Slides: Here

Note the venue - we are in our new location!

Summary For those of us still configuring physical servers and storage, using RAID to ensure the availability of storage is part of our everyday jobs. But things are changing rapidly in the types of storage devices being used, as well as their characteristics. Standard RAID techniques may carry consequences that solution architects may not realize are present.

This talk will examine the beginnings of RAID, how we got to where we are at now, and some of the issues that currently exist with RAID. Alternate techniques (including open source solutions) can provide more resiliency with fewer gotchas. There will also be a quick tutorial on "fio", the flexible I/O tester.

Bio Dwain Sims has been working in the UNIX/Linux world for the last 30 years. He started out using BSD UNIX on a PDP-11 while in Graduate School (West Virginia University), and he has been hooked ever since.

Dwain has worked as a system admin and data center architect, product manager, trainer, and as a Systems Engineer for various companies (including Sun Microsystems and Fusion-io). He currently works for Western Digital / SanDisk / HGST. (yes, he is confused at times!)

He has been working in the storage (mainly Flash) world for the last 5 years, helping bring the storage revolution to the masses. He lives in North Raleigh with his wife Cleo (of 28 years), 4 children (1 married and living in Charlotte - a Nurse Practitioner, 2 at NC State, and one still living at home), and 5 hens.

September 14 - Meeting Announcements

NOTE the venue change! We're at the Red Hat Annex, where we have held our last couple of Holiday Parties, in downtown Raleigh.

Summary Conflation between open source, open data and open government has been problematic in fitting open data related open source projects to meaningful outcomes. Jason Hare will discuss data management and the link between open data and performance management and measurement. To do this Jason will run through a survey of some of the open source technologies used to manage data and create visualizations. Jason will also discuss issues around open data and its adoption by public sector agencies in the Triangle and how civic tech groups are adding value to open data programs through open source efforts.

Bio Named one of the top 100 global influencers in Government Technology by Onalytica in 2017, Jason Hare is the Open Data Evangelist for OpenDataSoft. He has worked in the public sector and in data dissemination for most of his 25 year career. He serves in several organizations on the topic of data governance and open data: In the previous Presidential Administration, he was a frequent participant at the White House OSTP on the subjects of data quality and open data; he was a member of the White House OSTP Open Data Advisory Group; he is listed as an Open Data Expert on the World Bank's Open Data Tool Kit; he is an advisor on data governance to the Chemical Genome Project.

In 2013 he became a charter founder of the Open Data Institute Node for North Carolina. In the same year he became an Open Government Partnership (OGP) Delegate. He guest-blogs on the Open Government Partnership (OGP) website and is an Open Data Moderator for OpenSourceWay, the Red Hat Open Source Blog. He previously served as an advisor for the Open Data Working Group on behalf of the US OGP Civil Society Delegation. In the past he has also consulted with the Open Knowledge Foundation to help craft Ireland’s OGP submission and spent several years working on the ground with Irish Civil Society.

His Open Data projects include: The North Carolina Department of Commerce; Town of Chapel Hill; Durham City and County; Durham Public Schools; City of Raleigh; The City of Newark; The City of Cambridge; The City of Chelsea; Ireland’s Ministry of Reform; Colombia’s Ministry of Information and Communications; The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico; The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.

You can find him on twitter @opendatasoft and @jasonmhare.

Summary This session will detail how to deploy a multi-service application in Kubernetes, using Pulp as the example. Pulp is a multi-service web application that manages repositories of content, such as software packages, and makes it available for installation. With a REST API, async worker processes, a scheduler process, and a service to curate job queues, Pulp is a natural fit for the orchestration provided by Kubernetes.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to deploy a multi-service application in Kubernetes
• How to share persistent storage across multiple services
• How to scale individual services to meet changing load
• How to manage shared configuration and secrets for a "pre-docker" app that was not designed for container deployment

Bio Michael Hrivnak is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat and Team Lead for the Pulp Project. With strong experience in both software and systems engineering, he is excited to be writing software for systems engineers. Michael is passionate about open source software, live music, general aviation, and reducing energy consumption.

JUL-13 Meeting Announcements

Summary At the June TriLUG meeting I will show what a $150 starter TARPN station looks like as well as a multiple-link network node used to tie several destinations into a single Raspberry PI. I’ll bring some sample antennas. I may even be able to show communications from a station set up at the meeting into our existing 42 mile wide network.

In 2014 I started creating the TARPN web site to promote a technology, philosophy, and system for promoting and building a scalable digital communications system with education as a major purposes and with the goal of having Raspberry PI users communicate over distances of hundreds of miles by stepping through intermediary stations, all built by hobbyist volunteers using equipment located in our homes or at sites the participants control.
TARPN’s buzz-phrase is "off-the-grid text messaging". We communicate entirely on hobbyist controlled networks, mostly located in our homes. Internet is neither required nor desired. The challenge and reward is doing it on our own. This also gets us some extreme educational opportunities. See our web site at TARPN.NET

Bio: Tadd Torborg is a Firmware Engineer presently consulting to a startup company in Austin TX from an office at First Flight in RTP.

We’re using WiFi and “UWB” transceivers for indoor asset tracking. I have been a small systems microprocessor programmer since 1982 starting with the RCA 1802 CPU for E-Com in Stirling New Jersey. My first microprocessor programming job and my first packet radio project were both in 1982 at E-Com where they were using packetized messages sent and received on CATV lines. I’ve been working in digital radio communications for about half of my working life and in microprocessor programming for bare metal systems for 30 of the past 35 years. I’ve been using Amateur Radio for digital radio communications between computers since 1981.

“Packet networking over ham radio": http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html Local Raleigh ham radio info: http://torborg.com/a

My first computer KIM1 by MOS Technologies uses 6502 CPU, same as Apple 1 and Apple 2 computers. I bought this in 1978 for $190 + $30 for a plastic box. I wrote a touch tone decoder, morse code sender, telephone pulse dialer, a couple of games and learned how to do memory busses. Coding was involved writing separate functions in memory, with space in between for expansion room. Code was entered using HEXidecimal machine instructions.
The code space allowed for about 400 instructions in 1K of RAM. Watch out, the stack, limited to 256 bytes, wants to gobble up part of that.

My hobby is Amateur Radio. My FCC issued Amateur Radio callsign is KA2DEW issued in 1979 when I lived in Mendham New Jersey. I’ve lived in Wake County for 10 years, married with two adult children, and I’m 57 years old.

Tadd / KA2DEW tadd@mac.com Raleigh NC FM05pv

Jun-8 Meeting Announcements Slides

Bring your system down to Caktus Group and let Mike help guide you in how to set up your own Home Brew Lab. From installing the hypervisor, to spinning up VMs and maybe configuring a little virtual infrastructure, he'll be on hand to help kickstart your setup.

Note that you should bring a reasonably powerful system if you want to set up much more than a trivial lab.

Note We will be holding our annual Steering Committee elections at the very start of the meeting.

Summary In this talk, I will cover how you can create your very own lab for both testing and learning new platforms using freely available software. I want to share with everyone a way that you can have your very own test lab at home for little to no money. With this project, you can brew your own lab at home or work with only one "server" allowing you to test many OSes and networking configurations. I will discuss topics including: Why do a Home Brew Lab? What kind of hardware to you need? What virtualization platform? What kind of networking? I will also provide ideas on how to obtain hardware at reduced and sometimes no cost. I will present methods of acquiring various type of OS and software including VMWare, KVM, and Hyper-V. I will also discuss the implications of the licensing for each product.

Bio Mike Canada is an Engineer/Account Manager at Deal Consulting providing IT Support for small to medium businesses in the Triangle. In his own words... I have over 30 years of experience in IT ranging from mainframes to PC’s to mobile devices. I cut my teeth in Linux on Slackware in the mid 90’s. I have been using Linux as a hobbyist ever since and I am currently working on Linux Certification. I have a B.S. degree in Computer Science from James Madison University. I have the unique experience of having worked in federal, private, non-profit, and entrepreneurial endeavors.

May-11 Meeting Announcements Slides

Video: YouTube

Summary Tonight's talk will go in depth about the advantages and drawbacks of going serverless. A demo will illustrate deploying a generic Python application using AWS' SAM (Serverless Application Model), a Flask (WSGI) application using Zappa, and why you should reconsider your position on CloudFront.

Speaker Brian Jinwright is a Senior Software Engineer and resident AWS wizard at MetaMetrics, of Durham, NC where he has deployed various serverless django applications for production in AWS such as the company's homepage: metametricsinc.com.

APR-13 Meeting Announcements

Writing or maintaining an SELinux policy can be a daunting task if you've never done it before. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to create a basic SELinux policy. You will also learn to debug SELinux issues while designing or maintaining a SELinux policy. Contributing to SELinux is a great way to become more familiar with how it works and make open source computing more secure.

A rough outline of topics will include:

• Basic examples and compiling
• Using the M4 Macro Language (Reference Policy language)
• Debugging SELinux policy issues
• Contributing policies and fixes upstream with SELinux
• Packaging your policy
• Decompiling policies
• Where to get help

I wrote and maintain the SELinux policy for an open source project, Pulp, and want to share the experience I had writing it. With some guidance it can be fun. I'm assuming users have Fedora or RHEL, but we can probably figure it out on other distributions too.

Attendees are encouraged to come with a computer and a desire to contribute to an open source SELinux policy. If you bring software that does does not run within a SELinux context already you could write a basic policy for it. You can also learn more about an existing policy that you did not write. We can fix SELinux bugs and improve existing open source policies.

Bio Brian Bouterse is a Principle Software Engineer at Red Hat and has been working with SELinux for roughly 3 years. He is a developer on Pulp and has written an SELinux policy for Pulp and fixed many SELinux issues along the way. He lives in Raleigh with his wife Katie and his cat Schmowee.