telling us about his favorite open source project, and how it can be a good fit for companies that need a Unix solution. He'll tell us what's similar to Linux, what's different, and why companies might care.

Wes is a Senior Information Security Engineer for a government contractor. He spends his days in the trenches fighting the APT and his nights poking at FreeBSD with a stick. His interests include C code, network traffic and general mischief and shenanigans.

6/10 7pm, Red Hat HQ

This month, YOU are the speaker!

Got something interesting that you'd like to share? can't wait for BarCamp? We're hosting our own mini "unconference" style meeting, where members of the audience will be given 5-10 minutes to present an idea or open source tool.

To get an idea of what folks have in mind, see the wiki page here -> Meeting:2010_June_10

Vote for your favorite presentation... the winner gets a prize (TBA).

The ballots went out, came back, and the results are in ... We have a new Steering Committee! Please make the two new members, Jeff Schornick and Jym Williams Zavada, feel welcome!

Join us and Mike Seda at Red Hat HQ, May 13th, 7pm

Mike Seda, CEO and IT Consultant at Seda Systems, Inc., will introduce us to Puppet, an Open Source Data Center Automation and Configuration Management framework.

Puppet, is an extremely powerful System Administration tool. This presentation will demonstrate the value in "Puppetizing" both system and application tasks that were originally performed only by hand or via home-grown scripts.

Mike Seda has years of System Administration experience in Research and Enterprise Computing environments. The niche skills that he accrued during this time were (and still are) deemed extremely rare and valuable in the IT industry. One such skill is Puppet, which he has been using to automate tasks for businesses of all sizes since 2008.

• with Greg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat HQ, April 8th 7pm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Join us in April when Greg DeKoenigsberg, Senior Community Architect for Red Hat, presents a retrospective on the use of open source in education, with lessons learned from the OLPC project, along with future ideas of collaboration in teaching.

Greg is certainly in a position to know what he's talking about - he was a community advisor to the One Laptop Per Child project and a founding board member of the Sugar Labs project. He serves on the advisory boards of several open source advocacy organizations, writes about open source issues, and speaks at open source events worldwide.

Location: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus Speaker: Michael Peters Time: 7:00pm -0500 Thu, 11 Mar 2010 Food: Pizza and soft drinks provided

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HTML is "easy", right? Security is not, right? Come listen to Michael Peters discuss web security, why you should care, where you should care, and tips for the "rest of us" who don't (but should!) wear a paranoia hat daily.

Michael will explain the basics of web security, discuss various attack vectors (SQL Injection, XSS, CSRF, and more), and some avoidance tactics. Whether you're an experienced web developer (we all need reminding) or just starting out, this talk can help avoid being the next easy harvest of The Bad Guys.

See the meeting wiki page for directions, etc.