TriLUG Install and Hack Day, will be kind of like an install fest, where members can meet to share ideas and skills. The theme for this hack day will be on running Linux (OpenWRT) on Wireless Routers. This topic keeps re-appearing on the TriLUG mailing list every few months, so why not get together and help each other do something fun.

Date: The hack day will be on Saturday 21st January 2012. All day. 10am - 5pm

Location: Techshop RDU located at 5905 Triangle Drive Raleigh, NC 27617.

The activities for the day include:

• installing OpenWRT firmware (linux) on peoples routers
• learn some embedded linux skills
• build and customizing OpenWRT packages
• take apart routers to add serial ports and other electronics
• fix bricked and broken routers if we can

What to Bring

1. laptop/desktop for building and deploying code
2. wireless router or other funky equipment to run OpenWRT
3. CAT5 network cable
4. serial cables, usb-serial adapters, jtag pods

Topic: Open Source Showcase and Holiday Social Presenter: You! When: Thursday, December 8, 7pm Where: SplatSpace, 331 W. Main St., Durham, NC Map: http://splatspace.org/location/ Permalink: http://trilug.org/2011-12-08/showcase

Back by popular demand, our holiday meeting will be at SplatSpace (our local hackerspace) in Durham, NC.

We will provide space to anyone who wants to showcase open source projects they find interesting. It can be software, hardware, or data -- just as long as it's free (as in speech). Think of it as a science fair or show-and-tell for open source enthusiasts.

We will also open up the kitchen area for anyone who wants to bring snacks, desserts, and drinks to share with everyone else. These items do not have to be open source, but you definitely get extra geek cred if there is a creative-commons licensed recipe sitting next to the food you bring. It also makes it easier for folks like me, who try and avoid gluten, to know what's safe to eat.

The doors open at 7pm and you can wander from table to table, to see the neat things people are showcasing. If you are presenting something, be sure to let us know which things you want to see. We will try to coordinate breaks for people so that even the presenters get a chance to see the things that interest them.

If you'd like to showcase something or bring some food to share, please add an entry to the wiki page: http://trilug.org/wiki/Meeting:2011_December_8

PLEASE NOTE: To make things a little harder for spammers, you have to enter a username and password to access the wiki. The username is "TRI" and the password is "LUG".

You may also add things to the wiki page that you simply wish someone would demonstrate. That said, please consider running that table yourself. It's completely OK to show up with 20 copies of a live CD that you've been meaning to try out and to invite others to sit down and tinker on it with you. The important parts of this meeting are sharing your interests with others and socializing. Please let us know ASAP that you intend to present something, so that we can reserve a table and chair for you.

Alan Porter, one of our fantastic steering committee members, has volunteered to demo an Arduino system, "that measures and records environmental stats for our hermit crab's cage. It's like a Star Trek tricorder for crustaceans. The hardware and development tools are all open source - so share and enjoy!"

I've heard rumors that someone is bringing egg nog, but I'm not sure how much. What are you bringing? Go add it to the wiki now :)

Looking forward to seeing all of you at SplatSpace on December 8!

Kind regards, Justis Peters

Topic: Nagios and Cacti Presenter: Dylan Lusk When: Thursday, November 10, 7pm Where: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus Map: http://www.redhat.com/about/contact/ww/americas/raleigh.html

No network is complete without an effective monitoring solution, and who doesn't love a good graph or two?

Come to TriLUG's November meeting to learn the ins and outs of network and service monitoring. Fellow TriLUG member Dylan Lusk will introduce Nagios and Cacti, two premier projects in the world of FOSS monitoring tools.

Dylan will go into the details of setting up a host system to monitor the health of your network. He will then show how to setup and integrate devices and services into the monitoring.

About Nagios and Cacti:

Nagios is a powerful monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes.

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality.

About Dylan:

Dylan Lusk is currently a network engineer and system administrator for a regional telecommunications provider. Over the years he has honed his expertise in a variety of networking-related positions, including stints at a Charlotte datacenter/ISP and a major credit card company. His extensive experience with open source network monitoring stretches back to the days when Nagios was called NetSaint (circa 2000). Over those years, he has successfully monitored everything from blade servers in the lab to climate sensors in enterprise-grade network deployments.

Topic: FabLab Presenter: Drew Nelson When: Thursday, October 13th, 7pm Where: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus Map: http://www.redhat.com/about/contact/ww/americas/raleigh.html Permalink: http://trilug.org/2011-10-13/fablab

Drew will take us through the challenges and rewards of using Open Source software at FabLab.

Fab labs provide widespread access to modern means for invention. They began as an outreach project from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.

Topic: Making Debian Packages Presenter: Igor Partola When: 7PM, Thursday September 8, 2011 Where: Red Hat Worldwide Headquarters Permalink: http://trilug.org/2011-09-08/debianizing

Have you ever wished you could apt-get install allmyapps? After this presentation you can!

Deploying software to a production environment often presents challenges to those charged with infrastructure and operations. It is typical for each piece of software to come with a separate deployment and startup procedure, a unique layout of configuration files, and a different logging strategy.

Using the standard Debian package format is one way to unify software deployment. TriLUG member Igor Partola will be showing how to use Debian packages to create a powerful and flexible build and deploy process for your software.

The talk will include a tutorial portion showing how to prepare and package a piece of existing software, as well as a discussion of how to set up repositories for hosting your packages.

Igor Partola works as a developer and "man behind the curtain" at TransLoc Inc where, amongst other things, he has packaged most of the software stack as Debian packages. He has a wide array of interests in software engineering, including web applications and web application infrastructure and operations, mobile development and networking.

When: Thursday, August 11th, 7pm Where: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus Map: http://www.redhat.com/about/contact/ww/americas/raleigh.html

One of the coolest parts about TriLUG is how the members share their projects with the rest of the group. Most of the TriLUG meeting presentations over the last year have been given by members, not by outside guests. But, geeks that we are, many of us are more comfortable in front of a laptop (or a green screen terminal) than we are in front of a crowd. We feel that the guy up front must have a knack for speaking, or maybe he had a class on it. What does it take to be a good speaker?

Alan Hoffler was teaching technical courses at SAS, and teaching other trainers how to teach, when he realized that his true passion was teaching communication skills. This month, Alan will show us that giving a good technical presentation is not that hard to do. In fact, it's something that any of us can do.

We are very excited about having this crash course in technical presentation skills, because we rely on our members for many of our programs. And many of us are asked to give technical presentations at work as well.

About the speaker: Alan D. Hoffler Trainer, Speaker, Consultant, Coach

Raised around America's Space Program, Alan Hoffler has earned degrees in aerospace engineering and applied mathematics and never bothered to pursue a living in either field. At some point in his 20 years of training technical corporate audiences, instructing in the college classroom, teaching public high school, and speaking nationally to pilots about flying safety he became passionate about helping others communicate more effectively. He believes that communication has the power to change a person, an organization, a community, and the world. When he’s not speaking or training, he stays active serving in the local chapter of his professional organization, supporting activities and instructing in his local church, and enjoying the privileges of his commercial pilot’s license. His blog identifies solutions to common communication foibles and highlights his analytical eye and desire to improve himself as well as his clients. His most challenging training endeavor is also his most enjoyable – raising two children – and is the basis of a forthcoming book on fatherhood.

When: Thursday, July 14th, 7pm Where: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus Map: http://www.redhat.com/about/contact/ww/americas/raleigh.html

Zero configuration networking allows machines on a network to publish their capabilities for others to use, without requiring an administrator to specifically list those services in a directory.

TriLUG member Jym Williams-Zavada will be taking a look at two zeroconf services, AirPrint and mDNS. Both of these technologies were introduced by Apple, and now they are gaining support on other platforms as well.

AirPrint allows you to publish the presence of a printer, and then allow devices to print to it. The quintessential use case is printing from an iPhone or iPad.

Similarly, mDNS publishes the presence of other services on a network. Perhaps you have a public shared drive where you store your music.

Jym will show us how to configure both of these services on a Linux machine.

Jym Williams-Zavada has been a member of TriLUG since he moved to NC from Syracuse, where he was active in SyrLUG. He served on the TriLUG steering committee last year. Jym currently works as a system administrator at Shodor in Durham.

When: Thursday, June 9th, 7pm Where: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus Map: http://www.redhat.com/about/contact/ww/americas/raleigh.html

Android has taken the mobile market by storm, in part due to its open source nature (did you know it is based on the Linux kernel?). However, Android development has had to walk a delicate line between developers demanding openness and the established mobile industry that prefers to lock everything down.

In this talk, Luke will introduce Android as a mobile development platform, discussing the architecture and development tools available, as well as the history of how Android has walked the line between open and closed.

Luke Meyer, web geek and open source zealot, started TriDroid, the Triangle Android Meetup, because no one else had done so yet when he wanted to start hacking for his G1 phone. He currently works technical support for SpringSource at VMware. Previously he worked as a web engineer at Red Hat.