FVLUG Meeting and Presentations

Last night was the FVLUG meeting and it went really well… we actually had people! 17 showed up I think, which is pretty good for not having a meeting about a year. I was relieved that it wasn’t just me, Silverstr, Wim and Raskal like it has been sometimes in the past. Of course, if it had been we could have skipped the pretense of having a meeting and get to the real reason, drinking Guinness and eating nachos over at Finnegans Pub (“building f” someone referred to it as)
BSpudd even made it out, was great to see him again too, as well as the other regulars, and a fair number of people I’ve never met before. Great to see.


The presentations were great as always. Read more on them below (as to not bore people who aren’t into tech things 🙂

Here the presentations from the last meeting are:


  • The 2.6 kernel by yours truly. A quick intro into what it is, why it’s important and what’s new. You can check out the slides if you want: OpenOffice, Powerpoint, or HTML. There are also some good linux kernel links over in the wiki.
  • Dana did an excellent presentation on Forensic analysis with Linux and the Knoppix-STD LiveCD. He has the slides here. This is something that’s interested me for a while, and I’ve wanted to try the Honeynet Challenges but simply didn’t know where to start or how to go about things. This gave me enough of an introduction that I at least have a clue now where to start. Damn you! I don’t have time for all this neat stuff!
  • Wim followed this up with an equally interesting look at at Samba 3 and integrating it with Microsoft ADS. He has his presentation here. This was nifty for me not so much because of ADS (my main fileserver/do everything server isn’t running windows), but for it’s look into what it can do, and how things like PAM and domain controllers work. The ability to automagically create user directories and integrate permissions and fine grained control on a linux server is pretty cool. It also reminded me that I want to set up my ftp server to use a different authentication scheme, now I know how easy it is to set up. Also LDAP has been added into my list of things to learn about. Damn you!

So a very successful meeting in my opinion, with lots of stuff that (for once) I was interested in and that I didn’t know, which for me has always been one of the downfalls of the LUG meetings. If the topics discussed are things that I’m pretty knowledgable about, or very knowledgable about, it’s not nearly as interesting as something I’m interested in but know nothing about. I hope everyone else learned as much as I did.