Annual General Meeting and Elections

plus June General Meeting

Phoning Home with Open Source

Speaker: Mike Babulic

Many businesses allow their employees to "phone home" with commercial proprietary products such as Citrix, Windows Remote Access and Timbuktu. As well as applications in the working world, remote controlling a PC from a window in your computer screen is a godsend when you need to help a friend or family member.

This presentation shows how free software can be used to remotely control a computer... whether you are in the next room, or in an internet cafe halfway around the world.

Mike Babulic is a longtime CUUG member and City of Calgary employee. Although no member of Mike's family lives closer than 1400 km from Calgary, they have all (with the exception of his 92 year old grandmother) phoned for help with "computer problems".

The presentation will be preceded by CUUG's Annual General Meeting and election of the 2006/2007 Board of Directors.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Hackathon special

OpenBSD Presentation

Speakers : Bob Beck and Reyk Floeter

The 2006 OpenBSD Hackathon is taking place from May 26th to June 2nd here in Calgary, attended by developers from around the world. This year again, some of the developers have agreed to take some time for a presentation to CUUG.

Bob Beck and Reyk Floeter will talk about some of the directions they have been taking in wireless chipset support, advanced feature support, and security support as well as what they are doing to try to ensure they have good wireless chip support without having to incorporate "binary blobs" from vendors.

OpenBSD 3.9 CDs, as well as T-shirts and posters, will be available.

SAIT campus

Thursday, June 1, 2006, 18h00

May General Meeting

BrandZ - Running Linux in Solaris 10 Zones

Speaker: Willem van Schaik, Sun Microsystems

With the release of Solaris 10, two new important features were added to the operating system: zones and dtrace. With zones, multiple instances of the OS can be configured, enabling a virtualized deployment environment.

In this presentation by Sun's Willem van Schaik, we take a look into the next phase, called BrandZ, which allows the installation of non-Solaris operating systems like Linux and BSD into a zone. Solaris Containers for Linux Applications (SCLA), i.e. Linux running in a Solaris BrandZ Zone, opens up new possibilities, like analyzing and debugging Linux programs with DTrace. BrandZ is still under development, but try-out versions are available as part of OpenSolaris and Solaris Express.

Willem van Schaik is a Senior Solutions Architect with CUUG's Diamond-level sponsor Sun Microsystems.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, May 23, 2006

April General Meeting

Calgary LinuxFest 2006

Speaker: Shawn Grover, open2space

Calgary LinuxFest 2006 is a one-day conference and exhibition promoting the use of GNU Linux, free software, open source software and Operating Systems. The conference will feature a keynote speaker, a dual track speaker conference with topics of interest to technical users, those who are new to Linux and business community members interested in the cost saving and business advantages available through the use of Linux and FOSS.

This event is coming up soon (May 6), and organizers are still accepting volunteers. Shawn will provide an overview of what it's all about.

Shawn Grover is an active member in Calgary's Linux community and a past President of the Calgary Linux Users Group from 2005 to 2006. Shawn has done a number of presentations for the Calgary Linux Users Group and organized the Programming Special Interest Group which now meets once a month.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

March General Meeting

WAN Acceleration

Speaker: Greg King, DNS Inc.

Companies usually link remote offices through wide area networks (WANs) and distributed IT infrastructure. Yet in many cases, the effects of low bandwidth and high latency mean applications that run well locally are all but unusable on a WAN, so your remote offices are constantly struggling with poor application performance. Furthermore, the cost of maintaining distributed IT is very high.

A new category of appliances delivering "wide area data services" has emerged to solve the issues of limited bandwidth, high latency, and protocol inefficiencies.

Greg King will describe how these devices enable WAN performance improvements of up to 100 times or more, and will include a demo of the technology.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

February General Meeting

NikSun Systems - February 28

NIKSUN has built the next-generation technology that revolutionizes the way networks and services are secured, protected and managed. We will detail this approach by comparing the IDS technology to having a "Camera on the Network" with all the intelligence built into the camera for real-time motion analysis.

Our speaker this month is Ryan Sutton of Proactive Data Solutions. PDS is the official re-seller of NIKSUN products in Canada and the Pacific Northwest. PDS is focused on providing their customers with valued solutions that expedite resolution to network and security issues.

The NIKSUN IDS won the InfoWorld "Product of the Year" award for 2004 in the security category.

W.R. Castell Central Library

6:00 PM - 8:30 PM, Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

January General Meeting

Open House

Join us for our annual Open House!

As in previous years (e.g., 2005 and 2001), we invite the general public to come see what CUUG is all about. There will be information and demonstrations on systems and applications, as well as short seminars on a variety of topics. Other user groups will also be represented.

Tables and/or presentations include the following:

• Sun Microsystems -- What's new at Sun: X64, UltraSPARC T1, Solaris 10, Open Solaris
• Calgary Linux Users Group (CLUG) -- Linspire, the world's easiest desktop Linux
• Novell -- Novell Enterprise Linux status update
• Apple Canada -- Mac OS X/UNIX connectivity
• Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS)
• Calgary Oracle Users Group (COUG)
• Calgary Agile Methods User Group (CAMUG)

Pop, Donuts and Door Prizes will be provided by sponsors.

Admission to this event is absolutely free, so come and explore the rewards of membership! Pre-register is appreciated (though not required); please send your name by e-mail to office@cuug.ab.ca.

Feel free to print our poster (pdf file) and display or distribute it.

W.R. Castell Central Library

6:00 PM - 8:30 PM, Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

December General Meeting

The Challenges of Enterprise Systems Development with Linux

Sponsored by

Richard Huntrods, M.Eng., P.Eng, is a Calgary-born Chemical Engineer and IT Consultant with extensive experience in software development and teaching. He is currently an Academic Coordinator for the School of Computing and Information Science at Athabasca University, Canada's premier distance-education University.

Mr. Huntrods has also continued his consulting practice, developing enterprise web applications in Java. He is the developer of the competency and test tracking HR system for Quicktest International.

Richard's successes and frustrations developing enterprise systems on a variety of UNIX platforms form the context of his December presentation to the Calgary UNIX Users' Group, in which Richard offers nuts-and-bolts details of his difficulties trying to provide Java-powered web applications with Red Hat Linux after a long and happy relationship with Solaris on Sun hardware.

As Richard is a registered Sun developer, Sun Microsystems of Calgary has agreed to make this a Sun-sponsored meeting of the Calgary UNIX Users' Group, and Sun customers are encouraged to call Cindy Kwan at 262-0592 / x57592 if they would like to come as guests of Sun.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 (N.B. This is the second Tuesday of December, not the fourth.)

November General Meeting

LDAP for authentication in the enterprise

/etc/passwd (files) on more than a few machines is a headache to manage, NIS is easy (but insecure), and NIS+ is a nightmare and not well supported by the different OSes. So what's the solution for an enterprise where security is important ?

LDAP of course!
Put everything in the LDAP Directory Server and point your client hosts to it. Simple! Really?

It turns out that even if you go with only one vendor (and by the book), it's not quite as easy as advertised. Add security requirements, client hosts from multiple vendors, and external connections to corporate information sources and you get a late and overbudget project -- but great war stories!

Harold Ditchfield from CCSI (former CUUG sponsor) and Al Cameron, an independant consultant, will give us a brief overview of what LDAP is, how it's used for UNIX name services and authentication, and the problems they faced when implementing it at a large UNIX site in Calgary.

The project used Sun Java System Directory Server v5.2. (AKA: Sun ONE, iPlanet, and Netscape.) Client hosts include:

• Solaris 8 and 9
• Red Hat 2.1 and 3.0
• NetApp
• AIX 5.2 and 5.3
• HP-UX 11.x

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

October General Meeting

Asterisk™ - the Open Source PBX

Speaker: Tomas Florian, Asterisk

For the average consumer all the VoIP buzz focuses on cheap long distance rates. This is great, but there is much more to VoIP than that. VoIP rips open a new frontier that was inaccessible just a few years ago because of proprietary solutions and huge monopolies that owned them.

Asterisk PBX is doing for VoIP what Apache did for web hosting. This presentation will demonstrate how you can use Asterisk to run your own world wide telecommunication infrastructure with minimum resources and effort. We'll cover both the basics of the underlying technologies involved as well as some of the cool stuff you can do once you have the infrastructure in place.

Tomas runs his own consulting company specializing in Linux, VoIP, high availability, and software development. He has been playing around with VoIP and Linux ever since the early Netmeeting days passing voice channels through masquerade on the 2.2.x kernel. He's been working with Asterisk for the last year, currently finishing up infrastructure for a company launching VoIP service targeting large population centers in Canada and India.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

September General Meeting

Subversion on Unix

Spearker: Mike Mason, ThoughtWorks^®

Please note the change in location.

The latest and greatest open-source version control tool, Subversion, is gathering steam and getting converts across the internet. Mike Mason will talk about Subversion and its development model, and how thanks to Apache's Portable Runtime it's available on every system that can run Apache web server. UNIX^® is the platform of choice for "serious" deployments, and Mike will be demoing on MacOS X to show you something a little different. Recent surveys showed around 50% of teams don't use version control at all to manage their assets--Subversion is useful for storing code and, as we'll see, managing other funky stuff like system configuration and website deployments.

Mike is a developer, coach and Agile/XP evangelist with ThoughtWorks, now based in Calgary. His recent book, Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion, was well received by the community earlier this year. Mike has been using version control since an accidental rm -rf * toasted his homework one night, and Unix since the early Slackware Linux days.

Please note the change in location.

Location:	SAIT
	Corporate Training room MA127
	east wing of the Heritage building
	Check the PDF of the campus map.

5:30 PM, Tuesday, September 27th