May 18 - Home Brew Lab Hack Night

2017-05-15

Bring your system down to Caktus Group and let Mike help guide you in how to set up your own Home Brew Lab. From installing the hypervisor, to spinning up VMs and maybe configuring a little virtual infrastructure, he'll be on hand to help kickstart your setup.

Note that you should bring a reasonably powerful system if you want to set up much more than a trivial lab.


May 11 - Home Brew Lab

2017-04-30

Note We will be holding our annual Steering Committee elections at the very start of the meeting.

Summary In this talk, I will cover how you can create your very own lab for both testing and learning new platforms using freely available software. I want to share with everyone a way that you can have your very own test lab at home for little to no money. With this project, you can brew your own lab at home or work with only one "server" allowing you to test many OSes and networking configurations. I will discuss topics including: Why do a Home Brew Lab? What kind of hardware to you need? What virtualization platform? What kind of networking? I will also provide ideas on how to obtain hardware at reduced and sometimes no cost. I will present methods of acquiring various type of OS and software including VMWare, KVM, and Hyper-V. I will also discuss the implications of the licensing for each product.

Bio Mike Canada is an Engineer/Account Manager at Deal Consulting providing IT Support for small to medium businesses in the Triangle. In his own words... I have over 30 years of experience in IT ranging from mainframes to PC’s to mobile devices. I cut my teeth in Linux on Slackware in the mid 90’s. I have been using Linux as a hobbyist ever since and I am currently working on Linux Certification. I have a B.S. degree in Computer Science from James Madison University. I have the unique experience of having worked in federal, private, non-profit, and entrepreneurial endeavors.

May-11 Meeting Announcements Slides


April 13 - Serverless Deployments in AWS

2017-03-19

Video: YouTube

Summary Tonight's talk will go in depth about the advantages and drawbacks of going serverless. A demo will illustrate deploying a generic Python application using AWS' SAM (Serverless Application Model), a Flask (WSGI) application using Zappa, and why you should reconsider your position on CloudFront.

Speaker Brian Jinwright is a Senior Software Engineer and resident AWS wizard at MetaMetrics, of Durham, NC where he has deployed various serverless django applications for production in AWS such as the company's homepage: metametricsinc.com.

APR-13 Meeting Announcements


Mar 16 - Hack Night: Understand or Write a Basic SELinux Policy

2017-03-13

Writing or maintaining an SELinux policy can be a daunting task if you've never done it before. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to create a basic SELinux policy. You will also learn to debug SELinux issues while designing or maintaining a SELinux policy. Contributing to SELinux is a great way to become more familiar with how it works and make open source computing more secure.

A rough outline of topics will include:

  • Basic examples and compiling
  • Using the M4 Macro Language (Reference Policy language)
  • Debugging SELinux policy issues
  • Contributing policies and fixes upstream with SELinux
  • Packaging your policy
  • Decompiling policies
  • Where to get help

I wrote and maintain the SELinux policy for an open source project, Pulp, and want to share the experience I had writing it. With some guidance it can be fun. I'm assuming users have Fedora or RHEL, but we can probably figure it out on other distributions too.

Attendees are encouraged to come with a computer and a desire to contribute to an open source SELinux policy. If you bring software that does does not run within a SELinux context already you could write a basic policy for it. You can also learn more about an existing policy that you did not write. We can fix SELinux bugs and improve existing open source policies.

Bio Brian Bouterse is a Principle Software Engineer at Red Hat and has been working with SELinux for roughly 3 years. He is a developer on Pulp and has written an SELinux policy for Pulp and fixed many SELinux issues along the way. He lives in Raleigh with his wife Katie and his cat Schmowee.


March 9 - Understanding SELinux for the Win

2017-02-20

Video: YouTube Many thanks to Eric Leary of DataKraft for the excellent recording and editing work!

Summary Do you find SELinux complex or confusing? Have you ever disabled it in production? Is your application compliant with SELinux? This talk will provide an introduction to SELinux including how it works and motivation for why it is important for secure systems. This does not require previous SELinux knowledge, but it will give the basic tools to analyze failures and understand the state of SELinux on a system for both sysadmins and developers.

Topics will include:

  • Why do we care about SELinux?
  • How SELinux Works
  • What is an SELinux Policy
  • Fixing SELinux Errors
  • CIL Language
  • M4 Macro Language (Reference Policy language)

Come learn about SELinux so you can work with it for the win.

Speaker Brian Bouterse is a Principle Software Engineer at Red Hat and has been working with SELinux for roughly 3 years. He is a developer on Pulp and has written an SELinux policy for Pulp and fixed many SELinux issues along the way. He lives in Raleigh with his wife Katie and his cat Schmowee.

MAR 9 Meeting Announcements


February 9 - Hackable Drones, Drone Laws, and The Development of the UAS Ecosystem in North Carolina

2017-01-24

Many thanks to Eric Leary of DataKraft for the excellent recording and editing work!

This event will feature 3 excellent speakers, and we will be giving away a drone!

We will begin with Adrian Pomilio, UI Architect and Platform Architecture Team Lead for Mapp Digital, presenting on the topic of hacking drones. Next we have James Vann of Vann Attorneys Law Firm presenting the on the lastest drone laws and legislation. Finally we will hear from Kyle Snyder, Director of The NextGen Air Transportation Program (NGAT), NCSU Institute for Transportation Research and Education, which is a Consortium of academia, industry, and government members. This meeting will tie together the regulations, the research activities, the economic opportunities, the transportation infrastructure, and future directions.

1st Presentation: Hackable Drones Video: YouTube There has been a lot of talk about drones, and you can pretty much buy some type of a drone at the corner store. But can you control it with JavaScript? Can you tap into the OS and make the drone do your bidding? Or are you just stuck with what they give you in the box? This talk will cover two hackable drones as well as libraries you can leverage to control a myriad of non-traditional devices. Think of it as IOT before IOT. We will have live code, and a few demonstrations, and then we will raffle off one of the drones used in the presentation. This is a light hearted presentation and not a deep dive into aerospace engineering.

Bio: Adrian Pomilio is a UI Architect and Platform Architecture Team Lead for Mapp Digital in Raleigh NC. Adrian has been designing/architecting enterprise applications in the B2B and B2C space. With a heavy focus on front-end technologies JavaScript is at the forefront of his coding adventures. Currently he is heavily focusing on serverless and IOT architecture when he is not spending his free time with his two sons.

2nd Presentation: Drone Laws Video: YouTube James Vann from Vann Attorneys will present on drone laws. Full abstract and bio is forthcoming.

3rd Presentation: The Development of the UAS Ecosystem in North Carolina Video: YouTube "I will bring some slides with some of the work we have been doing to support UAS integration around the state since 2012. I will also talk about our role on the FAA UAS Center of Excellence ASSURE team. And I will talk about opportunities for getting involved with the NGAT Consortium here at NC State (my office) and what we are working on as a community. Our focus is developing North Carolina as an advanced aviation communications testbed for transitioning all aviation activities into a digitized operating environment, not just drones."

Bio: In 2012 Kyle returned home to North Carolina to lead the development of an Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Ecosystem as part of an effort to transition the state to a modern air transportation system. In the role as the NGAT Consortium Director at NC State University, Kyle is reaching across North Carolina to connect researchers and educators with industry and government offices that are preparing for future aviation capabilities. Kyle has spent his entire career researching, developing, testing, educating, and advocating for new aerospace and aviation technologies. Having seen the initial Space Shuttle launches from his backyard as kid, to standing on the flight line for a couple of the last SR-71 flights at NASA Dryden, to being a driving force in the domestic integration of UAS for civil and commercial operations, Kyle continues to be inspired by the science of flight and seeks to share those moments with those around him (especially his wife and young son!). https://itre.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SnyderK.pdf

This is going to be an amazing event you do not want to miss!


January 19 - Hack Night!

2017-01-13

LibreGaming night! Tonight we are going to play a few popular open source games together. List:

  • Warsow
  • Minetest
  • Teeworlds

Bring a laptop and we'll see you there.

Or bring one of your personal projects down and hack away! Join your fellow TriLUGers at Caktus Group for an evening of fun tech hackery.

If you can't make it in person, hop on IRC; we'll be hanging out on #trilug-sys on Freenode.


January 12 - RHV

2017-01-06

Video: On YouTube

Jeff Spahr gives us an overview and tour of RHV (Red Hat Virtualization), outlining its features and benefits, and finishing up with a demo.


[TriLUG]

The Linux Users Group of the Triangle. Serving Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and RTP.

Sponsors

Our monthly meetings are hosted by:



Dr. Warren Jasper



Hosting Sponsor

Hosting for TriLUG's infrastructure is provided by:

NetActuate


3D Printed "TriTuxes" provided by:
Brian Henning