Events Archive

Here is a list of previous PLUG events, organized by year.

All the wonders of LDAP revealed!!! (Eggs and all major vegetables accepted.) by Adrian Woodley
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
AGM Minutes 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.

Awesome Tools for Document Authoring by Davyd Madeley
Libre software provides a suite of excellent tools that really interact well together for creating top quality professional documents. Davyd Madeley will take the time to demonstrate some of these authoring tools, plus some awesome tools for information management.

"System Monitoring - Knowing When to Duck" and "Simple Ubuntu Tips and Tricks" by Adrian Woodley, Daniel Axtens
It would be painfully obvious to anyone who's worked with computers that they are far from perfect. Failures are forever prevalent and often expensive. To mitigate the affects of these failures, monitoring is essential. Adrian Woodley will present a talk covering several monitoring packages available to *nix systems, how they work and how to configure and use them; hopefully with a demonstration of each.

Adrian Woodley has been a Linux user for the past 8 years, both professionally and as a hobby. He has worked on networks scaling from small home setups through to Australia’s largest ADSL2+ network. Adrian currently works for iiNet as a Systems Engineer, and has 12 months experience working in iiNet’s Network Operations Centre, monitoring the iiNet network. With this presentation, Adrian reaches the status of PLUG’s most prevalent presenter!

"Command Line Fu" and "Map The Planet" by Patrick Coleman, Cameron Patrick
Patrick will be presenting an introduction to using the Linux commandline - shells, shortcuts, common commands and whatever else he can think of on the night.

Cameron will be talking about open geographical data, why you’d want it and how you can help the Open Street Map project to map the planet.

Xen and virtualisation by Adrian Chadd
Adrian Chadd runs a web hosting business specialising in providing Xen virtual machines. He will be talking about his experiences in doing so, with the intention of making virtualisation seem less like black magic. The talk will cover various virtualisation methods and techniques, as well as some particular implementations (VMWare, Java, Xen, Linux KVM, jails). Or as he puts it, “Adrian will rant a bit like he normally does, you might pick up something useful.”

Autofs in the Linux Kernel by Ian Kent
Many large scale enterprise deployments include an automounter implementation. The automounter provides a mechanism for automatically mounting file systems upon access, and umounting them when they are no longer referenced. It turns out that the Linux automounter is not feature-complete, and there are cases where Linux is just plain incompatible with the implementations from other proprietary vendors.

Deconstructing Lustre by Phil Schwan
The Lustre cluster file system provides a POSIX-compliant file system API for clusters of almost any size.

Pushing a gigabit of web traffic from a single machine by Adrian Chadd
This month seminar will be presented by another Adrian with experience in the ISP industry. Adrian Chadd is a FreeBSD and Squid developer who has recently been working on improving web cache performance. He intends to have a speccy live demo to show off what can be done.

Virtual E-mail Hosting by Adrian Woodley
Adrian spoke to us about his experience at an ISP hosting e-mails for many domains on a single machine. There was a live demo including a working SMTP, IMAP and web-mail system. No slides or recordings are available.