February 2022
- Toolbelt: Install anything (in theory) by Alastair Irvine
The process of ad-hoc system administration, in which lengthy and possibly insecure installation commands are typed/pasted from software project websites or even Q&A sites, is both time-consuming and not recommended from a security perspective.
However, OS-provided software packages are often old versions or not present at all. And modern DevOps approaches like Ansible, Puppet, Vagrant or Docker are not always justified, especially for experimentation or work on one’s own workstation.
Toolbelt fills the gap, by automating the recommended installation approach described on the provider’s website for each supported piece of software.
April 2022
- Dorothy, a dotfile ecosystem by Benjamin Lupton
Dorothy is a dotfile ecosystem with cross-platform automations.It supports fish, zsh and bash, it runs on Mac and Linux. This presentation will show how to set it up and configure it, and will demonstrate its capabilities and extensibility with ideas for both beginners and experienced shell scripters
May 2022
- Tarsnap by Niall Navin
In this day and age backups are ubiquitous with basic system administration. Tarsnap augments the traditional tape archive program, tar, to provide encryption and cloud storage. Designed such that not even the creator can access your data, its tagline is ‘Online backups for the truly paranoid’
This talk is an introductory overview of the program and why I use it. https://www.tarsnap.com/
June 2022
- Building Websites on the Cheap With Hugo by James Henstridge
James Henstridge will talk about the Hugo static website generator. Websites served as static files have a smaller attack surface for security bugs, easier to migrate between hosting providers, and generally cheaper to host.
Hugo together with Git can provide some of the content management features that would otherwise be missing in a static site.
July 2022
This month we are going to try an experiment with the meeting format, and hold a discussion directed by the meeting’s participants. If there’s a topic you’d like to discus on the theme of privacy, or you have questions you think the community might be able to help you answer, this is good opportunity.
So we can keep the meeting on track, please add any topics you’d like to discuss to this document: https://demo.hedgedoc.org/ej7SEkdMT6iop8QgRePtcA?both (no account required to edit). We will also use the document to make notes about the discussion.
November 2022
Join us for our annual quiz night, which this year is being held at the Captain Stirling Hotel in Nedlands.