June General Meeting

Configuration Management Tools in the Enterprise

Speaker: Pat Valentine, Sr. Systems Administrator, Cloud Automation and Engineering, IHS

Pat Valentine will speak about the initial investigation of Configuration Management tools in the Enterprise. IHS Inc. is moving towards a more agile DevOps environment and has just completed an evaluation of these products (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, Cfengine). We have gone through a Proof of Concept and I should be able to share our decision at the meeting.

IHS has over 400 products and a development group of around 1500 developers. Development drives the adoption of new technologies and our IT mandate is to provide service with value to our product development teams while still providing configuration management (drift) and secure (CIS Benchmark) environments for both private and sensitive information.

Pat Valentine has been providing UNIX and Linux system administration for over 15 years. Working as a junior admin at a local ISP, to the University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine to IHS Inc. has provided experience with Solaris (6-11), TRU-64, HP-UX, RHEL (2-7), CentOS, OpenBSD, Ubuntu and AWS. His other hats include Data Centre Administrator, Change Management Leader, Network Admin, Storage Admin and all around handy guy.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Snacks at 17:30. CUUG Annual General Meeting begins at 18:00. Presentation begins immediately after AGM.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Annual General Meeting and Elections

The Calgary UNIX Users' Group is holding its Annual General Meeting and election of the 2016/2017 Board of Directors. Nominees so far include the following:

• Christopher Aziz
• John Clarke
• Alan Dewar
• Greg King
• Dick Miller

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Membership Renewals Due

It is annual renewal time for CUUG memberships. Membership fees remain at $50.00 (no GST), and cheques can be made payable to Calgary UNIX Users' Group. Our mailing address is as follows:

Calgary Unix Users' Group
Box 878, Station M
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2P 2J6

Invoices have been sent by email. If you have not received yours, please contact office at CUUG.

May General Meeting

Better than a sandbox, safer than a jail, it's ... Pledge

Speaker: Theo de Raadt, Founder, OpenBSD

Pledge is a new way of constructing security policy in programs:

• study the program
• figure out what it does
• when you determine all the system calls that will be called in the future
• promise those are the only operations needed!

Pledge is an OpenBSD system function that uses a design pattern to split a program into processes performing different sub-functions. Each process is designed to operate in a separate security domain. Processes cooperate over pipes using some protocol. This is a refinement of the "sandboxing" concept.

Pledge forces a process into a restricted-service operating mode. A few subsets are available, roughly described as computation, memory management, read-write operations on file descriptors, opening of files, networking. In general, these modes were selected by studying the operation of many programs using libc and other such interfaces, and setting promises or paths.

Use of pledge() in an application will require at least some study and understanding of the interfaces called. Subsequent calls to pledge() can reduce the abilities further, but abilities can never be regained.

Theo de Raadt is widely recognized as a world class security expert. In October 1995, Theo founded the OpenBSD project. OpenBSD is the most secure of the publicly available operating systems.

In 1999, Theo created OpenSSH with other members of OpenBSD. It is now incorporated into all Unix systems plus hundreds of other network enabled products. It has become the most "vendor re-used" piece of open source software, with more than 95% of the SSH market.

Theo was awarded the Free Software Foundation's 2004 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, for recognition as founder and project leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects. His work has also led to significant contributions to other BSD distributions and GNU/Linux. Of particular note is Theo's work on OpenSSH, his leadership of OpenBSD, his commitment to Free Software and his advancement of network security.

Theo is also well known for his advocacy of free software drivers. He has long been critical of developers of Linux and other free platforms for their tolerance of non-free drivers and acceptance of non-disclosure agreements.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Non CUUG members are welcome but now must RSVP to office at CUUG no less than 48 hours prior to the meeting or pay $10 at the door.

April General Meeting

General Discussion: Items in the News

What interesting UNIX-related items have you come across in the news recently? Our April general meeting will be an informal round-table (okay, technically more hexagon- or octagon-table) discussion of items our members and guests have come across. Here are a few ideas to get things started (we may or may not get to all of these):

1. BASH on Ubuntu on Windows. Is this reason to rejoice, or is it an Admiral Ackbar situation?
2. Drones. Lots of challenges to air safety and privacy, with a lack of certain regulation in most jurisdictions.
3. Lack of basic security standards in many corporations, from the number of cases of breaches and other failures. This really appears to be getting worse, not better.
4. Lack of basic privacy in standard Business-to-Individual (B2I) interactions, especially on the World Wide Web. Seems every company wants to get to know as much about people as possible, to the point of refusing to deal with them if they try to maintain the personal privacy that used to be standard. They all want to slurp up that data and either use it themselves and/or sell it, often with no certainty what they're doing is worth it.
5. Advertising online. The old line was "I know half the money we spend on advertising is wasted, but we just don't know which half." Now many websites and people are deriving income from ads and major companies running massive ad networks. But the new advertising is rife with click-fraud and other corruption. And people are fed up with crap ads and even ad-network delivered malware. The old line is all new again. Something's going to give.
6. Intelligence Big Data. The governments and large corporations have also bought into hoovering up as much as possible, with apparently no indication of whether all this massive unfocused data is even doing any real good. Be seeing you.
7. The Internet of Things. Soon to be the Internet of Spying and Hacked Things.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Non CUUG members remain welcome but now must RSVP to office at CUUG no less than 48 hours prior to the meeting.

March General Meeting

Ceph Software Defined Storage — The Future of Storage

Speaker: Tomas Florian, Florian Consulting Inc.

Over the last decade we've seen servers become a commodity thanks to virtualization. Software defined storage (SDS) is set to revolutionize data storage technology in the same way. Software defined storage delivers higher reliability, cheaper costs, greater flexibility and simpler operation compared to traditional SAN systems. Ceph is one of several competing software defined storage systems. It is an open source project currently headed by Red Hat. Its distributed nature proves itself equally agile at providing 1 TB of storage as it is for 1 EB. Some notable users of Ceph include CERN storing 1.5 PB of data, Dreamhost at 3 PB and Yahoo/Flickr at 500 PB. This presentation will show you the ins and outs of setting up your very own Ceph cluster using inexpensive commodity hardware to reap the same benefits as the big guys.

Tomas runs his own consulting company focusing on IT security, Linux, virtualization and advanced troubleshooting of anything that has bits passing through it. Tomas' favorite technologies are those that empower people to maximize their own productivity, privacy and security.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Everyone is welcome. Non-members please register by sending e-mail to office at CUUG.

February General Meeting

Strong Encryption: Good for Society?

In December of 2015, a couple in San Bernardino, California, shot 14 people to death before being killed themselves by police. Subsequently, authorities recovered a passcode-locked iPhone which they wish to investigate. Apple has offered what assistance they can, but the FBI wants more. A U.S. magistrate judge has how ordered Apple to create the necessary software to allow the FBI to apply a brute-force attack on the phone with zero delay between attempts and without triggering the phone's auto-erase function after ten attempts.

Apple is strongly contesting this order. CEO Tim Cook has stated that Apple does not have this capability currently, and that it is something which would be "too dangerous to create." It would effectively be creating a backdoor which could too easily be abused, to the potential detriment of all of Apple's customers.

Apple's position is being supported by other tech companies. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others argue that strong encryption is in the public interest. Politicians, on the other hand, have been advocating for mandatory backdoors in all encryption products, in the interest of national security.

What's your opinion on this matter? Should Apple and other companies simply comply with orders like this, or should they fight them? Is society better off when individuals can be guaranteed privacy, or should governments be able to override individuals' rights whenever they deem it necessary? Join us for a round-table discussion, where everyone can air their views. We look forward to your participation!

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Everyone is welcome. Non-members please register by sending e-mail to office at CUUG.

January General Meeting

Hookflash and WebRTC

Speaker: Trent Johnsen, Co-Founder and CEO, Hookflash

In 2010 Google paid $200 million to acquire world leading audio and video codecs. In the spring of 2011 Google open-sourced that codec technology and proposed that the global standards bodies - IETF and W3C - create a real-time communications standard - "WebRTC".

The vision for WebRTC is to enable developers to quickly and easily add real-time voice and video functionality - think Skype, Facetime or Periscope - into browsers, mobile applications and more. The WebRTC standard is now forecast to have over 2.9 billion users and operate on over 6 billion devices by 2019.

WebRTC has been a hot topic for more than three years now, and there are signs that this Web communications standard may finally be reaching critical mass of acceptance. What does the continued evolution and growth of the WebRTC ecosystem mean for developers, consumers and businesses? What is the state of real-world products and implementations? And how many enterprises are deriving real business value from WebRTC technology today?

Calgary based "Hookflash" is leading development of the global WebRTC standard as Founder, Chair and lead author of "Object Real-Time Communications" (ORTC) technology and libraries being implemented by both Google and Microsoft.

Hookflash co-founder and CEO, Trent Johnsen has been a featured presenter at the largest major WebRTC events throughout Europe and North America including WebRTC Global Summit - London, England, WebRTC Expo, Miami, Florida, Google Meetups at MIT Boston, Google, San Francisco and America's largest telecom conference: Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Florida.

Learn what WebRTC can do for you today, and what it could mean for your future.

A lifelong entrepreneur with a dedicated belief in the power of innovation and new technology to improve the way we work and live, Trent Johnsen has been at the forefront of successive waves of innovation throughout his career. With pioneering work in wireless and mobile communications, Internet Data in the Cloud, Voice over IP, and Peer-to-Peer communications, Trent has founded, built and sold multiple private and public companies. Trent supports the Alberta technology community through his work with the A100, as a Director of Innovate Calgary and at his blog: AlbertaTechnology.com.

Trent Johnsen has a degree in Economics from the University of Calgary and completed New Ventures Development in the University of Calgary's Owner/Manager program.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Everyone is welcome. Non-members please register by sending e-mail to office at CUUG.

December General Meeting

CUUG Holiday Season Social Evening

It's December, and in keeping with our tradition of recent years, CUUG members and their invited guests will get together for a social evening at the Regency Palace restaurant on Tuesday, December 15. We'll have a private room and will have food from the buffet.

If you are a CUUG member and would like to join us, please let us know by e-mail to office at cuug.ab.ca so that we can get an approximate count of how many people to expect. Also, if you would like to bring or invite a guest, please let us know your guest's name as well. We look forward to seeing you there!

Regency Palace Restaurant

5:45 PM, Tuesday, December 15, 2015

November General Meeting

Technocreep

Speaker: Tom Keenan, Professor, University of Calgary

Technology has started to move into a new, and very creepy phase. Wheels are turning within wheels and information is flowing in ways that most people don't understand. We've heard a lot about government surveillance, but what businesses are doing may be even more disturbing. For example, you look up a product on Amazon and suddenly it's showing up as an ad on your Facebook Page. Your eyeballs have just been sold to the highest bidder, through a little known system called FBX (Facebook Exchange). Or, you walk down Main Street USA at Walt Disney World and smell cookies baking. What you actually smell is a chemical pumped into the air by a patented machine called The Smellitzer. You've just been hit by scent marketing. Stores and shopping malls are starting to use cameras to track your movements and mine data from where you linger, what you look at, and especially, what you pick up but don't purchase.

Tom Keenan combines a deep technical knowledge with lively insights into the social and cultural aspects of technology. He was educated at Columbia University, receiving BA, M.Sc., MA and Ed.D. degrees in Philosophy, Mathematics, Engineering and Education. He is a popular professor of Environmental Design and Computer Science at the University of Calgary, a Fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society and the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies. Tom taught Canada's first computer crime course, and was involved in drafting the country's inaugural computer crime legislation.

Dr. Keenan is the author of over 500 academic papers, book chapters, presentations and articles, and has spoken on five continents to academic audiences, major conferences and the general public. His latest book, Technocreep dissects how technology is becoming creepy in hidden ways that are difficult for most people to understand. It has recently appeared in the top ten on Amazon.ca in categories including Civil Rights and Liberties, Technology & Society, and Social Aspects of Technology.

Copies of Technocreep will be available for purchase ($20 cash) at the meeting. Tom will be happy to sign these.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Everyone is welcome. Non-members must register by sending e-mail to office at CUUG.

October General Meeting

The Internet is Full! What To Do? IPv6!

Speaker: Gustin Johnson

What is IPv6 and should you care? This will be a high level overview with some technical details of IPv6. We will highlight some of the key differences from the preceding IPv4 currently in widespread use. The presentation will be beneficial for both managers and technical implementers. There will also be a demo network on-site where you will be able to test various devices and operating systems for IPv6 compatibility.

Gustin currently works as the operations lead for a small Calgary software company that focuses on project management solutions for the oil and gas sector. He has been working for fun and for profit with networking technologies for almost two decades. He has more computers and musical instruments than is probably healthy.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, WEDNESDAY, October 21, 2015

N.B. This is the third Wednesday of the month!

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Everyone is welcome. RSVP to office at CUUG if you plan to attend.

September General Meeting

From Calgary to Silicon Valley

Speaker: Olivier Aubin, Google

What's involved in making the big move to Silicon Valley? Join us to relive the journey that took Olivier Aubin from growing up, studying and working in Calgary all the way to the heart of Silicon Valley. Hear stories about life within the Googleplex and what drives constant innovation.

Olivier is a software engineer on the Shopping Search Quality team at Google, where he focuses on machine learning models for Product Listing Ads. Prior to Google, Olivier worked in software development and applied agile practices for start-ups and established companies alike, in his hometown of Calgary. His experience in technical leadership and software development was honed at companies including Chaordix, Quadrus and Telvent, as well as through independent consulting work.

Olivier earned a bachelor's degree in computer science with a minor in pure mathematics from the University of Calgary.

Tillyard Conference Centre

5:30 PM, Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Building doors are locked at 18:00, so please try to arrive early.

There is $2 parking after 16:00 across the street in the underground parkade (McDougall Centre).

Everyone is welcome. RSVP to office at CUUG if you plan to attend.

2015 Board of Directors

At the June 2015 Annual General Meeting, the following people were elected to the Board of Directors for 2015/2016:

• Christopher Aziz (President)
• John Clarke (Secretary-Treasurer)
• Mark Hewitt
• Greg King
• Dick Miller