January 2008
- Web Content Delivery, 2007 style. by Adrian Chadd
Adrian will be talking about websites - how they work, get delivered to your machine and the challenges involved in caching them. He will also discuss some popular web applications, including Youtube and Google Maps, and present the challenges involved in caching these in a way that is transparent to the end user.
February 2008
- iSCSI: It's not a Mac by Patrick Coleman
Patrick will be talking about iSCSI - a protocol for exporting storage devices over a standard ethernet network. iSCSI is gaining popularity as a cheap alternative to Fibre Channel for connecting storage area networks (SANs). The talk will discuss the principals of iSCSI, along with the pros and cons, and will include some experiences deploying iSCSI in a high-availability environment with (hopfully) a demo.
March 2008
- Linux Filesystem Internals by Ian Kent
Linux is able to support many different file systems using the same method as other Unix variants by using a facility called the Virtual Filesystem Switch (VFS). The VFS provides a well defined interface to the kernel for those developing filesystem modules. This talk aims at describing, very briefly, the structures and methods provided by the VFS for filesystem implementers and will look more closely at a couple of these interface functions by describing how the kernel resolves a path to get a data structure needed for most functions in the VFS.
April 2008
- WPAD for chumps by Adon Metcalfe
Adon will outline how to setup a proxy server that adheres to the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol (WPAD) with basic filtering & virus scanning (DansGuardian) and caching (Squid). He will also discuss the various technical difficulties involved in transparent proxying of HTTP and HTTPS connections. The talk will include a demo if time permits.
May 2008
- LDAP for Popular People and Sysadmins by Ritchie Young
LDAP is the standard protocol for storing and accessing identity information. OpenLDAP is a high-performance, hugely scalable implementation of this important standard that you can install on your (Linux based) server or laptop in about 3 minutes. Whether you need to provide access control for a large organisation or store the contact details for a couple of million close, personal friends, OpenLDAP can help.
In this introductory talk, Ritchie will show you how to configure OpenLDAP on Linux and talk about where it fits with other identity management technologies.
June 2008
- Making Emacs your bit^H^H^H preferred editor and IDE by Alastair Irvine
Emacs has a very long history of being one of the most full-featured text editors around. Not only that, but it has a whole galaxy of other features: everything from a Tetris clone to a Usenet news reader. It also goes hand-in-hand with Unix’s tradition of supporting the programming process.
This introductory talk assumes no prior Emacs experience.
July 2008
- User security on shared hosting and shell servers by David Adam
With a computer on every desktop, we sometimes forget that most modern operating systems are designed for more than one user. This talk will take you through the things you need to keep in mind as a user of the most popular multiple-user systems - shared web hosting, and shell servers - such as the UNIX security model, keeping database credentials secure, and the dangers posed by web-administered CMSes.
September 2008
In this presentation I hope to explain some of the fundamentals of LDAP, how it works and what if can be useful for. I will demonstrate setting up and LDAP server for a network, how to manage accounts within a LDAP directory and setting up client machines to authenticate against the LDAP server. With these basics, it is possible to have unified usernames and passwords across your whole network, including Linux login, email, web and Samba. And as a special treat (assuming all goes well over the weekend), I’ll demonstrate my shiny new OpenSolaris server with ZFS and VirtualBox.
October 2008
- LTSP for fun and profit by Adon Metcalfe
November 2008
(Or “What Adrian’s been playing with this week”)
December 2008
- The Eeepc: tips and tricks by John McCabe-Dansted
The Eeepc 701 is under a kilogram, and often under $300 new. This makes it easy to have a full Linux pc with you where-ever you go. Despite the low weight and low cost the Xandros based OS is snappy for casual use.