Summary of Q2 talks @ ilughyd

June:

Yo Folks,

Welcome to this month's meet.. Here comes June, bringing in showers to solace the Hyluggers... And as we splash into this months agenda, let me thank Virtusa, Arjun Mukherjee, Ramakrishna and Murthy in particular for playing great hosts..

This time we are going to talk about a very unique topic. here it goes..

Topic: SysAdmin - The Firefighter
Speakers: Abrar / Sanjay
Duration: 1.5hrs

He has the power.
He has the expertise.
He can work wonders with machines, and can bring up a zillion servers with his touch.
His life is adventurous, always demanding to be the sheet anchor and the saviour of the company's infrastructure.
Yes a SysAdmin is truly a demigod in today's inevitable IT world.

The speakers will share some real time scenarios and walk through the firefighting skills required.
In the due course of the talk, a number of *nix tools that are used to troubleshoot and fix problems will be introduced.
Later, they will talk about the measures and best practices to safeguard a company's Infrastructure.

All you SysAdmins out there, come join and make this months meet a great success..
Make sure you spread the message about the meet and attend it..

Meeting minutes:
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This has been one of the best meets so far. The talk was more inclined towards realistic problems in production environments and how to troubleshoot and fire fight them. Abrar and I have covered various scenarios, like sytem related, network related, and some bits of security hardening.

System Related: We touched upon the basic commands like uptime, top, and digged deep into how the information is gathered such as /proc/uptime, and strace level info etc. Gave them tips on troubleshooting any complex problem with simple techniques, such as log messages checking, dmesg checks and many more. Following which, we talked about hardware troubleshooting bits and unveiled some commands like dmidecode which caught their attention and they were all excited about it.

Network & Security Related: Forking out ou the system related stuff, we delved into the magical bits and bytes.. Introduced the luggers to mii-tool, iptraf, iptables, route, nmap, /proc tweaks, lsof, netstat and many more commands.

Hardening aspects such as honeypot, TBF, syn cookies have been breifly touched as well.

Those of you who wanted some good references, I have a page coming soon which has all the URLs.

Venue: Date and Time: 30th June 2007 Saturday 6:00PM

May:

Welcome to the May Month LUG Meet. It's the hottest month and this month we offer you a nice opportunity to chill out at the meet.

Lined up for this meet are:

1) Install Fest: With summer vacations on, lots of students would be pondering on how to utilize their vacation time productively. Well Folks!!! Drop in at the Install Fest and learn how to install a popular distro and then spend your vacation exploring the wonderful world of the Penguin.

2) Python, A friendly pet: Calling the attention of all hacker wannabes!!! Bored of learning programming languages through perverted examples? Want to learn a programming language through real world applications? Then this session might just be for you! In the first of a series of sessions, the speaker plans to cover the following aspects of Python Programming Language.
i) Features of Python and its "Batteries Included" Philosophy
ii) Regular Expressions

The speaker will discuss the various aspects of the Python programming language as they appear in the applications.

Speaker: Thejaswi Puthraya
Total Duration: 2 hours

Meeting minutes:
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Fantastic festival and great response !!

The python talk was huge hit too.. A lot of HCU folks.. It is a positive sign for sure :)
Thej covered the features, semantics and the beauty of python... His slides speak much more than my notes
here goes the slides http://thejuhyd.blogspot.com/2007/05/python-series-1-at-ilug.html


Venue: Date and Time: 26th May 2007 Saturday 6:00PM

April:

How many of you have Aphrilophobia? Oh well, if you are wondering what is that.. It is the fear of April Fools' Day. Yes, this month has a humorous start and many people must have fallen pray to your gullible acts and hocus pocus spells ;).. Carrying the same fun and excitement, come join to share the Open Source spirit.

This month we are having a talk on Jabber and a short talk on Regular expressions

Topic 1
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What: Chat with Jabber !
Speaker: Srinivasan aka Cheedu
Presentation link: http://www.cheedhu.name/Docs/iLUGHyd-XMPP.pdf
Duration: 1.5hrs
Type of talk: Admin talk
In Cheedu's words: I would discuss in short about the jabber / XMPP and the various jabber servers and clients available.
if possible, show the installation and configuration of one of the chat servers called 'Openfire' (formerly wildfire / jive messenger).

Topic 2
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What: The regex magic !
Speaker: Sanjay Sha
Duration: 45mins
Intended for: programmers and all the lazy people like me ;)
Covers: basics of regular expressions

Meeting Minutes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With the World Cup final match coinciding with the monthly LUG Meet, the attendance dipped to 10. But the quality of the talk wasn't affected, Srinivasan aka Cheedhu delivered a talk on "Jabber: A messaging Protocol". He began with a brief yet comprehensive introduction to the protocol before he decided to show a hands on. He setup the OpenFire Chat Server in under 10 minutes!!! Then he configured a client (Gaim) to show a demo. Though the second talk was supposed to be on "Regular Expressions", it had to be postponed as the speaker was unwell. Before calling it a day, feedback on upcoming talks was collected.
The audience at the meet weren't disappointed as they got to see the final match, thanks to rain!!!