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Upcoming
The Design of Unix Shell
Stephen R. Bourne
2026-05-13
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
Remote participation: Plans are to stream via NYC*BUG website. Q&A will
be via IRC on libera.chat channel #nycbug - please preface your
questions with '[Q]'.
We’re looking at having a “fireside chat” with Stephen R. Bourne,
covering everything from shell to its design decisions, and the
relevance today.
Some relevant reading for the meeting might be Stephen’s 1978 piece in
The Bell System Technical Journal entitled “UNIX Time-Sharing System:
The UNIX Shell”
(Bell
System Technical Journal, Vol 57, No 6, 1978).
Steve Bourne is internationally known for his work on the UNIX operating
system. During his career he spent 20 years in senior engineering
management positions at computer systems and networking companies.
These included Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment and
Silicon Graphics. Since 2000 he has been Chief Technology Officer at El
Dorado Ventures (now Rally Ventures) in Menlo Park, California.
He is past chair of the ACM Queue board, a magazine that he started in
2003 for software practitioners.
Steve spent nine years at Bell Laboratories as a member of the Seventh
Edition UNIX team. He designed the UNIX Command Language sh or “Bourne
Shell” which is used for scripting in the UNIX programming environment
and he wrote the adb debugger tool. His book “The UNIX System” was
widely read and published in 1983.
Flyer
Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.
To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long
bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the
BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off
to your right.
Past
What's Changed Since The Last Time I Came this Way - a talk that was supposed to be about OpenZFS
Michael W Lucas
2026-04-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
Michael W Lucas and Allan Jude are busy working on a new OpenZFS book,
which means not only documenting everything that’s changed in the last
12 years but discovering everything that they got wrong the first time.
The quest for accuracy has taken Lucas deep into mailing list archives,
Usenet, VAX installation manuals, the Kremlin’s first Internet
connection, the United Nations’ effort to merge the BSD projects, and
the ULTRIX and S51K filesystems, and left MWL more convinced than ever
that filesystems are nothing but a April Fools’ prank. This hurriedly
conceived and hastily assembled talk will update you on new OpenZFS
features, but will also try to determine if it’s a good prank–or not.
Michael W Lucas’ name may ring a bell for some in the BSD community.
He’s written several shelves of books. But for anyone who has seen him
speak in public during Ante COVID days, it was clear they are mere
transcriptions of his rambling presentations. For this NYC*BUG meeting,
he is unlikely to edit out any of his expected corny jokes we endure
during his conference presentations.
More likely, you know his name from his grotesque horror fiction. In
the same way his technical books are just transcriptions of his
presentations, his fictionaal horror is just a simple reflection of
someone who lives in a haunted house filled with (pet) rats in Detroit.
Flyer
Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.
To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long
bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the
BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off
to your right.
Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD With libhijack.pdf remote presentation
Shawn Webb
2026-03-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
FreeBSD is a widely-used open source operating system, powering your
Playstation 4 and 5, Netflix, Juniper devices, and many other devices.
libhijack is a post-exploitation tool to make code injection easier. In
as little as four lines of code, developers can inject a complete shared
object into another process fully anonymously.
libhijack makes it easy to force the target process to create new
anonymous memory mappings, inject code into memory-backed file
descriptors, and finally call fdlopen on the memfd.
This presentation walks attendees through various methods in which to
stealthily inject code into a target process - some of these methods are
new variants of prior work and remain unique to libhijack.
Shawn Webb is the co-founder of the HardenedBSD Project and the founding
president of The HardenedBSD Foundation, a tax-exmpt not-for-profit
501©3 charitable organization in the US. While Shawn has a few
decades of experience in infosec, both as a profession and a hobby, he
considers himself a perpetual newb. He works for IOActive, an offensive
security company, spending his time finding vulnerabilities in customer
products.
While working in the NSA’s backyard, he had the opportunity to be
mentored by two interns - an experience that changed his life. He and
his interns focused on the intersection of human rights and information
security and cybersecurity.
Shawn “lattera” Webb also maintains a post-exploitation tool called
libhijack. It makes runtime process infection and runtime function
hooking for remote processes over the ptrace boundary incredibly simple
on FreeBSD.
Flyer
Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.
To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long
bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the
BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off
to your right.
February Social
Could be you!
2026-02-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
We are having a social meeting to catch up after the holidays. Will
bring a few ideas for future meetings, stickers.
Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.
To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long
bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the
BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off
to your right.
Video meeting - upcoming 4th edition of The Book of PF, CRA and more
Peter Hansteen
2026-01-10
13:00 local (18:00 UTC)
at an internet connected computer near you
Peter Hansteen on The Book of PF 4th edition, and doing proper
engineering
Peter Hansteen has a new edition of The Book of PF, its fourth, hitting
shelves near you just about now. Peter would love to tell you all about
the book and how to use the PF toolset properly.
It’s about proper engineering. Which will be on the horizon more than
ever in the coming months and years as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)
is coming int force. Peter has a teaser presentation about that too,
and you’ll see how these themes tie together nicely.
Peter N.M. Hansteen is a DevOps (formerly sysadmin) consultant and
writer based in Bergen, Norway. A longtime Freenix advocate, Hansteen
is a frequent lecturer on OpenBSD and FreeBSD topics. He also
occasionally contributes articles to websites and magazines, and blogs
on mainly networking related topics at
Hansteen was a participant in the original RFC 1149 implementation team.
The Book of PF is an expanded follow-up to his very popular online PF
tutorial
Meeting Sldies
sbom.pdf
nycbug_20260110.pdf
Event Video
Peertube / Toobnix.org:
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
Youtube:
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
January Social
Could be you!
2026-01-07
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
January social; open mic for anyone.
Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.
To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long
bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the
BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off
to your right.
Holiday Party & Lightning Talks & Tips
various
2025-12-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
Holiday Party & Lightning Talks & Tips
Event Video
Peertube / Toobnix.org:
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
Youtube:
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
The Once and Future COBOL
James Lowden
2025-11-05
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
GCC 15, released in April 2025, for the first time includes COBOL among
the languages it compiles. Alongside the venerable gcc and g++, there
is now gcobol.
The reader may well wonder why a small company would devote years of
development to produce a product they don’t own and can’t sell. Why did
GCC decide to include COBOL? In short, what use is COBOL?
To those questions and more, we have answers.
As Mark Twain said of himself, news of COBOL’s demise is much
exaggerated. Industry studies show billions of lines of COBOL still in
production. With a probability of 95%, your last ATM transaction went
through a COBOL application. Not for nothing did nearly every large
firm pull out the stops 25 years ago for Y2K to adapt their critical
software to the 21st century. They didn’t do that to throw it all away.
COBOL was and remains useful because it was specifically designed for
its problem domain. No language is better suited for nuts-and-bolts
unglamorous data processing. For example, COBOL defines an I/O model,
numerical precision, 8 forms of rounding, and over 100 runtime
exceptions.
Programming languages often have shallow, undeserved reputations. Lisp
has too many parentheses, COBOL too many words, Perl is write-only.
Let’s talk about why COBOL remains viable and vital, and why it’s now
part of GCC.
James lives in Maine, where he tries to work 11 months a year, reserving
August for sailing with his wife and their dog. He worked for many
years on Wall Street on quantitative research systems. For a decade he
was the maintainer for FreeTDS (
), a client library for
SQL Server. Due in part to his efforts, this year GCC 15 added COBOL to
the suite of languages it compiles.
Event Video
Peertube:
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
Youtube:
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
October Social
Could be you!
2025-10-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.
To get to the backroom, you must enter the fontdoor, follow the long bar
on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the
BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off
to your right.
We are evaluating a new NYC*BUG space with a social meeting. Future
planned meetings include -jkl on his new work along with a holiday
lightning talks meeting in Dec.
September Social and new space evaluation
Could be you!
2025-09-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.
To get to the backroom, you must enter the fontdoor, follow the long bar
on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the
BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off
to your right.
We are evaluating a new NYC*BUG space with a social meeting. Future
planned meetings include -jkl on his new work along with a holiday
lightning talks meeting in Dec.
FreeBSD Laptop Desktop Working Group + DJ-BSD redux
Charlie Li
2025-05-14
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
From the FreeBSD wiki page: “The Laptop and Desktop Workgroup (LDWG) is
a platform for the community to collaborate on development, testing,
knowledge exchange, and advocacy for FreeBSD on laptops and d esktops.
Our mission is to advocate, support, and improve the use of FreeBSD on
laptops and desktops for both business and personal users.”
Mostly informal discussion, ways to get involved and a-day-in-the-life
of using FreeBSD as a primary desktop system, including a short DJ-BSD
redux from last BSDCan.
Charlie Li is FreeBSD Ports committer focusing on GTK-based desktops,
Python stuff, a little Rust and of course ham radio (callsign: K3CL).
Sometimes works at a transit agency. Otherwise lurking across eastern
PA with occasional trolling elsewhere.
QEMU Virtualization on BSDs
Jim Brown
2025-01-08
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
A section of the FreeBSD Handbook comes to life as Jim Brown covers
QEMU. This talk will cover how QE MU fits into the open source world,
host architechtures, and OSes, and how it fits into the *BSDs.
Jim Brown is a long time BSD aficionado who currently lives in Durham, NC.
Life with a FreeBSD Laptop
Brian Reynolds
2024-11-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
EuroBSDCon Recap/*BSD Fund info session
Patrick McEvoy
2024-10-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
EuroBSDCon Recap/*BSD Fund info session
During this talk, I will cover:
- hardware we saw at EuroBSDCon
- the hallway track
- general community involvement post-pandemic growth
- the NYC*BUG cabinet at NYI video repository
Because the community has been donating funds for hardware, I also
thought this would be a good time to cover how these funds are being
spent. We are shooting for the best bang for our Buck/Euro while
growing a reliable suite of hardware to use for community benefit and
reduced training time for volunteers.
Patrick McEvoy (BSDTV) has been streaming NYC
BSDCons since 2010 and
BSDCan since they lost their entire videoteam in a last minute staffing
emergency. He has been active with NYC
BUG for a number of years and
streams other tech / *BUG events when the schedule allows and releases
these videos on conference YouTube and Peertube under a number of
different umbrellas.
GEFS: The Long road to Production Use
Ori Bernstein
2024-09-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
Since GEFS was announced and discussed, a lot of debugging and
stabilization has happened. I’m using it on my laptop. Others are
testing it out. But there’s still a lot of work to do. Join for an
update on it.
Once again, I've done something no one asked for: New (and old!) C/C++ compilers for your next *BSD adventure: a tale of advocacy: and a sub-sub-subtitle to drum up intrigue
Brian Callahan
2024-08-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
At NYCBSDCon 2007, a talk titled “BSD is Dying” took the world by storm.
Two years later at DCBSDCon 2009, we got the follow-up “BSD is (Still)
Dying.” A year later, “BSD Needs Books” was presented at NYCBSDCon 2010,
followed up with “BSD Breaking Barriers” at NYCBSDCon 2014.
These excellent presentations fall into what I call “*BSD advocacy for
everyone” talks. That is, talks that can get anyone excited about
joining the
BSD community and fully bringing themselves and their
skills and gifts to our little piece of human history. But the most
recent of the talks above is a decade old at this point. What should a
BSD advocacy for everyone” talk look like in 2024? How ought we
communicate the value of the software and ourselves to the broader world
today?
Come with me on an exciting journey on how I wrangled the proprietary
Oracle Developer Studio and Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ compilers to run on
FreeBSD and NetBSD and output native binaries for those operating
systems. This journey is interesting to our question of “*BSD advocacy
for everyone” by highlighting the power of the BSDs, the flexibility to
undertake and excel at any task you might throw at them, and how many of
the perceived problems those on the outside might feel “hold us back”
are social, not technical, in nature, and how we can lead in turning the
tide on outsiders’ thinking in myriads of easy and small, large, and
in-between ways.
This talk will leave you with more than a few laughs, insights on
“porting” proprietary software to the BSDs, and energized to be a *BSD
advocate in your communities.
Brian has been around the
BSD community since 2005, NYC
BUG since 2010,
and got his OpenBSD account in 2013; he primarily works on OpenBSD
ports. In 2014, he moved to Troy, NY, where he has lived ever since.
He still does not appreciate the harsh upstate NY winters. Brian is the
Graduate Program Director for and a Senior Lecturer in the Information
Technology & Web Science program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
and the Founder and Director of the Rensselaer Cybersecurity
Collaboratory, the cybersecurity research lab and nationally leading CTF
team at RPI.
Event video
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
The State of Email
Michael W. Lucas
2024-07-10
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
“It’s impossible to run your own email!” Not quite. But you must do it
carefully and correctly. This talk discusses the current state of
email, with a focus on the small independent server operator. What do
you need to run your own mail? How can you use protocols like DKIM and
DMARC without wrecking your ability to communicate with the outside
world?
Based on Lucas’ book “Run Your Own Mail Server.”
The first chapter is online
Michael W. Lucas’ name may ring a bell for some in the BSD community.
He’s written several shelves of books. But for anyone who has seen him
speak in public during Ante COVID days, it was clear they are mere
transcriptions of his rambling presentations. For this NYC*BUG
meeting, he is unlikely to edit out any of his expected corny jokes we
endure during his conference presentations.
More likely, you know his name from his grotesque horror fiction. In
the same way his technical books are just transcriptions of his
presentations, his fictionaal horror is just a simple reflection of
someone who lives in a haunted house filled with (pet) rats in Detroit.
Event video
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
20th BSDCan Recap meeting
NYC*BUG members
2024-06-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
We plan to gather after the 20th BSDCan and share notes.
Possible subjects of discussion:
BSDCan 20th recap (speakers thoughts welcome)
next steps
fist time conference attendees thoughts also very welcome.
*BSD community growth ideas
streaming / recordings production report.
[your suggestions here]
Demystify ZFS Replication With a Safe and Powerful Approach
Daniel J. Bell
2024-05-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
ZFS is theoretically a powerhouse for data protection and performance,
but only if you can dodge its many traps. I’ll demonstrate the common
ZFS pitfalls and their solutions, along with practical strategies to
simplify and scale your backups. I’ll also introduce Zelta, a toolkit
of management scripts built on Unix fundamentals designed to help you
master ZFS with finesse.
Daniel J. Bell is the CEO of Bell Tower Integration, an NYC-based IT
consultancy with over two decades of experience. A FreeBSD aficionado
for over 25 years, he’s all about making advanced systems approachable.
Catch up or learn more about Zelta at
Event video
(recorded and processed by Pat
McEvoy)
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
20 Years of NYC*BUG and Can We Handle 20 More?
George Rosamond
2024-04-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
The New York City *BSD User Group officially launched at Linux World
Expo on January 2004 with a packed
birds-of-a-feather session
The first meeting was held on
February 4th
Several of us starting pulling together the group in December 2003, and
carefully planned for the events.
That makes January 2024 the official 20th anniversary of NYC*BUG, which
is a long time in user-group years.
Like every other organization, NYC*BUG’s history isn’t a simple linear
process. There were ebbs and flows, some due to our own decisions and
activities, others due to the larger world.
But we are still operating, with regular monthly meetings after the
pandemic, and still constantly assessing and reassessing what we’re
doing and where we’re going.
This isn’t going to be a straight-forward presentation. Rather, the
input from everyone who experienced the trajectory at any moment is
vital for drawing a full picture. That input will provide important
ingredients for the more polished version of this presentation at
BSDCan
May 31 through June 1st.
We look forward to input from those who have been part of this journey.
Hopefully the outcome will be a rich image of the history.
George Rosamond is a founder and long-time admin@ member of NYC*BUG.
He’s the co-founder and CTO of ClearOPS, a privacy and security
technology startup. A sysadmin by trade with citizenship in BSD Unix
land, his area of interest and expertise lies with privacy-enhancing
technologies, most importantly with the Tor Project. He thrives on
creating and designing unorthodox solutions to ordinary problems, but so
do most other people in the *BSD community.
NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist
Ivan "Rambius" Ivanov
2024-03-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
This talk grew out of the experience of going on vacation with only a
$100 Pinebook and trying, and succeeding to get work done.
Roughly the topics will be:
Installation and Updates - possibly automating them
Setup after the first boot
Battery monitoring with envsys framework
tmux - the “GUI” of choice
Network connectivity and wireless
sudo setup
pkgin and binary packages
Email with mutt
Using external media - USB sticks and CDs/DVDs - with and without sudo
Audio
Ripping CDs
Various audio formats
Podcasts
Typesetting
Typesetting with *roff
Typesetting with tex / latex
I don’t want to give a list of tools only. I would like to discuss more
about how they work - for example battery monitoring uses envsys
framework that can read various sensors and I have a sample program to
demonstrate it. Envsys can react when sensors reach critical values -
for exampe when the battery is almost depleted or when the CPU gets hot.
Email needs authentication - what the various options are. Wifi -
wpa_supplicant is great if you use just a couple of networks, for
example work and home; how we scan for wireless networks, how we sniff
them.
Ivan Ivanov is a Bulgarian software developer currently working for a
financial company in New York City.
slides
Event video
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
Jan Social and Planning 2024
n/a
2024-01-10
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
We are meeting for the first time in 2024! Will bring a few ideas for
future meetings, stickers, and a #runbsd Holiday Card we received.
Social / FreeBSD 14 chat / EuroBSDcon Swag
n/a
2023-11-08
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
Discussion of upcoming FreeBSD 14 release.
Also, Patrick will bring swag from EuroBSDcon Portugal and use it to
bribe people into giving a NYC*BUG talks. On offer: EuroBSDcon 2023 bag,
and many *BSD related stickers. Modirum-made floppies given out during
the conference at the Modirum table.
PEP-517 in FreeBSD Ports: design, architecture and how to use, first reading and discussion
Charlie Li
2023-09-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
After my programme at this year’s BSDCan on clash of the package
managers, using the integration of Python’s PEP-517 standard into
FreeBSD Ports to illustrate challenges, nuances and schemes between
different systems, it was suggested that a FreeBSD Journal article be
written to provide some more detail on PEP-517 integration specifically.
Given that it took about a year to actually commit, much of which did
not involve writing any code, we take a dive into the design and
architectural decisions that resulted in the committed form, as well as
future considerations.
Charlie Li is FreeBSD Ports committer focusing on GTK-based desktops,
Python stuff, a little Rust and of course ham radio (callsign: K3CL).
Sometimes works at a transit agency. Otherwise lurking across eastern
PA with occasional trolling elsewhere.
July Social Event & Open Mic
Could be You!
2023-07-12
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
Come on down to the Five Mile Stone Wednesday night to see if anyone has
brought an fun project they have been working on or possibly show off
something you have discovered. The streaming gear will be there, so if
anyone has anything they would like to present, then you are more than
welcome.
Possible topics:
“Hey, check out this cool util I found to save myself some time!”
“Has anyone seen *this specific weirdness before?!”
“The one editor to rule them all!”
(This brave soul will want to come prepared with a raincoat)
Either way, we will be there, the beer will be cold and the stories will
flow. Hope you can make it.
Down With the Corporate Ethos, Up With the Sunrise: Inspiring a New Generation of Hackers
Josh Natis
2023-06-14
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
I. Students
As a student, it’s easy to feel useless in the current state of the
world’s software ecosystem. At times, it seems like everything has been
invented already. For the most part, we’re only able to program “toy”
projects, and if we do decide to be amicable and share them with the
world, our code falls upon deaf ears – there is no positive
reinforcement for our feedback loop, our programs do not seem to help
anybody. Software forges like GitHub are brimming with programs, why
should anybody be concerned with ours? Projects we care about are so
complex that we can hardly grok their code, let alone offer any
meaningful help. Looking far into the past, the picture seems less
bleak. Programmers were a scarce resource. There was no Internet, and
thus no gigantic repository of programs to render yours obsolete. If
you wrote a program, you were contributing to your community’s
infrastructure, building it up with more and more utilities over time.
Every program you wrote bettered the system, extending the capabilities
of whomever you were sharing your system with. Systems themselves were
simpler, built from primitives one could reasonably wrap their head
around, so adding an impactful change was possible. This endows
programming with a sliver of humanity – you are doing a favor to your
community by doing this work. In modern day, this is often replaced by
an appeal to capitalism – you are improving your resume by programming
this, it will help you get a job. This leaves us hollow.
II. Computing Industry, Western Society
The world of computer science students is representative of a general
trend within the computing industry, which itself is a microcosm of
society as a whole. The pure information overload of the Global
Village, the wealth and power amassed and deployed by technofeudal
corporations, the fading away of our warm, caring human nature and trust
in one another, the slow cancellation of the future as we train our
children to be automatons. Where have all the hackers gone? I think
this is deeply connected to the gaping hole left by the departure of
myth, spirit, and religion from our society, replaced by a cold
calculated rationalism and commodification of everything, even human
nature and identity. The Soviet Union tried to fill this hole through
“God-building”. What should we do?
We will look to the past to once again discover the warm stream of
computing, the free-flowing camaraderie of the hacker ethic. We’ll
consider the freedom of constraints, the altruistic nature of humans,
the tradeoffs between the departing software Wild West and the global
coordination enabled by standards / governing bodies, best practices,
and a convergence on a shared corpus of open source software. With the
flame in your heart kindled, we will debate how to improve the state of
affairs – should we go bottom up? Become teachers, mentors, poets,
artists, creators of evocative media, inspiring the new generation of
hackers? Or should we go top down, using whatever means necessary to
change the way we live in our society on a macro level – economic and
political systems, states.
Things can be different – Down With the Corporate Ethos, Up With the
Sunrise.
Caveats:
I come bearing questions not answers
I was wearing a diaper when 9/11 happened so I can’t speak authoritatively about the past
I have a relatively strict time limit so even if I was a crackpot I couldn’t take up too much of your time :-).
Josh Natis is a Unix herder searching for unknown unknowns, hopelessly
stuck in a dialectic between Luddism and technological utopia. Loves
having a cappuccino at night. Longs for mornings but is never awake for
them. Happy to be here.
slides
video
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
video
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
GEFS, A Good Enough File System
Ori Bernstein
2023-05-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
GEFS is an experimental file system built for Plan 9. It aims to be a
crash-safe, corruption-detecting, simple, and fast, snapshotting file
system, in that order. It’s built on top of a relatively new data
structure known as a Bε tree. Ori will be talking about how it works
internally, and his ambitions to port it to OpenBSD.
100% human, or triple your money back.
video
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
video
(recorded and processed by Pat McEvoy)
First Social/Open Mic in new location!
Anyone with an idea or opinion to share.
2023-04-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Five Mile Stone, 1640 2nd Ave (northeat corner of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd Floor).
We are “in the book” with the nice people over at Five Mile Stone for an
April 5th social/open mic. The location is accessible from both the
Q, 4, 5, & 6 trains. With our standard meeting time of 18:45 and likely start
time of 19:00 EDT. We have the entire second floor to ourselves with
plenty of ventilation, a projector & screen, and most importantly;
isolation from the rest of the bar/restaurant. Hope to see you there.
Extreme scripting with KSH and AWK
G Clifford Williams
2021-09-08
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Zoom
Have you ever wanted to learn AWK? I mean, really really dig in and be
able to do things with AWK that most people didn’t know was possible?
If your answer was “YEAH!!”, calm down it’s just scripting not saving
the planet or anything. If your answer was “no”, tough toggle switches
because that’s what we’ll be covering. We’re going to push AWK to its
limits and beyond. Then we’ll do the exact same with a specific shell
command dialect known as KSH93/Korn Shell.
Obviously time won’t allow us to cover every corner of the language in
depth but you’ll definitely learn enough to get up and running on your
own with plenty of resources to help fill in the gaps. When I say up
and running think “…with scissors”. We’ll start right off with the
powerful features using no safety nets. This goes beyond “tips and
tricks” and directly to the extreme.
slides
Why Privacy/Security (usually) Needs Anonymity
George Rosamond
2021-07-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Zoom
In an uncensored and unleashed version of an ISSA Privacy SIG
presentation from June, George will be making a strong declaration
relevant to the times: why privacy and security (usually) need
anonymity.
As privacy finally becomes an acceptable and even popular service and
product feature, its sibling anonymity is still carries nefarious
connotations. Privacy advocates onced faced questions like “do you have
something to hide?” Similar retorts are now posed to anonymity
advocates.
But creating privacy solutions without anonymity means ignoring a core
aspect of (corporate,nation-state) surveillance: metadata. Knowing who
talked to whom, when did they talk and for how long, makes the actual
content of the communications less relevant in an era of mass
surveillance.
Cut down to the basics and unfettered, we’ll look at the changing
environment of privacy, relating it to anonymity then approach some of
the basic ingredients necessary for adapting anonymity to technical
solutions today.
And yes, the relevance of BSD Unix will be woven throughout, somehow,
someway.
George Rosamond is a founder and long-time admin@ member of NYC*BUG.
He’s the co-founder and CTO of ClearOPS, a privacy and security
technology startup.
A sysadmin by trade with citizenship in BSD Unix land, his area of
interest and expertise lies with privacy enhancing technologies, most
importantly with the Tor Project. He thrives on creating and designing
unorthodox solutions to ordinary problems, but so do most other people
in the *BSD community.
Minimal Scripted Configuration
Eric Radman
2021-06-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Zoom
Configuration management is term that is usually used to describe a
declarative approach to systems, but a new generation of tools has
emerged that take a different tact. By providing only the minimal
scaffolding for writing scripts, it is possible to build configuration
management that scale with the complexity of the environment. In this
discussion we will consider three different architectures: Agent-Server,
Gather-Fact, and Remote Execution.
Eric has administered BSD and Linux systems for 20 years, and has
supported applications using PostgreSQL for nearly as long. He is
usually most content when result of a test or deployment returns in two
or three seconds after typing ‘:w’.
slides
Polyglot *BSD
Brian Callahan
2021-05-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Zoom
When you install a ‘*BSD,’ you are given all the tools needed to
rebuild the entire base system out of the box. This also means you have
the tools to create more software without any external packages. This
helps make the BSDs a prime development platform.
Despite this, there are many other programming languages out there, some
of which are even used in production! Having access to those languages
provides a double benefit: 1) it opens up the richness of programming
language research and implementation to all interested ‘*BSD’ users;
and, 2) it opens up the BSDs to aficionados of these languages.
Come follow one man’s never-ending quest to port every known compiler to
OpenBSD. We will explore some languages you know, some you don’t, and
discover the tricks necessary to bring up compiler system support to new
platforms. We will learn how to be a good member of the language
community, how to represent well your ‘*BSD’ to a language community,
and how you can even accidentally end up with your name buried in the
GCC source tree!
Brian sometimes speaks at NYC*BUG. You’ve probably heard him talk about
OpenBSD ports before. He has been a developer for OpenBSD since 2013,
primarily focusing on ports.
Brian is a Lecturer in the IT & Web Science program at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where he sometimes gets to teach with
the BSDs!
slides
HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union
Shawn Webb
2021-04-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Google
Over the last few years, since the last State of the Hardened Union,
HardenedBSD has made strides in several areas. We’re now focused as a
hardened human rights-focused operating system. This presentation will
dive into recent developments of the OS itself along with our focus on
human rights. We’ll highlight some unique areas where HardenedBSD is
being used in production.
Shawn is a senior security engineer and lead technical architect for
BlackhawkNest, Inc. He is also the cofounder of HardenedBSD and its
lead security engineer. He was introduced into the security industry as
a teenager, falling in love with both offensive and defensive security.
Shawn has written tools like libhijack, which aims to make runtime
process infection dead simple on FreeBSD. Now he works primarily on the
defensive end, implementing exploit mitigations and security hardening
technologies in HardenedBSD.
slides
Gaming on OpenBSD: Pearls, Pitfalls, Paranoia
Thomas Frohwein
2021-03-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Zoom
OpenBSD has had a long-standing reputation for its security focus, but
is also surprisingly good as a desktop OS once you’ve made it past the
initial barriers. It hasn’t been known for gaming (other than
tetris(6)), leading users to play on other platforms like a Windows box
or game consoles. But now, things are changing one
emulator|sourceport|game engine at a time.
Follow thfr@ on a years-long journey to try to extend the advantages
offered by OpenBSD to more and better gaming - from hardware support to
security mitigations at play, to ultimately overcoming multiple barriers
and growing both OpenBSD’s gaming library and its gaming community.
Thomas Frohwein is a German expat living in Montana. He has been
OpenBSD user since 2014, and developer (thfr@) since 2018. His primary
focus has been improving gaming options on OpenBSD and he maintains the
(eternally unfinished) webpage playonbsd.com with the infamous shopping
guide in an attempt to sabotage the productivity of OpenBSD hackers and
tempt them to drain their notoriously low bank accounts. His dayjob is
working as a physician which in this day and age is almost equivalent to
being an IT specialist.
Fifteen Years and Fifteen Minutes: Applying Occam's Razor to FreeBSD with OccamBSD
Michael Dexter
2021-02-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Zoom
occambsd.sh (
) is a script that
builds a minimum FreeBSD u serland and kernel using build options, for
use with bhyve(8) and jail(8). The result takes minutes t o build and
seconds to boot, but achieving this simple objective required fifteen+
years of experimen tation, error reporting, and gentle persuasion. This
talk will touch on the milestones leading to occ ambsd.sh, the role of
build options as part of the fundamental FreeBSD value proposition, the
mysteri ous build
option
survey, occambsd.sh in action, and your
insightful questions.
Michael is best known in NYC
BUG circles for his help via BSD Fund as
the fiscal sponsor of NYC
BSD Con 2010 and has organized the Portland
Linux/Unix Group (pdxlinux.org) since that same time. Michael provides
TrueNAS and OpenZFS support from Portland, Oregon side-by-side with this
wife, three kids, dog, and hamster.
Chatting About TLS and Orcs
Michael W. Lucas
2021-01-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Zoom
Mr. Lucas will be doing some readings from his forthcoming book on TLS.
We promise that this meeting will be entertaining, although NYC*BUG can
make no assurances about the accuracy of the data. While his jokes
will likely drop like lead zeppelins, we are convinced you will be at
least entertained.
Michael W. Lucas’ name may ring a bell for some in the BSD community.
He’s written several shelves of books. But for anyone who has seen
him speak in public during Ante COVID days, it was clear they are
mere transcriptions of his rambling presentations. For this NYC*BUG
meeting, he is unlikely to edit out any of his expected corny jokes
we endure during his conference presentations.
More likely, you know his name from his grotesque horror fiction.
In the same way his technical books are just transcriptions of his
presentations, his fictionaal horror is just a simple reflection
of someone who lives in a haunted house filled with (pet) rats in
Detroit.
Besides, who doesn’t need another video meeting planned for Wednesday
January 6?
For the Love of Troff
James K. Lowden
2020-12-02
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Zoom
James K. Lowden will present “For the Love of Troff”, a discussion of
the state of Unix documentation and documentation systems. James
advocates the obvious superiority of mdoc markup for documentation, and
demonstrates the continuing miserable state of competing systems and
formats. If you are not impressed, you’re sure to be startled.
To prepare for the assault
Wascent
Wtalk, you may wish to read his
unsubmitted, unpublished, nearly secret paper of the same name,
For an example of the capabilites of the modern GNU troff system
(groff), please see his paper on a completely unrelated subject,
James has played a central role in the BSD periphery for 20 years and
has the bar tab to show for it. In a moment of rare foresight, he quit
Manhattan a few years ago for a house on the Penobscot Bay in Maine,
where he enjoys cold winters, summer sailing, and modest respite from
Covid-19. Once the maintainer of the FreeTDS library, he now spends
his days working on a re-implementation of IMS and helps out on the
GnuCOBOL project. Really.
Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes
Dr. Paul Vixie
2020-03-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, Room 1013, 10th Floor, Brooklyn
This meeting is cosponsored with NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity.
Apps and servers, especially on the Web, have an agenda which does
not include or welcome any interference by any on-path actors such
as ISPs, national security or regulation, or third parties from the
supply chain or from the Internet core. The way the ideal role of
on-path actors is often described by end users or application
developers or online service providers is to say, “I just want you
to be a dumb pipe”. As of 2019, operating system developers and
network and edge system administrators are also described this way.
DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and HTTP over QUIC(HTTP/3) now bypass the
operating system’s implementation and configuration of DNS, and
bypasses the kernel’s implementation of TCP.
At the March 2020 NYC*Bug meeting, Dr. Paul Vixie, CEO of Farsight
Security, will tell the story of how we got here, and what this
trend means for endpoint and network security. FreeBSD and “ipfw”
will be used for demonstration.
Dr. Paul Vixie is Chairman, CEO and Cofounder of Farsight Security.
Dr. Vixie is an internet pioneer. Currently, he is the Chairman,
CEO and cofounder of award-winning Farsight Security, Inc. Dr. Vixie
was inducted into the internet Hall of Fame in 2014 for work related
to DNS and anti-spam technologies. He is the author of open source
internet software including BIND 8, and of many internet standards
documents concerning DNS and DNSSEC. In addition, he founded the
first anti-spam company (MAPS, 1996), the first non-profit internet
infrastructure company (ISC, 1994), and the first neutral and
commercial internet exchange (PAIX, 1991). In 2018, he cofounded
SIE Europe UG, a European data sharing collective to fight cybercrime.
Dr. Vixie earned his Ph.D. from Keio University for work related
to DNS and DNSSEC in 2010.
NYC*BUG Meta-Meeting: Open Forum
n/a
2020-02-05
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Chartbeat 826 Broadway, 6th Floor
In this meeting we will go over a little NYC*BUG history, what we offer
the *BSD community, plans for future meeting and swa pping stories /
tips & tricks. Bring your plans, problems, and finished projects and
let’s discuss. We plan to brainstorm ways new people can take part.
Share projects we are working on & talk about the things we are learning
or teaching.
What is notqmail?
Amitai Schleier
2020-01-08
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Chartbeat, 826 Broadway, 6th Floor
What is notqmail?
It’s not qmail. It’s also not netqmail.
We all use email, so we all use email servers. notqmail is software for
running an email server. Someday, if we do a good job, some of the many
articles about how and why to run your own will recommend notqmail.
notqmail is a community-driven fork of qmail, beginning where netqmail
left off: providing stable, compatible, small releases to which existing
qmail users can safely update. notqmail also aims higher: developing an
extensible, easily packaged, and increasingly useful modern mail server.
More Info:
Amitai Schleier (@schmonz) is an independent software development coach,
legacy code wrestler, non-award-winning musician, and award-winning bad
poet. He publishes fixed-length micropodcasts at Agile in 3 Minutes,
writes variable-length articles at schmonz.com, and contributes code and
direction to notable open-source projects such as NetBSD, pkgsrc,
ikiwiki, and qmail. Amitai’s ideas, prose, music, and puns have
manifested mostly at a variety of software-focused venues, but
unfortunately also at the International Rachmaninoff Conference and the
Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest. You can work with him
through his consultancy, Latent Agility.
Holiday Party
n/a
2019-12-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Boat Bar, 175 Smith St, Brooklyn
We will have our holiday Party in Brooklyn this year. Come on down and
see the SDF Traveling terminal and your NYC*Bug friends in a different
bar in a different borough!
BSD Installfest
n/a
2019-11-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
NYC*BUG InstallFests are mixed-up, sloppy opportunities to get hands-on
and dirty with an array of hardware.
From Raspberry Pis and BeagleBones to common 64-bit laptops (Pine and
otherwise), lots of hardware and a rat’s nest of cables will saturate
the room, along with install media for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and
beyond.
This is a great chance to test out the BSD of your choice for the first
or 54th time, in collaboration with other BSD users and developers.
Bring in that laptop, maybe with a second hard disk, or one of the newer
supported ARM embedded boards.
As in the past, we’ll utilize the digital projector to those doing short
presentations or for those who want to display their progress. Feel
free to have a short overview of your install to present if you’re
interested.
Please email talk@ if you have any preliminary questions about hardware
support, specific hardware needs, etc.
Unix @ 50:The SDF Traveling AT&T 605 UNIX Terminal
We are also pleased to announce that we will have the SDF traveling AT&T
605 UNIX Terminal along with a BUNCH of SDF.org swag! SDF has very
generously offered to send us this terminal to play with while working
out installs on our machines.
Plan 9: Not dead, Just Resting
Ori Bernstein
2019-10-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Ori will give an overview of what Plan 9 is, and tell you not to use it.
He’ll then launch into why he ignores his own advice, give a description
of what the system is and how it’s put together, and talk about what’s
happened since Bell Labs. He’ll then engage in some philosophy, and
talk about what can be learned from the approach the system takes, and
how it can be applied to new systems.
A live demo will be included.
Ori was born once. He seems to be made of meat. He spends most of his
day tickling keyboards, hoping to convince computers to do things.
Setting up a convenient working environment
Ivan Ivanov
2019-09-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
The talk will present some of the author’s attempts to setup a
convenient working environment.
We often discuss automation topics, but no matter how perfect out
automation procedures, failures and errors do happen. Then we need to
actually log into a box and interactively and manually debug it. The
talk will discuss some of the author’s attempts to set up a convenient
working environment under Unix.
Ivan Ivanov is a Bulgarian software developer currently working for a
financial company in New York City.
slides
Video on OpenBSD
Andre Buskvekster
2019-08-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Andre selects his video production software based on free licensing,
portability, ease of installation, compatibility with OpenBSD,
usability, and whether it accomplishes whatever he wants to do. Videos
are consequently produced on OpenBSD with vim, make, ffmpeg, mkvmerge,
mpv, sox, Glottolog, aucat, bc, fossil, borgbackup, R, Python,
ImageMagick, files, and custom Unix-style utilities. Competence with
such portable video editing software has come in handy when needing to
use GNU/Linux and Windows.
Andre will touch on many parts of my video production process, including
planning, recording, editing video streams, editing audio streams,
composition of subtitles, translation of subtitles, encoding,
publishing, and version control.
Andre Buskvekster works in logistics at a petrochemicals company in S_o Paulo.
Everyday ZFS
Brian Reynolds
2019-07-10
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
The ZFS storage management system from Sun Microsystems, and available
for FreeBSD, is well known for data reliability in the data center.
This talk will discuss using ZFS in more low key environments like the
desktop, or on your laptop.
Brian Reynolds is a UNIX and Network Systems Administrator from New
York City with too many years of experience. He has worked in the
Banking, Software Development, Finance, Legal, Internet Service
Provider, and Garment industries. Brian is a graduate of NYU/WSUC and
Aviation High School. In the distant past Brian was a board member of
UNIGROUP, and has given presentations at local technical groups.
General discussion and planning after BSDCan
n/a
2019-06-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
We’ll have a general discussion covering:
future meeting topics
renewed user group resources offered at BSDCan
and general *BSD chatter
Swag from BSDCan will also be available.
Lookup Data Structures in the FreeBSD Kernel
Firecrow Slivernight
2019-05-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Lookup Data Structures in the FreeBSD Kernel will be a tour of Red/Black
Trees and Radix trees as they appear in the source code. An overview of
what problem the structure solves as well as an in depth look at the
call strucuture of each will be covered. The structures will also be
compared to assess their strengths/weaknesses for example red black
trees are organized to rebalence on write and be stateless on read,
whereas radix trees have a more predicable insertion method.
Firecrow has been a self taught software engineer since 2008, in 2010 he
contributed to a patch for the NetBSD alc driver and in 2016 was a
contributor to a patent for interactive video, awarded to the mobile
advertising company Yieldmo, his familiarity with data structures comes
from his recent development of a standalone red black tree
implementation and a version control system based on simple file data
storage. He is currently working for Haven Life as a full stack
engineer.
Verification As Code of Infrastructure As Code
Raul Cuza
2019-04-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Shell scripts are a great tool for both building and testing services,
but they are not the only choice. Sometimes your team needs to describe
infrastructure into existing and building your own DSL can be a
distraction from your goals. Something like Ansible is still a fine
choice for these situations. Once you have chosen to use Ansible, you
next have to choose how to verify what you are building. You could
verify manually
verify by writing a general program (shell, python, etc)
verify by using molecule
The demo part of the talk will show how molecule and testinfra can be
utilized to test your infrastructure code.
The discussion part will be about why testing infrastructure code is a
lukewarm tech topic at best. Why aren’t other people as excited about
its possibilities as me? What are the practicalities of these tests
(e.g. costs, time to develop, etc)? How do these tests inform
monitoring? Why isn’t the idempotence of Ansible sufficient? How much
coupling and anti-DRY do infrastructure tests involve?
This talk is compatible with all BSDs but is not limited to them.
ref:
Raul Cuza is a systems administrator but some of his best friends know
how to code.
One of his first accomplishments after college was deploying a fleet of
JavaStations in a K-12 school giving the faculty and students their
first wide spread access to email, word processing, and web surfing. He
quickly learned that being the sole person in an organization who
understood how to administer UNIX, no matter how thin the clients, did
not lead to a good work life balance. And, thanks to Citrix, he learned
that even when an OS is virtual, you still have to manage it.
Maintaining qmail in 2019
Amitai Schleier
2019-03-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
qmail 1.03 was notoriously bothersome to deploy. Twenty years later,
for common use cases, I’ve finally made it pretty easy. If you want to
try it out, I’ll help! (Don’t worry, it’s even easier to uninstall.) Or
just listen as I share the sequence of stepwise improvements from then
to now – including pkgsrc packaging, new code, and testing on lots of
platforms – as well as the reasons I keep finding this project
worthwhile.
Amitai Schleier (@schmonz) (
) is a software
development coach, legacy code wrestler, non-award-winning musician, and
award-winning bad poet. He publishes fixed-length micropodcasts at
Agile in 3 Minutes, writes variable-length articles at schmonz.com, and
contributes code and direction to notable open-source projects such as
NetBSD, pkgsrc, ikiwiki, and qmail. Amitai’s ideas, prose, music, and
puns have manifested at Agile Roots, Agile for Humans, CodeMash,
Self.conference, pkgsrcCon, Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, NYCBUG, the
International Rachmaninoff Conference, and the Alfred Joyce Kilmer
Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.
slides
video
Using Shell as a Deployment Tool
Ivan Ivanov
2019-02-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Tools like Ansible provide a convenient way to deploy software.
However, they come with complexity that may not be justified for
certain tasks. The presentation will describe a real-world use case of
converting an ansible-based deployment procedure to shell scripts in
order to simplify it. I will explain how it is done and why it is done.
Ivan Ivanov is a Bulgarian software developer currently working for a
financial company in New York City.
slides
From 5.7 to 6.4 and beyond: Getting -current with OpenBSD
Brian Callahan
2019-01-02
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at all the new things going on
in OpenBSD land. This talk provides a good recap of the last several
years of OpenBSD development. We’ll talk new hardware, new software,
new security mitigations, and even playing Steam games on OpenBSD! Come
experience what’s new in OpenBSD.
Brian gives lots of NYC*BUG talks so you may have seen him around. He’s
been an OpenBSD developer since early 2013, mostly focusing on ports and
packages but also has interests in userland tools and exotic hardware.
Brian is a Professor in the IT & Web Science program at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
slides
video
Holiday Party
n/a
2018-12-05
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
We are “in the books” for our holiday party. Bring your ideas for 2019
tech meetings and we will try to set the *BSD world to right over the
beverages of our choice.
Ensuring Perl's Viability on FreeBSD: A NYCBUG-NY.PM Collaboration
James E Keenan, Andrew Villano
2018-11-07
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
How have NYCBUG and New York Perlmongers collaborated to ensure the
continued viability of Perl 5 on FreeBSD?
This will be a report on the progress of a collaboration between the New
York City BSD User Group (NYCBUG) and New York Perlmongers (NY.pm) to
ensure the continued viabilty of the Perl 5 programming language and
ecosystem on the FreeBSD operating system. We’ll consider:
The Perl 5 core distribution and development process
Testing the Perl 5 core distribution on various platforms
The Perl 5 ecosystem: CPAN
Testing CPAN on various platforms: CPANtesters
The Perl 5 development process in relation to CPAN
The need for diversity in testing environments
The NYCBUG-NY.pm collaboration
Preparation of the testing environment
Testing Perl monthly development releases against CPAN on FreeBSD
Impacts
video
Subdo
Ibsen S. Ripsbusker
2018-10-03
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Subdo installs packages such that your main user (the “super”) has the
right to run the program through doas, sudo, or ssh as a user dedicated
to the particular program (the “sub”), group information and filesystem
access are configured accordingly.
Here are some reasons you might want to do this.
A program has lots of dependencies, and you thus don’t want to
port/package it.
You are using multiple package managers and want to ensure that
dependencies are separated by package manager.
You do not trust the software to run properly, as it may contain bugs or
malware.
setuid, &c., is not appropriate, or you don’t feel like using it.
While it is technically quite different, subdo has been compared to
Android, chroot, jails, containers, and virtual machines.
subdo protects against many bugs and naive malwares, but vulnerabilities
are known for usage of subdo with the doas and sudo backends and for
usage of X programs through subdo.
Ibsen S. Ripsbusker is a berry farmer. He mostly grows currants, but
he also grows other berries. He has been developing Unix-like software
as a hobby for 15 years.
Social
n/a
2018-09-05
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Long overdue social.
Reproducible builds on NetBSD
Christos Zoulas
2018-02-07
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
LMHQ, 150 Broadway, 20th Floor
I will talk about my recent work getting reproducible
builds on NetBSD. The talk will be based on information that I
first posted at:
and it will have more detailed examples of the toolchain, build,
and application changes that every OS needs to make to achieve
reprodicibility.
I will also discuss the meaning of timestamps and other “build-specific”
information that needs to become predictable for fully reproducible
builds, and if it is worth faking in the first place to achieve
identical built artifacts at the media level.
I live in New York City and work in the Finance Sector. I spend most
of my free time with my kids. When they let me I try to write and
fix things for NetBSD/file/tcsh/libedit/… and other pieces of code
I’ve worked on over the years.
slides
video
(recorded and processed by Patrick McEvoy)
OpenBSD Porting Workshop. Learn how to make ports!
Brian Callahan
2018-01-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
LMHQ, 150 Broadway, 20th Floor
Writing ports is a crucial aspect of *BSD development. There is a lot of
software out in the world, and ports and packages make all our lives much
easier. All the non-base software you use passed through the fingers of a
porter.
Making your own ports is an easy and fun way to make your first contributions
to a *BSD project. Is there some piece of software you just can’t live
without? Do you have some software of your own that you would like to have
readily available to *BSD users? Just interested in learning about ports and
package management? This is the workshop for you! No experience necessary to
participate. All set up, including an OpenBSD virtual machine, will be
available for participants.
We will be creating our own first ports for the OpenBSD project. This workshop
will be a step-by-step from identifying the software you want to port through
and including the final port ready for submission. By the end of the workshop,
you will have submitted a new port to the OpenBSD ports@ mailing list!
Brian is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Science & Technology Studies
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
He is an OpenBSD developer, mostly working on ports.
He once spoke at BSDCan with George. And now George doesn’t go to conferences
anymore. Coincidence?
Holiday Get-Together
n/a
2017-12-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
Let’s reconnect with old friends and meet new ones as a bunch of NYC*BUG
people will eat and drink for the evening.
Come with a technical question or not.
*BSD Tor Bridge Installfest
The Tor BSD Diversity Project
2017-10-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
LMHQ, 150 Broadway, 20th Floor
Tor is a public and open-source anonymity network, playing a critical
role for users facing censorship and surveillance around the globe.
There is one glaring weakness about the Tor network: an overwhelming
dominance of Linux-based nodes. Since March 2015,
The Tor BSD
Diversity Project
has worked to rectify this
operating system monoculture.
TDP managed a number of feats, including porting Tor Browser to
OpenBSD.
For this hands-on installfest, the goal is to start addressing the
massive monoculture in Tor bridges, which serve as private gateways for
users blocked from the Tor network.
That monoculture is stark as the
TDP statistics
illustrate
Bridge operating
system diversity
is even worse than for public relays.
Bridges are ideal services to run from a residential network. Many BSD
users in New York City maintain fast, underutilized internet connections
that can easily help increase diversity. As Tor bridge IPs are not
publicly listed, there is little worry about geting any flack from
internet service providers.
Popular small embedded systems, from armv7 BeagleBones to amd64 APU
boards, are ideal hardware platforms for a residential bridge. Each of
the BSD projects provide strong support for an array of small systems.
This meeting will feature a brief introduction to TDP, a quick overview
of some diversity statistics, followed by hands-on configuration of
hardware on-hand.
To make this installfest worthwhile, come prepared with:
appropriate hardware to install the BSD of your choice on, with
appropriate cables and install media
an IP address reserved on your private residential network for the Tor
bridge
Adequate power and bandwidth will be available, along with other NYC*BUG
attendees ready and willing to assist.
The Tor BSD Diversity Project (
) launched in
March 2015 to inject more *BSD into the Tor public anonymity network.
Since then, TDP accomplished a number of important milestones, including
porting Tor Browser to OpenBSD with a current effort to port TB to
FreeBSD.
Building Open Source Random Number Generators
Rob Seward
2017-05-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
LMHQ, 150 Broadway, 20th Floor
Many of our secure encryption systems depend on black-box closed-source
random number generators. After the Snowden documents revealed that the
NSA tried to undermine random number generation with the DUAL
EC
DRGB
algorithm, there is renewed interest in using open-source hardware as a
more secure way to generate random numbers. With this in mind I set out
to manufacture an open-sourced design on a small scale as a means to
disseminate knowledge about true hardware random number generation. In
this talk I’ll discuss some of the thinking behind my project
Rob is an iOS engineer at Electric Objects. He has been fiddling with
random number circuits for about 10 years. He also makes art.
slides
Getting to yes.c
Mike Burns
2017-04-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
LMHQ, 150 Broadway, 20th Floor
Let’s read a classic: yes.c. We can look at OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
GNU, Illumos, and Unix 7th ed. implementations. With the many
different authors and distinct cultures we will be sure to have much to
discuss and compare. Some things to think about: what are some uses for
the yes command? What errors can occur, and how are they handled? How
did GNU manage to make this program 88 lines long? How did Illumos get
this program indented by five tabs?
The inspiration is the shared metaphors and expressions we have in
natural language due to common books (e.g. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy, Romeo and Juliet) and movies (e.g. Hackers, A Christmas Carol).
Come prepared for a poetry slam crossed with a book club.
Mike is an OpenBSD contributor, port maintainer, and long-time BSD user.
He’s new to town, having previously run the Classical Code Reading Group
of Stockholm.
OS : The underlying overhead of computation
Antti Kantee
2017-02-01
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders, 108 Greenwich St, 2nd Floor
An operating system is a piece of code intended to help computer
operators load punch cards – hence “operating”. The timesharing system
was created to allow interactive shared access to the handful of
computers which existed at the time. We will examine what is in the
interactive punch card loader in 2017, what actually belongs in there,
and why things are the way they are. Like science, the talk is highly
religious. Unlike computer science, the talk is grounded in reality.
Discussions, heretical opinions, and questions are encouraged
Antti Kantee has been a NetBSD committer since the 1900’s and has
managed to do many sorts of damage. He is probably best (or worst,
depending on who you ask) known for his decade-long workhaul on rump
kernels. Antti very recently moved to the Princeton area, so in case
he appears particularly absent during his talk, he got lost on the way
to the venue.
meeting video
(recorded and processed by Patrick McEvoy and Christos Zoulas)
slides
Infrastructure in a Post-Cloud Era
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2016-11-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Woolworth Building, 233 Broadway, 21st Floor
With a *BSD-minded perspective, we’ll walk through the money and
administrative ends of deploying cloud infrastructure, and compare it to
experiences in colocation.
Building modern internet applications is challenging; so why are so many
technology companies relinquishing control over their technology? The
public clouds, after all, are just computers owned by somebody else.
This presentation contains real data crunched by data scientists, to
help cut through marketing hype. Also covered, strategies and
approaches to help you keep your stack “infrastructure agnostic”, as
well as strategies to make cloud metered costs less opaque.
Note: This material was previously presented at LHMK, April 2016 - and
will be presented assuming a technical audience.
Standing on the shoulders of giants, ike’s background includes
partnering to run a Virtual Server ISP before anyone called it a cloud,
as well as having a long history building internet-facing infrastructure
with UNIX systems.
NYC startup veteran, and a long-time community contributor to the *BSD
UNIX family, ike has grown computing infrastructure from a hand-full of
virtual servers, to full-datacenter scale internet-facing infrastructure
for a number of growth stage startups.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January
2004, was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User Group.
He has spoken frequently on a number of UNIX and internet security
topics at various venues, particularly on the topic of FreeBSD’s
jail(8), and his involvement in the OPNsense router firewall project.
Teaching Operating Systems with FreeBSD and DTrace
George Neville-Neil
2016-09-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Woolworth Building, 233 Broadway, 21st Floor
For the past two years George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson have been
developing courseware for students studying Operating Systems at the
Graduate, Undergraduate and Post Graduate (practitioner) level. These
courses have been taught at the University of Cambridge, the University
of Darmstadt and various BSD related conferences. The material is all
available under an open source license at
and github
). We’ve been using DTrace
extensively as a way to give students insight into the complex workings
of the operating system and we believe that this leads to a more broad
understanding of the material presented. In this talk I’ll present an
overview of our work and discuss our experiences in teaching this
material. Our goal is to get more people to teach with our materials
and to promulgate both the teaching methods as well as knowledge of
FreeBSD in particular and the BSDs in general.
George is the author of two leading books on operating systems, the
latest co-authored with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert N. M. Watson
of The Design and implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System 2nd Ed.
For over ten years he has been the columnist better known as Kode
Vicious, producing the most widely read column in both of ACM’s premier
flagship magazines, “Queue” and “Communications of the ACM”. More
recently he was tapped to chair the ACM Practitioner Board, which is
dedicated to bridging the gap between research and industry, where he
helped create the ACM Applicative conference.
George has been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years, and currently
serves on the elected Core team which helps manage the overall project.
Since 2012 he has been on the Board of Directors of the FreeBSD
Foundation, the US 501c3 organization that helps to support the FreeBSD
Project.
He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who speaks several languages and
has lived and worked in Amsterdam and Tokyo. He currently lives in
Brooklyn, New York.
slides
BSD Installfest
n/a
2016-08-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
NYC*BUG InstallFests are mixed-up, sloppy opportunities to get hands-on
and dirty with an array of hardware.
From Raspberry Pis and BeagleBones to common 64-bit laptops, lots of
hardware and a rat’s nest of cables will saturate the room, along with
install media for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and beyond.
This is a great chance to test out the BSD of your choice for the
first or 54th time, in collaboration with other BSD users and developers.
Bring in that laptop, maybe with a second hard disk, or one of the newer
supported ARM embedded boards.
As in the past, we’ll utilize the digital projector to those doing short
presentations or for those who want to display their progress. Feel free
to have a short overview of your install to present if you’re interested.
Please email talk@ if you have any preliminary questions about hardware
support, specific hardware needs, etc.
Meet the Smallest BSDs: RetroBSD and LiteBSD
Brian Callahan
2016-07-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
We all expect *BSD to run on our personal computers and servers. What
you may not know is that the last five years have seen a successful
experiment to bring *BSD to the PIC32 microcontrollers. There are now
two different full *BSD operating systems for these microcontrollers:
RetroBSD
, a port of 2.11BSD, and
LiteBSD
, based on 4.4BSD-Lite2.
This talk introduces the two smallest BSDs, the differences between them,
what hardware you need (with hands-on demos), and how to get involved.
We’ll overview what works, what doesn’t, the challenges of writing a
complete operating system with extremely small RAM limits in the modern
era, and how to incorporate *BSD on the microcontroller into your *BSD
universe.
Brian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Science and Technology
Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research explores how
underserved groups vie for legitimacy and normalcy in the IT sector
through diversity and other initiatives. He is an ex-OpenBSD developer
who used to do a lot of work on ports but now advocates for a
BSD-agnostic approach. Somehow, George keeps convincing him that
giving talks at NYC
BUG is a good idea.
slides
Adventures in HardenedBSD
Shawn Webb
2016-06-15
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
This last year has been an amazing one for HardenedBSD.
We’re now around 1.5 years old (though our codebase has existed for longer)
and we’re starting to get noticed. This presentation talks about the cool
things we’re doing in exploit mitigation development and OPNSense integration.
You’ll hear where we’ve come from, what we’re doing now, and where we’ll
be headed in the next year. Included will be discussions of ASLR, W^X,
PIE + RELRO, and a few other lower-level tidbits in exploit mitigation
development.
Shawn is a security engineer for G2, Inc. He is also the cofounder of
HardenedBSD and one of its lead engineers. He was introduced into the
security industry as a teenager, falling in love with both offensive and
defensive security. Shawn has written tools like libhijack, which aims to
make runtime process infection dead simple on Linux and FreeBSD. Now he
works primarily on the defensive end, implementing exploit mitigation
technologies in HardenedBSD.
Urchin: Unix-style tests
Thomas Levine
2016-05-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Urchin is a portable shell test harness based on the idea that a test
case should be an ordinary Unix-style program. It’s called “Urchin”
because sea urchin shells are called “tests”.
I’ll discuss how one uses Urchin, and I’ll show examples of tests
written in Urchin. Urchin is mostly (entirely?) used for running shell
tests to test shell programs, so I’ll also compare it with other
approaches to testing shell programs.
Thomas Levine is a neodada artist with an interest in sleep. He enjoys
writing intuitive and minimal user interfaces, like Urchin, that are
thus easy to learn and easy to reverse-engineer.
slides
repository
Debugging with LLVM
John Wolfe
2016-04-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
“LLDB is a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built as a
set of reusable components which highly leverage existing libraries in
the larger LLVM Project, such as the Clang expression parser and LLVM
disassembler.”
There is a new debugger in town. Developed by Apple for Mac OS X, it is
now available on FreeBSD, Linux and Windows. We will take a brief look
at LLDB’s history and its modular design, delve into the commands with a
comparison to GDB’s commands, checkout the python interface and put it
all to use to debug a program.
John moved to New Jersey when he joined the software development tools
group at AT&T’s Unix System Labs in the early 90’s. He has been
working on compilers, optimizers, debuggers, and performance tools since
then.
LLDB.pdf
BSD init(8) and rc(8): Room for Improvement?
Raul Cuza
2016-03-02
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
The current init(1) and rc(1) startup services have served BSD well
for many years. But are they long in the tooth?
There are a host of problems that it does not solve. This begs the
question of whether it is time to replace it with something better.
More importantly what could be better? This talk will look at the
existing initialization and coordination system that currently serves
the major BSD projects, what problems they solve and what problems
they do not solve. We will review alternatives and how their approaches
will impact how we work. Some of the alternatives that will be
discussed include relaunchd, nosh, and systemd.
Raul Cuza makes pretenses to being a modern hip SysAdmin,
but can’t forget late nights installing Sun-3s to pull it off
successfully.
He has spent most of his career in K-12 schools reminding Cupertino-
designed hardware that there is BSD somewhere under all the glitz.
Many years making OpenBSD firewalls to replace web ads with student
artwork and keeping OS X machines useful tools for learning has taught
him that the real impact of the computer age does not happen in the server
room but couldn’t happen without it either.
He is currently challenged with getting meaningful work done on other
people’s hardware residing in other people’s server rooms distributed
around the globe. He has permission to use them.
shell-fu
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2016-02-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
shell-fu in 3 short talks
To say everything starts with the shell, is quite an understatement.
Portable shell programming does not have to be painful, exposing the raw
power of UNIX with shell can even be fun.
This talk is relevant for expert and novice alike, aimed at anyone who
uses UNIX systems.
Not the ‘shell tricks’ variety of talk, but a language discussion
focused on portability, and showing off how simple and profoundly
powerful portable shell can be.
We will cover:
the 3 finger claw technique
using atomic filesystem operations
general shell-fu, input and variable handling
There is always something amazing to learn about sh(1).
Isaac (.ike) Levy is a crusty UNIX Hacker.
A long-time community contributor to the *BSD’s, ike is obsessed with
high-availability and redundant networked servers systems, mostly
because he likes to sleep at night. Standing on the shoulders of
giants, his background includes partnering to run a Virtual Server ISP
before anyone called it a cloud, as well as having a long history
building internet-facing infrastructure with UNIX systems.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January 2004.
He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User Group,
and is still in denial that this group no longer exists. He has spoken
frequently on a number of UNIX and internet security topics at various
venues, particularly on the topic of FreeBSD’s jail(8).
slides
video
(recorded and processed by BSDTV)
BSD Installfest
n/a
2016-01-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
A chance to dip your toes in the *BSD waters!
Want to try out some embedded Hardware?
Novices, and Expert-Novices are all welcome!
This is a good opportunity to bring in a laptop (maybe with a spare
disk), or other hardware to hack on. There will be some embedded ARM
hardware on hand, (Beaglebone and RaspberryPI), for curious folks who
haven’t touched these platforms.
Do you have a spare laptop lying around? Do you have a Beaglebone or
RaspberryPi rotting in your desk drawer? Lets get it lit with a *BSD!
Various levels of experienced *BSD users will be on hand to help get a
system up and running, and generally hack around on hardware.
Materials to bring:
Some kind of computer
Some kind of spare disk or even USB memory stick media (optional)
If you can, bring install media to share! (Nothing fancy, just grab
useful bits from your desk drawer.)
Materials which will be on site:
ethernet networking gear (a small switch)
Power Strips, and Extension Cords, etc
A USB CD/DVD r/w drive, blank media
A spare Beaglebone and RaspberryPI will be on site
Additionally, we will be streaming McKusick’s “Introduction to the
FreeBSD Open Source Operating System LiveLessons” videos, complements of
Pearson.
This month, the meeting will be run by the usual cast of NYC*BUG
attendees.
Regular NYC*BUG attendees range in experiences from Sys/Ops folks, to
committers and software developers from the BSD Projects.
There will definately be folks on hand with experience using
Beaglebone/RaspberryPI, Soekris, PCEngines ALIX/APU, and it almost goes
without saying, regular X86 architectures in server and laptop form.
NYC*BUG has doesn’t have record of an official installfest since 2004,
this should be fun!
NY Tech Holiday Party
n/a
2015-12-14
19:00 local (00:00 UTC)
Clyde Frazier's: 485 10th Ave btwn 37th and 38th St
Details are set for the 2015 NYC Tech Meta-Party, with dozens of user
groups and sponsors, including NYC*BUG.
The party is Monday, December 14th starting at 7 PM at Clyde Frazier’s
at 485 10th Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets. The open bar and hors
d’oeuvres last until the sponsor money runs out.
Special Meeting
Stephen R. Bourne
2015-11-19
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
my history and background
how and why we had to rewrite the shell
why I wrote my own memory management
key language design decisions
where those ideas came from
what was hard to get right
system changes we made to accommodate sh
what the rules were in UNIX group
what would I do differently today
Steve Bourne is computer scientist who is internationally known for his
work on the UNIX operating system. While at Bell Laboratories, Steve
designed the UNIX Command Language known as the “Bourne Shell”. It is
the standard command line interface to UNIX and is widely used today in
scripting in the UNIX programming environment.
Steve has a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from King’s College London,
England. He has a Diploma (or Master’s degree) in Computer Science and
a Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. While at the
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory he worked on an ALGOL 68
compiler and CAMAL an early algebra system.
After Cambridge, Steve spent nine years at Bell Labs with the Seventh
Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb
debugger and published /The UNIX System/, the second book on the UNIX
system, intended for a general readership. This book is recognized as a
text for the effective use of UNIX.
After Bell Labs, he spent 20 years in senior engineering management
positions. At Cisco Systems, he was director of engineering for
enterprise network management; at Sun Microsystems, he managed the
Solaris 2.0 program; at Digital Equipment Corporation, he developed
DEC’s first RISC-based workstation; and at Silicon Graphics, he was
Director of Software Engineering responsible for the introduction of the
IRIS, the company’s first graphics workstation.
From 2000 to 2002 he was President of the Association for Computing
Machinery. For his work on computing he was made a Fellow of the ACM in
2005. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
At present Steve is chief technology officer at Rally Venture Partners,
a Menlo Park-based venture capital group in California. He is also the
chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for /ACM Queue/, a magazine he
started when he was President of the ACM.
slides
video
true(1) and false(1), The Classical Code Reading Group of Stockholm, NYC*BUG Mix Tape Edition
George Brocklehurst
2015-10-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
A different sort of event, cloned (with blessing) from The Classical
Code Reading Group of Stockholm (recently in NYC).
This is a reading group for code. Our focus will be the classics and
tools we use every day. The inspiration is the shared metaphors and
expressions we have in natural language due to common books (e.g.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Romeo and Juliet) and movies (e.g.
Hackers, A Christmas Carol).
True(1) and false(1):
This meetup will concentrate on simple and common commands: true and
false. We will start with the OpenBSD true program and compare it to
FreeBSD’s, Solaris’, GNU bash’s, and GNU’s. They all have different
complexity, and some even have different features, which should provide
for an interesting discussion.
Feel free to read the source code ahead of time and reflect on some of
the talking points or come up with additional ones.
While reading the code consider the following discussion points in
addition to any you think of: What is the code boilerplate and why is it
there? This is a small program; how did the different implementations
demonstrate this? Why does this program exist? What shortcuts did they
take and how do those make it easier to read?
For those who don’t yet have five variants of true.c on your hard disk,
you can find them online:
OpenBSD:
FreeBSD:
Solaris:
GNU Bash (builtin):
GNU Coreutils:
This should all take about three hours.
George Brocklehurst (of the original Stockholm meetup) will be leading
the reading.
A different sort of NYC*BUG meeting, cloned (with blessing) from The
Classical Code Reading Group of Stockholm (recently in NYC):
Special thanks to Mike Burns and George Brocklehurst for bringing this
excellent event to NYC!
This is a reading group for code. Our focus will be the classics and
tools we use every day. The inspiration is the shared metaphors and
expressions we have in natural language due to common books (e.g.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Romeo and Juliet) and movies (e.g.
Hackers, A Christmas Carol).
OPNsense: On the Shoulders of Giants
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2015-09-16
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
OPNsense is a BSD-licensed, easy-to-use and easy-to-build FreeBSD-based
firewall and routing platform.
This presentation is a hands-on preview of OPNsense, and should appeal
to a wide range of people looking for BSD based router and firewall
platforms.
With hands-on examples and gear on-site, we’ll be covering:
OPNsense Overview, a fast features walk-through
As a fork of pfSense, why fork?
Life with OPNsense today…
Lots changing every week under the hood!
Thanks to the stable FreeBSD Base, OPNsense is solid through changes.
Goals through next spring…
Implementation high-level,
Technical aims of the project
Why an appliance, why not a package?
The roadmap/goals for 2016
Why a granular development process?
HardenedBSD
(Whaaaa?!)
LibreSSL, OpenSSL
Scratching my itch,
Localized Translations!
AWS/Cloud Images, (why? how?)
OPNsense Project Future.
ike’s view of post-2016, many possibilities…
Musing on building an appliance with FreeBSD
Hands-on with hardware!
Isaac (.ike) Levy is a crusty UNIX Hacker.
ike, a long-time pfSense user, has moved on to become a contributor to
the OPNSense project. Ike has been focused on i18n work, and Japanese
translations, and for his sins, has been hacking on AWS AMI builds:
In 2006, ike gave an overview on pfSense and it’s mother project
m0n0wall, which were new and exciting router platforms back then,
“throw your Linksys/SoHo/WiFi router in the garbage where it belongs”
In 2010, ike gave an overview of life with pfSense in Datacenter/Large
deployments,
“you might wanna’ put your Sonicwall/Juniper/Cisco routers up on Ebay.”
A long-time community contributor to the *BSD’s, ike is obsessed with
high-availability and redundant networked servers systems, mostly
because he likes to sleep at night. Standing on the shoulders of
giants, his background includes partnering to run a Virtual Server ISP
before anyone called it a cloud, as well as having a long history
building internet-facing infrastructure with UNIX systems.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January 2004.
He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User Group,
and is still in denial that this group no longer exists. He has spoken
frequently on a number of UNIX and internet security topics at various
venues, particularly on the topic of FreeBSD’s jail(8).
What's New with OpenBSD
Brian Callahan
2015-08-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Another year, another two releases for OpenBSD. Even for the best of
us, it can be difficult to keep track of all the development activity.
This talk highlights some of the big new things over the last year of
OpenBSD. Hopefully by the end of the talk you will have learned about
some new feature you didn’t know about before.
Brian is a Ph.D. student in the Science and Technology Studies
department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has been an OpenBSD
developer for a few years, spending most of his time in the ports tree.
One time he gave a talk at BSDCan with George. Ike was in attendance.
nycbug-aug2015.pdf
Staying in sync with the Precision Time Protocol
Steven Kreuzer
2015-07-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Getting clocks to agree on the time is tricky. Getting them to agree on
the time better than 100 nanoseconds is even trickier.
In this talk I will provide an introduction to the basic principles of
the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and how it can be used to precisely
synchronize computers over a LAN.
Battling to keep unreliable clocks in sync, Steven is a system
administrator who has gained an appreciation for the art and science of
timekeeping. He lives in Queens, NY with his wife and dog.
PTP_Slides.key
mandoc: from scratch to the standard BSD documenation toolkit in 6 years
Ingo Schwarze
2015-06-18
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Two Sigma, 101 6th Avenue, 23rd floor
When Kristaps Dzonsons set
out to write mandoc in the fall
of 2008, all he wanted was a nicer HTML representation of manual
pages on his private website. Today, mandoc is the standard manual
page formatter in OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly, illumos, and
Void Linux, and OpenBSD also uses it as the manual page viewer
man(1), as the manual page search tool apropos(1)/makewhatis(8),
and as man.cgi(8) to search and display manual pages on the web.
It now produces ASCII, UTF-8, HTML5, MathML, PostScript, PDF, and
man(7) output. Given that manual page toolkits existed for almost
four decades before Kristaps even started, how could such an
overfulfillment of expectations possibly happen, and what lessons
were learnt in the process?
Topics of this meeting include:
importance of and requirements for software documentation
history of roff/man/mdoc, and why they remain the best doc tools
features of mandoc, both seasoned and new ones
mandoc development and system integration,
or how to lead a software package to success
mandoc adoption in various operating systems
and possible future directions
The talk is designed as a best-of selection of content
shown at BSDCan 2011, 2014 and 2015 and EuroBSDCon 2014.
After the presentation, you are welcome to optionally stay for
a hands-on workshop, so be sure to bring your notebook.
You might wish to hunt for markup bugs in operating system
manuals, or you might wish to work on format conversions from
legacy formats to mdoc(7), and if you already have some experience,
there are more ideas, see for example pages 40-43 of
In any case, there is a chance to do some work that results in your
first commit into your favourite operating system - that did happen
at a similar workshop held at EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sofia/Bulgaria…
Ingo Schwarze is the current maintainer of the mandoc(1) documentation
toolbox developed by Kristaps Dzonsons. He also maintains the
OpenBSD groff(1) port and has contributed to various parts of the
OpenBSD userland, for example the Perl rewrite of the security(8)
script, as well as smaller contributions to the rc.d(8)/rcctl(8)
framework, the yp(8) subsystem, the C library, and various other
programs.
After studying in Siegen (supervisor: Prof. Martin Holder), Ingo
Schwarze worked in experimental and theoretical high energy physics
at CERN (NA48) and in Karlsruhe. Having used various flavours of
UNIX and Linux in the nineties, he settled on OpenBSD as his server
and desktop operating system of choice in 2000 and joined the project
as a developer in the spring of 2009. As a day job, he maintained
the central configuration daemon and the MiddleWare of the Astaro
Security Gateway (now called Sophos UTM) for six years.
slides
FreeBSD's NUMA
John Baldwin
2015-06-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Newer x86 systems continue to scale horizontally by adding more cores rather
than vertically. This in turn has placed additional strain on other system
components such as memory controllers. The solution has been to scale these
components horizontally as well. This results in a more complex system
requiring additional tuning for optimal performance.
The first part of the talk will provide an overview of these extra-CPU scaling
changes in x86 systems. We will also talk about the resulting performance
impacts and some of the tradeoffs to consider when tuning.
The second part of the talk will focus on changes to FreeBSD to support these
system changes both in past releases and anticipated work in future releases.
Bring your facial tissues. The problems here are similar to those of
achieving optimal performance on systems with multiple CPUs, and we all know
how well that has worked out.
John first started using FreeBSD in 1996 and has been an active kernel
developer since 2000. He has worked for various companies that use FreeBSD
with a recent penchant for hacking on bhyve. John lives in New Jersey with his
wife and three kids.
slides
Bitrig
John C. Vernaleo
2015-05-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Bitrig aims to be a free, fast, and secure Unix-like Open Source
operating system focusing on modern hardware platforms only. Bitrig is
a fork of OpenBSD and recently release version 1.0. I’ll give a brief
description of what the current status of Bitrig is, where we hope it
fits in with the other BSDs, and why we think what we are doing is
worthwhile rather than just contributing to an existing OS. I’ll give
some info on the current progress on Bitrig on ARM devices. Finally,
I’ll try to explain what our current relationship to the OpenBSD
codebase is.
John is an astronomer by training who slowly moved from research to
writing code for other people’s research to writing code for finance all
the way to writing code for startups (and finally to writing code for a
BSD). He is a relative latecomer to BSD having previously gone from
Solaris to Linux before becoming involved with Bitrig. He is still
waiting for the day when his FORTRAN programming skills come in handy
again.
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blacklist'd
Christos Zoulas
2015-04-08
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Today’s systems expose multiple network daemons and are constantly
attacked by a fleet of zombie bots or determined attackers. Scanning
logs to determine if an attack is in place in order to modify a
firewall to block an attack is an ad-hoc inelegant solution.
Blacklistd is a daemon and a library interface that attempts to
correct this problem.
Christos’ first experience with Unix was in 1983 while studying at
Cornell. He currently maintains a few Unix programs (file, tcsh,
libedit, rdist6) and he contributes to many others. He is a board
member of the NetBSD Foundation and a recipient of the Usenix
Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the Unix operating
system. His day job is in Finance.
slides
video
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The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
George Neville-Neil
2015-03-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Book Release Event for “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD
Operating System” with George Neville-Neil
The March meeting will be a special launch meeting for the recent
release of “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating
System.” George Neville-Neil, one of the three authors, will be
speaking on DTrace, which is covered in the book. Copies of the book
will be for sale and giveaway.
DTrace is the tool of choice for debugging and performance tuning
systems running on FreeBSD. Originally developed for the Solaris
operating system, DTrace was ported to FreeBSD and has been developed
and enhanced within FreeBSD ever since. Used by both systems
administrators and developers, this talk will discuss both how DTrace
works, as described in the latest edition of “The Design and
Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” as well as how to
effectively use the system to monitor systems and diagnose problems.
George Neville-Neil works on networking and operating system code for
fun and profit. He also teaches various courses on subjects related
to computer programming. His professional areas of interest include
code spelunking, operating systems, networking, time and security. He
is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert Watson of
The
Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
and is the
columnist behind ACM Queue’s “Kode Vicious.” He serves as a Director
of the non-profit, FreeBSD Foundation.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Northeastern
University in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a member of the ACM, the
USENIX Association and the IEEE. He is an avid bicyclist and traveler
who currently resides in New York City.
Life with an OpenBSD Laptop
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2015-02-10
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Have you ever been OpenBSD-curious?
“OpenBSD is thought of by many security professionals as the most secure
UNIX-like operating system, as the result of a never-ending comprehensive
source code security audit.” Yet, whether OpenBSD is right for you is a
question that only you can answer.
I’ll share my practical experiences transitoning from Mac life to OpenBSD- the
good, bad, and the ugly. For over 15 years, Mac OSX was “the computer I
physically touch”. I build infrastructure, and the computers I care about
most, I rarely physically touch- servers on the internet. These servers
provide me the leading edge of computer security, networking, cryptography,
filesystems- all from Open and auditable codebases…
I decided I’d had enough with my laptop being the ironic weakest link in my
digital ecosystem.
Forget religous debates about Operating Systems- I simply set out to build an
Open Source, Stable, Securable, and full-featured laptop. And I was delighted
that id doesn’t suck to use!
Isaac (.ike) Levy is a crusty UNIX Hacker.
A long-time community contributor to the *BSD’s, ike is obsessed with
high-availability and redundant networked servers systems, mostly because he
likes to sleep at night. Standing on the shoulders of giants, his background
includes partnering to run a Virtual Server ISP before anyone called it a
cloud, as well as having a long history building internet-facing
infrastructure with UNIX systems.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January 2004.
He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User Group, and is
still in denial that this group no longer exists. He has spoken frequently on
a number of UNIX and internet security topics at various venues, particularly
on the topic of FreeBSD’s jail(8).
openbsd
laptop
nycbug_2015.pdf
Designing Versatile Unix Utilities
Eric Radman
2015-01-13
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St
Designing versatile utilities for Unix-like systems requires attention
to specific concerns and involves specific disciplines.
This talk aims to highlight the key concerns in play during the
development of entrproject.org that are applicable for anyone who
endeavors to develop tooling that establishes more effective paradigms
for working on *BSD.
Eric has been building and supporting in-house and public-facing Internet
services on BSD and Linux for more than 13 years. His most significant
endeavours have centered on eradicating operational dissonance between services
by writing new applications or restructuring existing network services to take
advantage of common data marshaled by PostgreSQL. For nearly 5 years he has
also functioned as apologist for the use of built-in self-tests and test-driven
development.
Eric refuses to believe that the ThinkPad keyboard is dead, notwithstanding
abundant evidence that it has been replaced. Although he has never been an
outstanding writer, he considers composing essays and to be essential and a
compelling reason to be up before sunrise. Select journal entries can be found
on his home page at
Holiday Party
n/a
2014-12-05
19:00 local (00:00 UTC)
Clyde Fraziers Wine and Dine @ 485 10th Ave
City-wide technical user group “Annual NYC Tech Holiday Meta-Party”.
A few dozen NYC user groups are hosting, including NYC*BUG.
Scaling Startup Infrastructure: A Datacenter Move Story
Ike Levy
2014-11-05
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
@ 160 Varick St
Focused on Open Source and “The BSD Mentality” approaches, this is an
overview of a massive datacenter move project and systems
rationalization. Startups grow organically, and as we all know, piles
of organic material takes on a life of it’s own; typically in the form
of rot, fungus, parasites.
From the ground up, this presentation is about turning that swamp into
bedrock at an accelerated pace.
With a focus on Open Source, and a de-emphasis on vendors or particular
technologies, we’ll cover key technical strategies for maintaining
production systems and networks, while delivering what replaces it:
Key technologies to support High Availability systems
Cost Analysis, vendor relations, planning
Datacenters: what to look for, what to expect.
The cloud, your other datacenter.
Network design principles, (internet startup patterns).
Server design principles (and some tools).
Systems Automation principles, (and some tools).
Team coordination principles, when the challenges become total war.
Through each section, with an internet-facing business, security
considerations will be considered at every step.
“Network Refactoring… or doing an oil change at 80 MPH.”
- Michael Lucas
“…and for Startups, the vehicle in question is a commercial airliner.”
- .ike
.ike has rationalized infrastructure for NYC startups since the dot-com
bubble, and has spent more than 15 years obsessed with high-availability
systems on the internet. Lucky to stand on the shoulders of UNIX giants,
his background includes partnering to run an early Virtual Server ISP
(before there was a cloud), as well as having a long history standing up
internet-facing applications on UNIX systems and networks.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January
2004. He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User
Group, and is still in denial that this group no longer exists.
His ACM membership has run out, but he’ll get around to renewing
it. He has spoken frequently on a number of UNIX and internet
security topics at various venues, particularly on the issue of
FreeBSD’s jail(8), (a presentation now banned on several
continents). .ike also likes POSIX shell programming, ssh, and
digitizes rare books for fun.
Event Audio
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Informal Meeting
n/a
2014-10-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
BXL Cafe @ 125 W 43rd St
Informal meeting at BXL Cafe
125 W 43rd Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway
Open Discussion: OpenBSD Porting and Deprecation of FreeBSD pkg_* tools
n/a
2014-09-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
about.com, 1500 Broadway, 43rd Street, 6th Floor
The meeting will be a discussion about the status of last month’s
OpenBSD porting, plus a short presentation on the deprecation of
FreeBSD’s pkg_* tools and its replacement with pkgng.
OpenBSD Ports
Brian Callahan
2014-08-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
about.com, 1500 Broadway, 43rd Street, 6th Floor
Everyone relies on packages and ports to have easily accessible third-party
software for OpenBSD. Have you ever wanted to write your own ports? Bring your
laptop and learn how ports are made! You can bring your own software to port,
or there will be a collection of software ready to be ported.
Those interested in taking part in the hands-on workshop should email
admin@lists.nycbug.org
for setup instructions. Please also tell us if you plan
on porting software of your choosing. Please sign up for the workshop no later
than July 23.
Even if you don’t want to be involved in the workshop, come and learn all
about ports!
This makes a great first foray into contributing back to OpenBSD.
Brian is a graduate student, beginning his Ph.D. work in Science and
Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Fall. He is an
OpenBSD developer, working primarily on ports.
Introduction to Timekeeping
Steven Kreuzer
2014-07-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
about.com, 1500 Broadway, 43rd Street, 6th Floor
Time is a funny thing. You can spend it, save it, waste it and kill it, but
you can’t change it and there is never any more or less of it. Everyone knows
what it is and uses it every day but no one can seem to define it.
In this talk I will provide a brief introduction to time, timekeeping, and the
uses of time information, especially in scientific and technical areas.
Battling to keep unreliable clocks in sync, Steven is a system administrator
who has gained an appreciation for the art and science of timekeeping. He
lives in Queens, NY with his wife and dog.
Cloud and Colocation
George Rosamond and Brian Coca
2014-06-04
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
about.com, 1500 Broadway, 43rd Street, 6th Floor
Continuing the recent talk@ and offline discussions, this meeting will feature
a few speakers approaching the question of colocation in data centers and the
cloud.
The issue is a regular feature in many of our lives. Is “the cloud” just a
marketing phrase that replaces hardware capital expenditures with deceptively
high monthly recurring costs? Is this the end of the road for colocation?
We have three speakers briefly approaching the question from three different
angles. We look forward to a dynamic and engaging discussion.
Introduction to bhyve
John Baldwin
2014-05-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
One of the new features in FreeBSD 10.0 is bhyve: a BSD-licensed hypervisor.
This talk will describe some of the unique properties of bhyve and its design
focus. It will also provide a brief introduction on running guests from bhyve
including host configuration as well as a brief demo.
John first started using FreeBSD in 1996 and has been an active kernel
developer since 2000. He has worked for various companies that use FreeBSD
with a recent penchant for hacking on bhyve. John lives in New Jersey with his
wife and three kids.
slides
Event Audio
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Secure Random Number Generators
Yevgeniy Dodis
2014-04-01
19:15 local (23:15 UTC)
NYU, Warren Weaver Hall (251 Mercer St), WWH 101
We will discuss how to design (and not design) secure Random Number
Generators. In particular, we will show attacks on Linux /dev/random, present
first theoretical analysis on the Windows 8 RNG Fortuna, and talk about the
importance of provable security.
We will follow these papers:
Recent and relevant blog posts:
security
of_7.html
Yevgeniy Dodis is a Professor of computer science at New York University. Dr.
Dodis received his summa cum laude Bachelors degree in Mathematics and
Computer Science from New York University in 1996, and his PhD degree in
Computer Science from MIT in 2000. Dr. Dodis was a post-doc at IBM T.J.Watson
Research center in 2000, and joined New York University as an Assistant
Professor in 2001. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007 and Full
Professor in 2012.
Dr. Dodis’ research is primarily in cryptography and network security. In
particular, he worked in a variety of areas including leakage-resilient
cryptography, cryptography under weak randomness, cryptography with biometrics
and other noisy data, hash function and block cipher design, protocol
composition and information-theoretic cryptography. Dr. Dodis has more than
100 scientific publications at various conferences, journals and other venues,
was the Program co-Chair for the 2015 Theory of Cryptography Conference, has
been on program committees of many international conferences (including FOCS,
STOC, CRYPTO and Eurocrypt), and gave numerous invited lectures and courses at
various venues.
Dr. Dodis is the recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award,
Faculty Awards from IBM, Google and VMware, and Best Paper Award at 2005
Public Key Cryptography Conference. As an undergraduate student, he was also a
winner of the US-Canada Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1995.
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One Weird Trick To Simplify Package Management
Amitai Schlair
2014-03-05
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Do you use ports on BSD, Homebrew on OS X, and RPM (or whatever) on Linux?
Stop wasting your time and effort. This talk will tell you why – and show you
how – to start using
pkgsrc
to manage third-party
software in the same way on every computer you’ll ever have.
Amitai Schlair is a software developer and Agile coach at Morgan
Stanley, a board member of The NetBSD Foundation, a non-award-winning
musician, and an award-winning bad poet. In his copious free time, he
hacks on pkgsrc and ikiwiki.
NYCBSDCon 2014
n/a
2014-02-08
09:00 local (14:00 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
We are pleased to announce the 2014 New York City BSD Conference
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OpenBSD: A Crash Course
Brian Callahan
2014-01-08
19:00 local (00:00 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
With issues of privacy and security occupying the forefront of recent
international news, a reexamination of the technologies used in one’s personal
and professional infrastructure is essential.
This talk will highlight why OpenBSD should be at the forefront of these
reexaminations. Whether you are a long time *BSD user or are completely new to
*BSD, you will discover why OpenBSD excels in these areas and why its security
reputation is well deserved.
Brian is a graduate student at Monmouth University studying Anthropology. He
is an OpenBSD developer, working primarily on ports.
bcallah-nycbugjan2014.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Isaac (.ike) Levy)
The Annual NYC Tech Meta-Party
n/a
2013-12-09
19:00 local (00:00 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
NYC technical user groups are joining forces to hold another holiday party to
remember!
Groups include:
DebianNYC (New York Debian Local Group)
DrupalNYC (Drupal New York City)
Erlang NYC (Erlang New York City)
Lopsa-NY (League of Professional System Administrators New York Chapter)
LispNYC (New York City Lisp User Group)
NYC*BUG (New York City *BSD User Group)
NYC-Clojure (NYC Clojure Users Group)
nycdevops (New York City Devops Meetup Group)
NYC-OCaml (The NYC OCaml Meetup)
NY-Haskell (New York Haskell Users Group)
NY-Scala (New York Scala)
PuppetNYC (New York Puppet User Group)
SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center)
TA3M (Techo Activist Third Mondays)
UNIGROUP (New York City’s Unix User’s Group)
NY Cloudera User Group
Everyone of all types of expertise and interests are welcome. The party
starts at 7 PM and will continue until at least 10 PM. It is the ideal
networking opportunity of the season, and a chance to connect with old friends
and make new ones.
Our generous sponsors are covering drinks and hors d’oeuvres for the evening.
The current list of sponsors includes:
New York Internet
Prentice Hall (Inform IT)
Brandorr Group
Tumblr
PuppetLabs
Oracle Solaris
TA3M
LispNYC
Amazon Web Services
Digital Ocean
Venmo
Cloudera
Opscode
Additional sponsors are welcome to join in and show their support for New York
City’s technical community. Contact us at brian.gupta AT brandorr.com and/or
george AT nycbug.org
Help us make the 2013 holiday party a success!
Regular Expressions Fundamentals
Moe Nasser
2013-11-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This meeting will cover regex basics, and based on audience participation, it
may go well beyond.
A regular expression (regex) is a sequence of characters describing a search
pattern. Regular expressions can match just about anything. Their power can
shorten code, turbo-charge your use of interactive UNIX shells, and change the
way you use your text editor. And, they’re fun. Regular expressions are
everywhere. Regular expression processors exist in
every
programming
language, and they are fundamental to grep(1), sed(1), awk(1)- as well as UNIX
shells. Classic text editors have regex processing at their core, vi(1),
emacs(1), based on ed(1). You may even use regular expressions without
consciously knowing it!
Programmer.
RegEx_Presentation.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Isaac (.ike) Levy)
Year after Sandy
Boris Kochergin
2013-10-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
In October 2012, New York City was befallen by perhaps the worst natural
disaster in its history. This meeting will consist of a first-hand account of
how, situated at the heart of the crippled financial district, with no working
infrastructure for miles around, New York Internet operated throughout the
storm and its aftermath.
Boris Kochergin is currently a system administrator and programmer at New York
Internet. He was a network and system administrator at NYU-Poly’s business
incubator at 160 Varick Street (consulting), network and system administrator
at EmPower Solar (consulting), network and system administrator at Ecological,
LLC (consulting), and programmer for the Long Island Solar Energy Industries
Association (consulting).
Event Audio
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PostgreSQL + ZFS on FreeBSD
Andrew Wong
2013-09-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
A quick introduction to the installation, configuration of Postgres on
FreeBSD and ZFS with a demo of using CitiBike data collected every
minute since May 28, 2013.
The talk will cover:
Postgres installation - “Where do I get this magical database?!”
Initialization - “How do I get this running?!”
Quick and hassle-free optimizations - “What can I do to make this faster?!”
After the talk there will be time for questions pertaining to the
content covered and some anecdotes about running similar systems in
production.
Andrew Wong, Sofware Engineer for AppNexus, previous worked at Viggle
and Gilt Groups in NYC. The last three years I’ve worked on designing
and implementing Data Warehouse loops with an emphasis on data
freshness. Currently working on the data delivery system for Real-Time
Bidding (RTB) and optimizing/rationalizing databases. Still in search
of why Ike thinks man sections 1-7 are a waste of space.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Isaac (.ike) Levy)
A Decade of NYC*BUG
n/a
2013-08-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
The New York City *BSD Group was launched in December 2003 and became
public at Linux Expo in January 2004.
We weren’t sure exact what we wanted, but we knew what we
didn’t
want.
We didn’t aim to be just another hobbyist user group attracting the
socially inept. And nor did we aim to become another resume filling
association with a fee-based membership, filling our free evenings with
sales talks.
We wandered into unknown worlds. The BSD community has never been
advocacy-driven, preferring to let the software stand on its own two
feet. And certainly the reputation of an “uncivil
BSD society” caused
us to wonder what NYC
BUG could ultimately morph into.
And it was not always easy.
One local, long-time BSD developer welcomed us with open arms with
comments like:
Ten years later we can look back and be proud of our accomplishments.
We have run four NYCBSDCons and raised funds to hosting a lot of mirrors
and projects. But more importantly, we should determine what we did
right, and how we can continue NYC*BUG for another ten years.
This meeting will look at the broad picture of where NYC*BUG has been,
and hopefully draw some lessons for everyone about technical user
groups, the *BSD community and more generally how.
zfs(8), More Proof UNIX is Dead
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2013-07-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
“This (ZFS) is definately one of the most exciting things for me to see happening."
- 2007, Kirk McKusick, original author of the UFS/FFS Filesystem
Six years of use is enough time for this presenter to trust a new filesystem.
The aim of this talk is to provide enough information to dive right into
using ZFS, professionally and personally. This presentation assumes
basic UNIX knowledge, and a mind ready to be blown.
The Zettabyte File System (ZFS) is a combined filesystem and logical
volume manager. Originally designed by Sun Microsystems, pjd@ ported
ZFS to FreeBSD over 6 years ago. The features of ZFS include protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management,
snapshots and copy-on-writeclones, continuous integrity checking and
automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs.
And that’s not even the fun stuff…
Have you ever wanted to just add a disk to grow a RAID volume?
Have you ever wanted to choose to boot from a particular snapshot of a volume?
Have you ever wanted to change filesystem settings on a live mounted volume, like atime or readonly?
Have you ever waited while your life slips away while formatting multi-TB disks?
Have you ever needed to dynamically change the hard limits of a logical disk partition?
Have you ever dreamed of block-level disk compression, to actually put all those fast CPU cores to
some
use?
Have you ever wanted filesystems to perform atomic acrobatics like great database systems can?
This presentation aims to provide a solid overview of:
ZFS core features
ZFS practical usage, from laptops to mammoth file storage
Some modern SATA “gotchas” will be covered
ZFS advanced/special uses, and paths to follow outside this talk
The general state of ZFS on FreeBSD, (and other projects)
.ike has been using ZFS, for big and small, since it first hit FreeBSD. Today
in ike’s professional life, his team is responsible for many racks of servers
booting on ZFS volumes (Solaris).
Ike has spent more than 15 years obsessed with high-availability systems on
the internet. Lucky to stand on the shoulders of UNIX giants, his background
includes partnering to run an early Virtual Server ISP (before there was a
cloud), as well as having a long history standing up internet-facing
applications on UNIX systems and networks.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January
2004. He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User
Group, and is still in denial that this group no longer exists. He has
spoken frequently on a number of UNIX and internet security topics at
various venues, particularly on the issue of FreeBSD’s jail(8), (a
presentation now banned on several continents). .ike also likes POSIX
shell programming, ssh, and digitizes rare books for fun.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Using Xapian to Index your Ports Tree
Matthew Story
2013-06-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Much of the existing search software out there is overly complex, bloated with
features that you may or may not need, difficult to configure and hard to
customize. The xapian library (xapian.org) provides a light-weight
alternative with minimal dependencies and a simple programmable interface that
is made available in nearly all higher-level languages through swig
(swig.org).
Install xapian and the python bindings before the meeting, and over the course
of an hour we’ll have you indexing and searching your local ports tree, and
updating your local index as ports are added, modified or removed on your BSD
of choice.
Matt is Director of the Axial Corps of Engineers, where he first began using
Xapian to substantially increase the speed and reduce the complexity of
several core systems. Matt is a contributor to the FreeBSD project; xargs(1)
is his favorite program (especially with -P).
Indexing
the
Ports
Tree
with
Xapian
–_NYC-BUG.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Anthony Elizondo)
Ansible
Brian Coca
2013-05-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Swiss army knife orchestration
I’ve been a programmer/sysadmin/dba/analyst/architect and sometimes consultant
for 15+ years. I’ve touched many platforms and languages, going from VB on
Windows to Magic on AS/400 and perl/python/php on various Linuxi? and
FreeBSD. I have tried to automate myself out of a job every day, which
I recently discovered lables me as DevOps though I always thought ‘Mad
Hatter’ or ‘Tech Janitor’ are more appropriate.
ansible
config
mgmt.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
MIPS on OpenBSD
Brian Callahan
2013-04-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Everyone knows the BSDs provide a stable, feature-rich Operating System for
the big name and “in the news” CPUs. What you may not know is that you can
expect an equally excellent experience on the lesser-known CPUs.
This talk will provide an in-depth look at the Loongson CPU, a mips64el CPU,
on OpenBSD. We’ll explore its history on OpenBSD and its support for
third-party software through OpenBSD’s excellent ports system. We’ll examine
the unique challenges that come with ports and packages on lesser-used CPUs.
Finally, we’ll discuss the future of MIPS support, including embedded MIPS.
Brian is a graduate student at Monmouth University studying Anthropology. He
is an OpenBSD developer, working primarily on mips64el (Loongson) ports.
bcallah-nycbugtalk.pdf
Event Audio
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BeagleBone with FreeBSD
Brett Wynkoop
2013-03-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
BeagleBone with FreeBSD
Brett Wynkoop fell in love with computers while a Freshman at the United
States Merchant Marine Academy, where he almost flunked out his first term by
spending too much time playing with Dartmouth Time Sharing on a model 33
teletype at 110 baud, instead of studying marine engineering and navigation.
His first Unix job was administering an AT&T Dimension PBX which used tape for
random access….ls took a long time! His first BSD experience was on a PDP
11/70 and he has been a BSD lover ever since.
His once wrote a web server in /bin/sh, just because he could
He was a member of the technical staff at BSDI and is currently a systems
engineer with the Internet Systems Consortium and is working on the BIND 10
project.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
How SMPng Works and Why It Doesn't Work The Way You Think
John Baldwin
2013-02-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Modern x86 CPUs have hit a wall in frequency scaling and are now expanding
sideways by adding more cores. Adding more cores does not magically multiply
performance, however. John talks about some of the reasons that it doesn’t.
In 2000, FreeBSD launched a project to multithread its kernel to more fully
take advantage of modern SMP machines. This talk will give an overview of
that project’s history and continuing work on improving scalability.
John first started using FreeBSD in 1996 and has been an active kernel
developer since 2000. He has worked for various companies that use FreeBSD
including The Weather Channel and Yahoo!. John lives in New Jersey with his
wife and three kids.
Event Audio
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What's New with FreeBSD
Eitan Adler
2013-01-09
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This will be an open-ended Q&A-style talk covering some new of recent
enhancements to FreeBSD as well some of the experimental upcoming changes.
By the end of the talk you should have heard about one FreeBSD technology you
hadn’t heard of before.
Eitan is a third year student at SUNY Binghamton studying Computer Science. He
has been using FreeBSD since 6.2. He is a src, ports, and doc developer and is
part of the BugBusting team.
Event Audio
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Another Holiday Party
n/a
2012-12-11
19:00 local (00:00 UTC)
Other
NYC*BUG has joined with LispNYC, NY Haskell, the New York Linux User
Group (NYLUG), PuppetNYC and LOPSA-NY to hold a holiday party on
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 from 7:00 PM until it’s over.
It will be at the House of Brews (
) at 302
W 51st street in the upstairs room.
NOTE
Our unHoliday Meeting is still taking place on December 5th.
This is an additional event with the wider technical community in NYC.
There are some sponsors, and we’re querying some additional ones, so
some beer and hors d’oeuvres will be provided.
Various registrations via Meetup are posted:
If you are interested in sponsoring, or have a lead for one, please ping
us offline at admin@
Details are in flux, but we are sure this will be a great social and
networking event.
unHoliday Meeting: Be a Grinch about Your Tech Gripe
n/a
2012-12-05
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
For the past several years, our holiday party has been filled with the notion
of giving back to the community: your tips, your hacks, your thoughts.
So many people have proved selfless and assisted others that we feel it’s time
for a change. Let’s be honest, we need a time to vent, and there’s no reason
the holiday season should be immune.
What are your gripes in technology? What do you hate dealing with at your
job? Is it some high- (or low-) level scripting language? Some clunky and
un-Unix-like application? Dealing with an underdocumented and buggy non-BSD
operating system?
Well, here’s your chance to let others know how you feel. Prepare a ten
minute or so presentation, with maybe a slide or two, and make your case. Be
coherent and to-the-point, and maybe others will jump aboard with your
argument.
Ping admin@ with your idea, and we look forward to having a meeting which
let’s us vent out very unholiday season gripes.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Informal Discussion
n/a
2012-11-07
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Informal Discussion
Informal Discussion
n/a
2012-10-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts in the meeting room, we bumped things
up and most people remained for just a plain gathering of like-minded people.
Trying to shoehorn FreeBSD onto embedded devices - why it's not as easy as it could be
Adrian Chadd
2012-09-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Adrian has been putting FreeBSD onto some small embedded Atheros MIPS devices
for quite some time - with varying levels of success. In this talk he will
cover what FreeBSD-embedded looks like today, how small can you get
your kernel and userland, where the bloat is, and what challenges lie
ahead.
Adrian has been tinkering in open source since high school. He now works at
Qualcomm Atheros on their internal driver infrastructure. In his spare time,
Adrian is working on 802.11n support, maintains the Atheros wifi driver in
FreeBSD as well as co-maintains the FreeBSD net80211 stack. Adrian lives in
San Jose with no wife, no children, no pets and a rather large collection of
embedded devices (most of which run FreeBSD).
Event Audio
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NAS: From Scratch
Henry Mendez
2012-08-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This talk will be on how to build and configure a Network Attached Storage
device. The first half will cover hardware purchasing tips, steps to build the
computer yourself, and common problems that you might encounter along the way.
The second half will cover how to setup your disks (using RAID, ZFS), and
configure the required network services to get you up and running quickly.
Henry Mendez is a Systems Administrator for Tablet, and an avid NYC*BUG
attendee. He has been building computers since he was 15.
meeting_2012-08-01.pdf
Event Audio
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FreeBSD Bugathon
n/a
2012-07-28
14:00 local (18:00 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
NYC*BSD is sponsoring a FreeBSD Bugathon along with the Bay Area FreeBSD User
Group in California. It’s a great opportunity to mingle and coordinate with
FreeBSD developers locally and beyond.
A basic outline includes:
Docs updating and validation
What do the other BSD’s say?
Is it it accurate?
Improvements
New docs / examples
Porting help for creating new ports
Ports bug busting
Confirming PR’s
Fixes to open PR’s
Testing various config options (i.e. can I set var=yes in make.conf
and get useful results?)
We’ll also be on efnet #nycbug for coordinating beyond NYC.
Bring a Box, Rock Your tmux(1)
Matthew Story
2012-07-11
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
A good terminal multiplexer is a vital part of the UNIX Developer and Systems
Engineer toolkit. For the better part of a decade, I installed GNU screen(1)
on each and everyone of my machines, dealing with the lack of useful features,
over-abundance of useless features, complex configuration mini-language, and
it’s preference to setuid to root. Then along came the OpenBSD project’s
tmux(1), and everything changed.
Core to the idea of tmux(1) is a command interface, used for both
configuration and run-time, making it a simple, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use
(and configure) tool. In addition to this, tmux(1) gives you vertical and
horizontal panes, pane templates, simple pane resizing, and so much more. If
you’re a screen(1) user, consider this a Screen User’s Anonymous session; if
you have refused to engage a terminal multiplexer to this point, and your
monitor is cluttered daily with 20 - 30 terminal windows … consider this
your salvation; either way, bring your box and we’ll get you rocking with
tmux(1) in a couple of hours.
Matthew Story is Director of the AxialMarket Corps of Engineers, and a
contributor to the FreeBSD project. He regularly uses the small gun; xargs(1)
is his favorite program (especially with -P).
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Networking by Example with the Packet Construction Set
George Neville-Neil
2012-06-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
PCS is a set of Python classes and libraries that is currently used for
network security and conformance testing. The purpose of PCS is to allow the
programmer to express themselves more naturally in network code. All of the
bit shifting and low level manipulation usually associated with network
programming is handled by the library, allowing the programmer to treat
packets as objects, with fields that directly mirror the ones described in
IETF and IEEE documents.
To date PCS has been used to test several protocols, including IGMPv3, IPv4,
IPv6, The Precision Time Protocol, Yahoo Messenger and several others.
In this talk I will cover the basics of PCS, how to get started with it, and
how to use it in your own work.
George Neville-Neil works on networking and operating system code for fun and
profit. He also teaches various course on subjects related to computer
programming. His professional areas of interest include code spelunking,
operating systems, networking and security. He is the co-author with Marshall
Kirk McKusick of
The Design and Implementaion of the FreeBSD operating
system
and is the columnist behind ACM Queue’s “Kode Vicious.”
Event Audio
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The Useless Use of *
Jan Schaumann
2012-05-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
A brief look at common shell commands and pipelines found in most engineers’
scripts, this talk aims to illustrate how the appropriate use of the various
flexible unix tools might allow for more efficient execution and argues
against the premature dismissal of the shell as a scalable programming
environment.
Originally given in 2007 at the Southern California Linux Expo, this updated
version of the talk will also diverge into the direction of premature
optimization and overuse of “the big gun” for simple problems.
Jan Schaumann currently works as a Senior Network Security Engineer at Etsy.
Prior to that, Jan was a Senior System Administrator, Systems Architect and
finally Principal Paranoid at Yahoo! Inc. He is also an adjunct professor of
Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes
in System Administration and UNIX Programming.
With this unique background in both a small scale academic as well as a
massive industry-leader corporate enterprise environment, Jan has over
10 years of extensive real-world experience in the practice and teaching of
System Administration. He has given presentations on various topics at both
national and international venues.
At the moment, Jan is working on a course book on System Administration, to be
published by Wiley & Sons in 2013. He lives with his wife and two daughters in
New York City, where you may find him riding a large skateboard. You may feel
free to buy him a beer anytime.
Event Audio
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The journey from user to contributor
Eitan Adler
2012-04-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This will be an open-ended Q&A-style talk covering contributing to FreeBSD.
By the end of the talk you should know what makes a good problem report, how
to best interact with FreeBSD developers, and how the project handles PRs and
anything else that may be relevant.
Eitan is a second year student at SUNY Binghamton studying Computer Science.
He has been using FreeBSD since 6.2. He is a src and ports committer and is
part of the X11 and BugBusting teams.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
TCL
Marc Spitzer
2012-03-07
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
TCL is a language that is well handy to know and a very good choice for a
system admin to know. It has the following things going for it:
Simple to learn and very stable over time
embedded in Cisco IOS
expect, all of your command line is belonging to me
start kits, or how to deploy fat multi-platform binaries
helpful community
Code is data so you can do very powerful things
Unicode since 8.0, long time ago
TK
you can create your own control structures
very consistent language things work pretty much the same everywhere
Did I mention the event loop?
Marc Spitzer has been working as a system administrator on Unix systems for
long enough that he does not want to think about it. He likes things that
quietly work allowing him to do other stuff, FreeBSD comes to mind here. He
is also rather fond of good bourbon and rye whiskey. Since he does not like
self promotion, he shall stop now.
meeting_2012-03-07.pdf
Event Audio
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BSD Networking Topics
Open Forum
2012-02-01
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Several times a year, we open the floor for more NYC*BUG attendees to speak in
brief about a networking related topic of general interest to an array of
people.
Topics this time will include:
keeping FreeBSD ports updated
ucspi-tcp
CARP
lagg(4)
There’s always room for more, so come prepared. Remember, these are brief
overviews of topics related to BSD networking on a day-to-day basic, not
full-blown presentations. There is no need to prepare anything broad and
comprehensive.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Cassandra LAN Party
NYC Cassandra User Group
2012-01-26
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Media6 Degrees
Media6 Degrees
37 East 18th Street , New York, NY
map
This is a special event held by the NYC Cassandra User Group which we’re
participating in.
This is a BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) event! Rather doing a presentation we
will setup a multi-datacenter, multi-node environment in a confined lab
environment. Cassandra NYC will provide the switches, the virtual machine
image, the soda, and chips. We will then use our laptops to set up a 3
datacenter (simulating New York, Japan, France) cassandra cluster with as many
laptops as people bring. This event is ideal for those who have never setup
Cassandra and want to learn how to setup real world deployments. However, it
is also going to be fun for those that have worked with cassandra before,
because lets be real, setting up and playing with a multi-node Cassandra
cluster is always fun! To help organized this event it is semi-important for
us to have a rough count of how many laptops we will have available. If you
register chose ‘bringing 1 guest’ if you plan to bring your laptop to the LAN
party. (We will provide a VM image on a pen drive)
AWK
Matthew Story
2012-01-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Your developers came to you wanting to use a new programming framework they
just saw on MTV.
It only builds on Ubuntu, and requires some bleeding-edge ports only available
as .deb packages, as well as some large rpm’s which for some reason only
install via yum. Not to mention you run a largely *BSD environment, with a
few Linux, Solaris, UNIX etc… boxes in the mix.
This is the moment when you whip out awk(1), on any of your UNIX systems, and
proceed to blow their minds.
Matthew Story is a software developer at Tablet Hotels, who regularly abuses
tcp services for fun and profit.
Event Audio
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Holiday Meeting
n/a
2011-12-07
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This year will feature a few technical and fun topics.
Isaac (.ike) Levy on A Footnote on Inappropriate Cloud Use “Don’t believe the hype…” - Public Enemy
ADAM David Alan Martin on “Riding the Balmer Peak: A tongue-in-cheek look at software engineering, drinking, and bad code.”
Boris Kochergin on Bastard Users from Hell: Tales of Sysadmin Perseverance
Come celebrate the holiday season and the beginning of the ninth year of
NYC*BUG.
We are open to additional light, fun yet technical talks.
Event Audio (a)
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Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care
James Lowden
2011-11-02
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Open source databases depressingly mimic proprietary ones. They compete on
“features”. They don’t share code or ideas. They don;t formulate a standard
a la the IETF and then strive for interoperability. And they are not working
toward creating a true RDBMS.
RDMBSs are important and technically challenging. It’s time to bring database
management systems – MySQL, Firebird, Postgres, Ingres, Rel, MonetDB, SQLite,
sapdb, et al. – into the Internet age. Let’s use the tools that made the
Internet possible to get out of the database doldrums.
Goals for free DMBSs:
Community
Standard wire protocol
Standard API
New query language
Shared language parser and query optimization library
Adopt lessons from Unix about namespaces and interfaces
Be the thinking man’s choice
James K. Lowden works in quantitative research systems at AllianceBernstein.
He began working with C, C++, and SQL around 1985, and NetBSD since 1.5. In
his copious spare time he has for many years been the maintainer of the
FreeTDS project (freetds.org).
Event Audio
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Clang on FreeBSD
ADAM David Alan Martin
2011-10-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Clang:
What is it?
Where to get it?
How to build FreeBSD with it
Why use it/advantages?
Fun bits in clang
Remaining GNU toolchain bits, and what’s being done about them
Demo of Clang on FreeBSD, and some of its neat features
ADAM has been using Unix systems since early childhood (truth be told he can
hardly remember using anything but). He messed with Rogue and Larn and even a
C program or two on old SunOS 4 and 4.4BSD based systems at his dad’s office
in the early 1990s. Shortly after the Y2K problem, the Linux User Group at
Case Western Reserve University (where nobody actually seemed to run Linux!)
first exposed him to FreeBSD. He now tinkers with a lot of different bits of
FreeBSD, but he vacillates between being too lazy and too obstreperous in his
insistence on C++ to get a commit bit. He still jests that he’s really a
Computer Physicist, despite abandoning Physics for Computer Science in 2003.
He’s always been easy to spot at conferences – find the guy with the unique
hat. (It’s different every few years.)
He worked in Erez Zadok’s FileSystem and Storage Laboratory at SUNY Stony
Brook, mostly writing code for linux, but he did take on a Google Summer of
Code project for FreeBSD with the Lab. Currently he works for FalconStor
Software, Inc. writing Deduplication engines for Linux platforms. Somehow he
always seems to wind up writing more code for Linux than FreeBSD systems. His
specialties are Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics & Statistics. Some
penguins may have been harmed in the writing of this bio.
Event Audio
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RP Counterattack and Net Sensor
Boris Kochergin
2011-09-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Boris will be speaking on two networking topics.
RP Counterattack (will include a demo!):
Monitors traffic on any number of Ethernet interfaces and examines ARP replies
and gratuitous ARP requests. If it notices an ARP reply or gratuitous ARP
request that is in conflict with its notion of “correct” Ethernet/IP address
pairs, it logs the attack if logging is enabled, and, if the Ethernet
interface that the attack was seen on is configured as being in aggressive
mode, it sends out a gratuitous ARP request and a gratuitous ARP reply with
the “correct” Ethernet/IP address pair in an attempt to reset the ARP tables
of hosts on the local network segment. The corrective gratuitous ARP request
and corrective gratuitous ARP reply can be sent from an Ethernet interface
other than the one that the attack was seen on.
Net Sensor (will include a demo!):
Aims to be a general-purpose, modular network-analysis suite for use in
research, diagnostics, forensics, and statistics-gathering. It monitors
traffic on an Ethernet interface, performs some pre-processing on it–such as
figuring out where a packet’s payload begins–and passes it along to any
number of modules. A module is an ELF shared object which may maintain state,
write data out to disk using the Berkeley DB-backed Writer library, or send
e-mail using the SMTP library. In addition to processing packets from the
network, a module can also accept input from any number of other modules.
Current modules include an HTTP session-keeping module, an HTTP
session-logging module, and a BitTorrent-detection module.
Boris Kochergin is currently a system administrator and programmer at New York
Internet. He was a network and system administrator at NYU-Poly’s business
incubator at 160 Varick Street (consulting), network and system administrator
at EmPower Solar (consulting), network and system administrator at Ecological,
LLC (consulting), and programmer for the Long Island Solar Energy Industries
Association (consulting).
Event Audio (a)
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Event Audio (b)
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BSD Networking Topics
n/a
2011-08-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Our August meeting will feature another series of short presentations related
to BSD Networking.
Topics will include:
Bruno on “packet tagging with pf”
Bill on “fun with tcpdump”
Event Audio
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Aggregating Metrics & Events
Alexis Lê-Quôc
2011-07-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Aggregating metrics & events, a necessity to grok systems & apps
Take any off-the-shelf web application, scale it a bit, put in on the cloud.
It’s faster, cheaper and easier to assemble & deploy than before. But easier
to operate it is not. Whereas 2-4 boxes with 40 metrics each would suffice for
the entire app 10 years ago, we’re looking at 10s or 100s of nodes acting
semi-autonomously and an avalanche of system metrics, system events, alerts to
weed through.
The only way out is through aggregation, filtering and visualization, which is
the topic of this talk. Starting the talk from where we should be, we will
then look at some libraries/applications that you can use to do this and
discuss where these currently fall short.
Alexis co-founded Datadog to help fellow developers and webops track in
real-time events, changes and metrics that can affect their applications. He
currently splits his time between caring for Datadog’s data stack and thinking
about how to improve the product.
Prior to Datadog, Alexis was building infrastructure software and leading a
team of IT operations staff as a Director of Operations for Wireless
Generation, supporting several million teachers in the U.S. In practice that
has meant everything from racking servers to obsessing over sql queries, to
writing embedded code deployed in teachers’ hands nationwide. In an earlier
life he spent time optimizing the performance of web applications for Orange’s
25 million mobile subscribers in France.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
High Availability with FreeBSD Jails and ZFS
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2011-06-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
After 14 years of jail(8), it’s mature enough for “high availability”
It’s been a long while since we heard a talk on FreeBSD jails from Ike.
In the 14 years since it was committed to FreeBSD, little has
fundamentally changed with FreeBSD jail(8), yet the surrounding toolset
has pushed jailed virtual servers to a level of noteworthy
sophistication and polish- (as though any UNIX tool could really claim
to possess either).
New and sexy jail(8) tools:
Jails as platform for HA/Failover Applications
ZFS for jails, in jails, between jails
Wild possibilities using HAST, and GEOM Gate
New run-time configurables
jid specification, smp cpuset, child jails, per-jail sysvipc and raw sockets, plus more…
Multiple IP’s, (ipv6 anyone?!)
devfs(8) and rc(8), teaching new warts old tricks
Base material that will be covered (quickly):
How Jails Work, internals overview.
How to setup jails, a practical how-to, cooking show style…
When NOT to use jails
jail(8) security vulnerabilities, design considerations
Jails vs. Linux UML, XEN, VMware- technical and philosophical differences
Basic jailing tools and management practices
Who wants jails?
System Engineers who need cost-effective high-availability systems.
System Administrators who need to securely separate feuding userland applications.
Software Developers who always need more dev machines.
Educators who need clean unix servers.
Anyone who wants to deploy virtual machines at the internet.
Why do these people want jail(8)?
The design of Jail(8) and jail(2) are very secureable, and because
jails use native system utilities.
They are simple to work with using common UNIX tools.
Isaac (.ike) Levy is a Sr. UNIX Engineer at Tablet Inc., the cure for boring
travel.
Ike has always been obsessed with high-availability systems and transparent
failover, mostly because he likes to sleep at night. Standing on the shoulders
of giants, his background includes partnering to run a Virtual Server ISP
before anyone called it a cloud, as well as having a long history hacking
internet-facing applications on UNIX systems.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January
2004. He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User
Group, and is still in denial that this group no longer exists. He has
spoken frequently on a number of UNIX and internet security topics at
various venues, particularly on the issue of FreeBSD’s jail(8).
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
The Unix Method of Development Management
William Baxter
2011-05-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
The Unix approach has been summarized in many ways, but most simply it’s about
a certain method in simplicity, portability and interoperability. Jamming a
square peg into a round hole it’s not.
The chapter entitled Basics of the Unix
Philosophy in The Art of Unix Programming provides more comprehensive
explanations.
Take that approach and look at development projects with dozens of programmers
in whatever language.
How is the Unix method relevant? How do Unix principles aid in structuring
and coordinating software development, even for, say, Java developers?
William Baxter argues that the Unix methods and principles are the most useful
set of tools for directing developers, even more so when bad habits need to be
relearned for the goal of creating good code.
William Baxter, a senior developer with decades of experience leading
programming projects, will discuss the process of managing developers and
their projects.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
BSD High Availability
Sam Banks
2011-04-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
The BSD High Availability (HA) suite has some very handy and powerful
features. However, as with all systems, there are certain considerations to be
made when rolling out a HA implementation. This talk will focus on the
security considerations when rolling out a BSD HA implementation.
The talk will cover the following:
An explanation of the BSD HA environment (CARP, pfsync, sasyncd)
How these components, specifically CARP, function at a lower level
Current and potential attacks against the HA environment, including some demos
Security considerations when rolling out a HA implementation and applicable work-arounds
Ideas on how to improve the security and flexibility of the BSD HA tool suite
Sam hails from a small country in the middle of nowhere called New Zealand,
where people live in mud huts and rub sticks together to produce fire. When
not foraging for berries and miscellaneous woodland creatures, Sam works for
Lateral Security as a security consultant (a more CEO-friendly word for
hacker) where he breaks into systems for a living. Previous to that, he spent
several years in programming and system administration roles. He caught the
BSD bug many years ago when his friend enlightened him to the fact that he too
could have a solid block cursor at the terminal.
Quick Note: Sam contacted us as he’ll be in NYC for a visit, and following the
February meeting discussion, we saw it was a great opportunity to have this
meeting.
Event Audio
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BigBlueButton
Dru Lavigne
2011-03-02
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This talk will provide an overview and demonstration of BigBlueButton, an open source project
that originated at Ottawa’s Carleton University. It was designed to enable
universities to deliver a high quality learning experience to remote users,
but can be used by any organization looking for an integrated web conferencing
system. Features include video conferencing, shared presentations, shared
whiteboard, instant chat, auto chat translation, and localization.
Dru Lavigne is the Director of Community Development for the PC-BSD Project
where she leads the documentation team, assists new users, helps to find and
fix bugs, and reaches out to members of the open source community to discover
their needs. She is the current Chair of the BSD Certifiication Group and
author of BSD Hacks, The Best of FreeBSD Basics, and The Definitive Guide to
PC-BSD.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
BSD Networking
n/a
2011-02-02
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
A number of short topics will be covered, reflecting some of the recent
discussion on our Talk
list.
Topics will include:
lagg/trunk
sysctl tweaking
bandwidth monitoring with pf tagging
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
An Introduction to WebDAV
Ivan Ivanov
2011-01-05
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
WebDAV is an HTTP-based protocol designed to turn the Web into a writable
media. The major web server vendors provide compliant implementations and most
OSes come with built-in clients. The presentation will describe how it works
and why it is a viable alternative for web publishing.
Ivan Ivanov met WebDAV for the first time as a service by a web hosting
provider. He built a software repository with a WebDAV backend at a previous
job and he implemented dependency management and deployment tracking based on
it.
Holiday Meeting: Your Tips as Community Gifts
n/a
2010-12-01
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Last December, we had a useful and fun meeting with a variety of speakers
presenting their day-to-day hacks: small methods and tools that save time and
hassles. This year, we’ll do the same.
So get ready and think of one or two small hacks that save you time. Maybe
it’s saved a few minutes a day, maybe it’s saved your job.
And with the holiday season, it’s a great time to give back to the technical
community.
The life you may be saving might be someone you actually like!
Post Meeting:
Dan’s Bash List Decomposition
Mark’s Using Rsync and Perl and Daemontools for Content Replication
George’s GMail-Checking for the Privacy-Aware
NYCBSDCon 2010
n/a
2010-11-12
00:00 local (05:00 UTC)
Cooper Square, Cooper Union
We are pleased to announce the 2010 New York City BSD Conference
Saturday, November 12-14, 2010
Cooper Students Present
Various
2010-10-06
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This month’s meetings will feature several Cooper Union engineering students
presenting their projects.
“A Study of Bayesian Authorship Classification” with Kevin Tien and Nicole Lesperance. From a Natural Language Processing class project.
“Real Time Hand Gesture Recognition” with George Todorov and Eugene Belilovsky.
“Characterization of Light Output Instabilities In Quantum Cascade Lasers Under Pulsed Operation” with Jonathan Ligo.
These presentations will be great opportunities to hear from the next
generation of young and bright engineers.
Event Audio
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Building Email Infrastructure
Bruno Scap
2010-09-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Organizations and individuals rely on e-mail, and while Google Mail and
similar hosted solutions might be a good alternative, sometimes e-mail needs
to be hosted in-house. The focus of this talk is building a reliable,
scalable, and distributed e-mail infrastructure using open source
off-the-shelf tools.
Bruno Scap helps companies achieve greater business value from IT. He works
with executives and top managers to maximize the business value from the
computing technologies and services. He can be reached at bruno AT konjz DOT
org.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Examples in Cryptography with OpenSSL
Ivan Ivanov
2010-08-04
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
OpenSSL is an ubiquitious SSL/TLS implementation and cryptography toolkit. It
is widely used to manipulate keys and certificates for servers and clients and
there are a lot of tutorials on how to use it from the command line.
This presentation attempts to go deeper into OpenSSL’s library and give an
overview of its API. It will show how to programmatically calculate one-way
hashes, perform symmetric and asymmetric encryption and create and verify
message authentication codes and digital signatures. The concrete examples
will include DES and AES ciphers, RSA and DSA encryption and decryption,
Diffie-Hellman key exchange and a simple SSL-enabled application. Some
particular algorithms can also be described in more details along with their
mathematical properties if time permits but the presentation will be mostly
example-driven.
Ivan Ivanov is a software developer currently based in New York. His interest
in cryptography comes from his mathematical education. In his professional
work he has developed encryption and decryption routines for protecting data
transmission over the network.
meeting_2010-08-04.pdf
Event Audio
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The Go Programming Language
Mark Chu-Carroll
2010-07-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Go is …… simplepackage mainimport “fmt"func main() { fmt.Printf(“Hello, 世界n”)}… fastGo compilers produce fast code fast. Typical builds take a fraction of a second yet the resulting programs run nearly as quickly as comparable C or C++ code.… safeGo is type safe and memory safe. Go has pointers but no pointer arithmetic. For random access, use slices, which know their limits.… concurrentGo promotes writing systems and servers as sets of lightweight communicating processes, called goroutines, with strong support from the language. Run thousands of goroutines if you want—and say good-bye to stack overflows.… funGo has fast builds, clean syntax, garbage collection, methods for any type, and run-time reflection. It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language. It’s a joy to use.… open source
Mark Chu-Carroll is a software engineer at Google, who is utterly obsessed
with programming languages. He’s been working on software development tools
for close to 20 years. In his free time, he writes the blog Good Math/Bad Math
at
Event Audio
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Introduction to GDB for System Administrators and Programmers
Nikolai Fetissov
2010-06-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
System administrators often have to diagnose and report software anomalies
back to developers while programmers often find themselves asking system
administrators for specific information about production issues. GDB, while
being a debugger and thus mainly a programmer’s tool, allows for gathering
enough information from either running or crashed process, so support and
development groups can communicate more effectively. We will touch upon
relevant usage of GDB and associated tools.
Nikolai Fetissov is a professional software developer with a long history of
working with various Unixen and broad interests ranging from kernel internals
to C++ meta-programming.
Scapy
Kevin Figueroa
2010-05-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Scapy is one of the most powerful packet manipulation programs
currently available. One of its powerful features lies within its
capability in creating and decoding packets using numerous different
types of protocols. In addition, it also has the ability send and
receive packets, plus performing a number of useful penetration
testing tasks, such as, handling tasks like scanning, tracerouting,
network discovery and certain attacks. It serves duties like sending
invalid frames, and creating double encapsulated packets in order to
perform VLAN hopping. Perform Nmap-like scan much faster, inject
802.11 wireless frames, and combine different types of custom
manipulation techniques within a single packet.
Kevin Figueroa has been a life-long resident of the Bronx. Over the last 13
years he has developed skills on a wide range of cyber security, which lead
him to various certifications as, A+, Network +, Security +, and CEH. He has
spoken at the several Cyber Security Conference in the world. Kevin is the
President and Senior Security Analyst for K & T International Consulting, Inc,
which provides a spectrum of cyber security services like, security analysis,
penetration testing, compliance audit, wireless security assessment, and
reverse engineering analysis. K & T International Consulting, Inc. has
successfully managed projects for clients like, The Federal Reserve Bank,
CitiGroup, MacQuesten Inc. and many Fortune 500 companies. He is also the
founder of Bronx Academy of Intelligent Technologists (BAIT). This academy
focuses on teaching cyber security, certification courses, and preforming IT
security research and Development. By grooming children and young adults on
future technologies and how to secure these technology the students will be a
great asset in securing the future of Corporations and national
infrastructure.
Event Audio
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Nepenthes
Marco Figueroa
2010-04-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Detecting and defending your network from script kiddies using Nepenthes
We will discuss what is nepenthes, why was it created, how does it work
and how to install it. As well as where to install Nepenthes on your
network to get the best results. We will have sample analysis of
Malicious Binary and show how to figure out what the code is really
doing.
Marco Figueroa is a Senior Security Analyst for fortune 500 companies. Marco’s
expertise includes reverse engineering malware, incident handling, hacker
attacks and defenses. He has performed numerous security assessments, and
responded to computer attacks for clients in different market verticals. Marco
holds the following certifications: GCIH, GREM, Security+, Network+, A+. You
can contact him at
Marco.figueroa@mafcorp.net
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
PFSense II, Rocking The Datacenter
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2010-03-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
In 2006, ike gave an overview on pfSense and it’s mother project
m0n0wall, which were new and exciting router platforms back then.
Quote from that first talk:
“throw your Linksys/SoHo/WiFi router in the garbage where it belongs”
Quote for this talk:
“You might wanna’ put your Sonicwall/Juniper/Cisco routers up on Ebay.”
pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD
tailored for use as a firewall and router. It has matured into a
full-fledged routing platform which fits right in at the datacenter. As
all the big router vendors now tout fully browser-based administration-
(over IOS, I2J, etc…) so the stigma of using pfSense in the enterprise
is gone.
Our speaker has been using pfSense in datacenter deployments for over 4
years, and will be describing how pfSense was used to save and secure
several “organically dysfunctional” corporate networks, and maintain
business continuity.
Throughout the talk, these points will be emphasized:
Deploys: “Performing an Oil Change at 80mph” (quoting Michael Lucas)
Corporate Office/Colo Life with pfSense
Quickly/Safely Training Junior/Senior Network Sysadmins on pfSense
Taking the Magic/Macho out of HA networking
Networking can be Reliable/Understood/Fun
Half of this talk is a quick pfSense bootstrap:
What
is
pfSense? (A Terrific Routing Platform!)
Hardware (Embedded and Regular x86 Systems)
The reality of recycling servers, (Go Green! and other buzzwords)
Install, basic setup- focused on typical multi-zone networks
The other half of the talk will go through the incredibly advanced tools
and features that make pfSense an excellent platform for
High-Availability and Security at the datacenter:
CARP, Physical Redundancy, (and living with HSRP/VRRP/GLBP
from your ISP)
Fully Redundant Load Balancing, 2 common roles:
(inbound) Load Balancing to scale Web Servers
(outbound) Load Balancing for multi-wan redundant networking
“Deep Packet Inspection” and other infosec buzzwords, done the
PF/BSD way
Missing your IOS shell? pfSense gives you a UNIX Shell- infinite
possibilities!
pfSense/embedded shell specifics, (read-only filesysem on CF?)
NanoBSD/implementation notes…
Using pf from the shell
interacting with system firewall/traffic-shaping/etc..
dancing a tango with the GUI
Syslog, SNMP, and all fixin’s
Config Management for Network Scaling/Sanity
As Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at the emerging startup Proclivity Systems,
Isaac (.ike) Levy is ob sessed with high-availability systems and transparent
failover, mostly because he likes to sleep a t night. Standing on the
shoulders of giants, his background includes partnering to run a Virtual
Server ISP before there was ever a cloud in the sky, as well as having a long
history hacking int ernet-facing applications on UNIX systems.
.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January
2004. He was a long-time me mber of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User
Group, and is still in denial that this group no longer exists. He has
spoken frequently on a number of topics at various venues, particularly
on the issue of FreeBSD’s jail(8).
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
BSD Certifcation SME Session
n/a
2010-02-07
14:00 local (19:00 UTC)
Other
NYC*BUG will be hosting a Subject Matter Expert (SME) session to review
current and prospective questions for the BSD Certification Exam.
For more information about the SME policy, see the BSD
Certification SME Policy.
BSD Certification Exam
n/a
2010-02-07
12:00 local (17:00 UTC)
Other
NYC*BUG will be hosting the BSD Certification Exam.
For more information, and to register, please look at BSD Certification
website.
Systems Programming On A System On A Chip
Aidan Cully
2010-02-03
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Embedded software is characterized by a tight coupling to its associated
hardware. This means that there is an ability to reduce the hardware and
software footprint to the barest version that can possibly support the
intended applications of the embedded system. In turn, this means that many
libraries written for full-featured operating systems are not well suited to
run in the embedded environment, as they often assume a range of system
features available in common desktop platforms, but unavailable to many
embedded systems.
This talk will emphasize techniques developers can use to make their software
more suitable for embedded systems. I will also discuss debugging embedded
applications, as well as the process of co-developing custom hardware, and its
associated software drivers.
Aidan Cully is a software engineer at Arkados, a fabless semiconductor
manufacturer in Piscataway, NJ.
Event Audio
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Hadoop a Worldwind Tour
Edward Capriolo
2010-01-06
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This presentation gives a brief high level overview of Hadoop. Next, we hit
the ground running with a quick practical example of how Hadoop solves a “big
data” problem. We also discuss how the demonstrated Hadoop processing model
scales out to terabytes of data and hundreds or even thousands of computers.
Edward Capriolo, works at About.com System Operations. When not in break-fix
mode, he researches high/traffic high-availability and scalable solutions.
Edward is a committer to the Apache Hadoop Hive sub project.
meeting_2010-01-06.pdf
Event Audio
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Holiday Meeting: Your Tips as Presents
n/a
2009-12-02
19:15 local (00:15 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
December’s meeting will be an opportunity for an array of people to illustrate
their Unix hacks.
In August, Dru Lavigne started a thread
on NYCBUG’s talk about “fave BSD tips/tricks?” that brought out some good
discussion. We see this meeting as a follow-up, and an opportunity to give
your hacks “back to the community” as a holiday gift.
Please submit your one page PDF to admin@, with one, two, or even three simple
tips. It might be simple and seemingly stupid, but it could save a few
minutes a day for another developer or sysadmin in the meeting.
It could be a creatively piped set of commands, or a simple script that you
run through periodic to prevent headaches. The field is wide open.
We will schedule a handful of ten minute or so speakers, and let the crowd
take it from there.
Event Audio
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FreeBSD 8.0 New Release and Virtualized Networking for All
George Neville-Neil
2009-11-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
The release of FreeBSD 8.0 brings with it many new features but none has been
more anticipated than the full integration of network stack virtualization
into the system. Virtualized network stacks have the potential to
revolutionize the use of FreeBSD in the same way that Jails did, by providing
a lightweight mechanism through which multiple clients or customers can use a
system’s networking resources without interfering with each other. My talk
will cover not only network virtualization but also all of the other features
and improvements that are present in FreeBSD 8.0.
George Neville-Neil works on operating systems and networking for fun and
profit. He is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick of
The Design and
Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
as well as the column Kode
Vicious.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
XMPP Takes AIM: A Lot of Jabber about Real Time Applications
Brian Cully
2009-10-07
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
XMPP Without IM
This will be an open-ended Q&A-style talk covering XMPP fundamentals. XML
streams, stanza semantics, federation, and extensibility will all be touched
on. The purpose will be to cover what makes XMPP different from existing IM
solutions and viable as a generic push technology. Come with questions!
Brian has been involved in the XMPP community since 2007, writing code for
ejabberd and prosody to support various extensions, with a particular focus on
publish-subscribe functionality. He is currently working on integrating XMPP
with Junction Networks’ SIP service, facilitating call control and monitoring
in real-time on the web.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
How to Get Started with Kernel Programming
Jeffrey M. Hsu
2009-09-02
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This talk is intended to introduce kernel programming for the absolute novice.
We will cover:
basic setup
building and booting test kernels
how to write your first system call
a quick overview of the major subsystems including
kernel locking and synchronization primitives
device drivers
VFS layer
memory allocation
networking
Jeffrey M. Hsu became a member the FreeBSD project in 1994 as one of its first
10 committers. He has contributed to many sections of the operating system in
areas such as the networking stack, Java, and a large number of the early
ports in the language category. He has worked professionally on FreeBSD and
NetBSD was offered commit bits to both the OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD projects
when they were first being formed and is active in the DragonFlyBSD project
today. He holds a degree from U.C. Berkeley in computer science.
In the past, he has consulted for leading companies such as the Western
Software Laboratory division of Digital Equipment Corporation, Cygnus,
Encanto, Netscape, ClickArray, Palm, Wasabi, and Cisco Systems. Jeffrey
enjoys giving talks and meeting BSD enthusiasts all over the world.
meeting_2009-09-02.pdf
Event Audio
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BSDA Angoff Session
n/a
2009-08-09
10:00 local (14:00 UTC)
Other
Call for BSD Certification Group Subject Matter Experts (SME)
Are you a working sysadmin?
Do you manage other sysadmins?
Want to help the BSD Certification Group?
If so, bring your laptop and come join us from 10 am to 2 pm on August 9 to
help improve the BSDA exam.
BSD Certification: A Case Study in Open Source Community
Dru Lavigne
2009-08-05
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Since their heyday in the 1990s, IT certifications have gained a bad rap. They
are often perceived as money making machines for large companies, havens for
braindumps, and certificates which aren’t worth the paper they are written on.
We are all familiar with how open source is revolutionizing the proprietary
software industry. Open source also has the potential to revolutionize the
proprietary certification industry, and the BSD community is leading the way.
This talk will introduce the BSD
Certification Group and their effort to create and maintain certifications
that effectively assess the skills of BSD system administrators. It will
provide an update on BSD certification, some of the lessons learned along the
way, and principles other open source communities can use to provide their own
certifications.
Dru Lavigne is founder and current chair of the BSD Certification Group. She
is a sysadmin, technical trainer, author of BSD Hacks and The Best of FreeBSD
Basics, maintainer of @bsdevents, board member of the FreeBSD Foundation, and
editor of the Open Source Business Resource. She has been actively involved in
the BSD community since 1997.
Please note that NYCBUG will be hosting a BSDA exam on August
2 which we encourage you to sign up for ASAP.
Event Audio
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BSDA Exam
n/a
2009-08-02
00:00 local (04:00 UTC)
Other
NYCBUG will be hosting a BSDA exam for the BSD Certification Group on August 2.
Please register
as soon as possible to ensure your spot at the exam.
The exam will be held at 55 Broad Street between Exchange Place and Beaver
Street in Manhattan.
Next steps for GNUstep
Gregory Casamento
2009-07-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Gregory Casamento will speak about the advantages GNUstep has over some other
environments as well as a brief discussion of it’s history and where it’s
going in the future.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Building Better Tools
Jan Schaumann
2009-06-03
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Every System Administrator has his or her own set of tools, programs and
scripts; within every organization, every team of engineers has theirs. This
means that a lot of the software used to maintain the infrastructure around
the internet is written by people who are not (primarily) software developers.
This talk tries to explain how these people can build better tools: tools
that scale well, programs that can easily be extended, systems that behave
well.
While not specific to BSD systems in general and completely programming
language agnostic, this talk focuses on a number of principles, guidelines and
concepts that should apply to virtually any system administrator’s or
engineer’s daily routine.
Jan Schaumann is a Systems Architect at Yahoo!, a nice place to stay on the
internet, where he designs and maintains infrastructure solutions servicing
over half a billion people each and every day. Jan holds a BS and MS in
Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also one of the
developers of the NetBSD operating system, where, amongst other things, he
manages the NetBSD Project’s participation in Google’s Summer of Code program.
Jan enjoys life with his wife and daughter in New York City. He can be
reached at
jschauma@netmeister.org
Event Audio
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Open Forum
n/a
2009-05-06
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Our “Open Forum” meetings allow for short presentations on a variety of
topics, in addition to providing a better environment for attendees to raise
issues and problems they face day-to-day as *BSD sysadmins and developers. We
look to these meetings as a “live” version of our dynamic ’Talk’ mailing list.
Git: A Case Study In Distributed Version Control
Brian Cully
2009-04-01
18:45 local (22:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This talk will go over what distributed version control systems (dVCS) mean,
and how git applies itself to its problems. The slides are here.
bjc has been involved in open source since the mid 90s, contributing to the
BSDs and Linux at various points. He once worked at Panix, and now works at
Junction Networks. Wherever he goes he seems to end up working on the version
control system, and is now using git exclusively.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
What's your biggest Time Management problem?
Tom Limoncelli
2009-03-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Tom Limoncelli is a FreeBSD user and the author of the O’Reilly book, “Time
Management for System Administrators”. He’ll be giving a brief presentation
with highlights from his book then will take questions from the audience.
Whether you are a system administrator, a developer (or even a Linux user)
this presentation will help you with something more precious a quad-processor
AMD box.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Postfix Performance Tuning
Victor Duchovni
2009-02-04
18:45 local (23:45 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
“Money can buy you bandwidth, but latency is forever!” - John Mashey, MIPS
Victor will cover an array of issues connected to Postfix performance tuning,
including:
Latency, concurrency and throughput
Postfix input processing
Queue file format rationale
Input processing bottlenecks
Pre-queue filters, milters, content filters
Tuning for fast (enough) input
Postfix on-disk queues, requirements and architecture
What is a “transport”?
Postfix “nqmgr” scheduler algorithm
Per-destination in memory queues
Per-destination scheduler controls
SMTP delivery
Understanding delay logging
Transport process limits, concurrency limits
Scaling to thousands of output processes
Connection caching, TLS session caching, feedback controls
Victor Duchovni trained in mathematics, switched tracks to CS in 1980s leaving
Princeton with a master’s degree in mathematics and newly acquired skills in
Unix system administration and system programming. In
1990 moved to Lehman Brothers, worked on system management tooling, and
network engineering. Ported “Moira” from MIT to Lehman, built efficient build
systems that predated (and partly inspired) Jumpstart. In 1994 joined ESM to
market “CMDB” tools to enterprise users, but this did not pan out, in the mean
time learned Tcl, and contributed bunch of patches to the 7.x early 8.x TCL
releases. In 1997 returned to New York, working in IT Security at Morgan
Stanley since late 1999. At Morgan Stanley, developed a hobby in perimeter
email security, becoming an active Postfix user and very soon contributor in
May of 2001. In addition to many smaller feature improvements, contributed
initial implementation of SMTP connection caching, overhauled and currently
maintain LDAP and TLS support. Made significant design contributions to queue
manager in collaboration with Wietse and Patrik Raq. In 2.6 contributing
support for TLS EC ciphers and multi-instance management tooling, ideally also
TLS SNI if time permits.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Introduction to Puppet
Larry Ludwig
2009-01-07
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
What it is and how can it make system administration less painful?
Larry Ludwig - Principal Consultant/Founder of Empowering Media. Empowering
Media is a consulting firm and managed hosting provider. Larry Ludwig has been
in the industry for over 15 years as a system administration and system
programmer. He’s had previous experience working for many Fortune 500
corporations and holds a BS in CS from Clemson University.
Larry, along with Eric E. Moore and Brian Gupta are founding members of the
NYC Puppet usergroup.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Holiday Party
Everyone, after a few
2008-12-03
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This year’s NYC*BUG Holiday Party will be a cash bar event in the backroom of
Suspenders Restaurant.
Join us in this social event and celebrate another year of NYC*BUG success!
Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters
George Neville-Neil
2008-11-05
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Many modern CPUs provide on chip counters for performance events such as
retiring instructions and cache misses. The hwpmc driver and libraries in
FreeBSD give systems administrators and programmers access to APIs which make
it possible to measure performance without modifying source code and with
minimal intrusion into application execution. This talk will be a brief
introduction to HWPMC, and how to use it.
George Neville-Neil is the co-author with Kirk McKusick of The Design and
Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System. He works on networking an
operating systems for fun and profit.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
NYCBSDCon 2008
n/a
2008-10-11
00:00 local (04:00 UTC)
Columbia University
We are pleased to announce the 2008 New York City BSD Conference
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Organizing NYCBSDCon 2008
Open Forum
2008-09-03
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Organizing NYCBSDCon 2008
Public Key sudo
Matthew Burnside
2008-08-06
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Two tools which have become the norm in Linux- and Unix-based environments are
SSH for secure communications, and sudo for performing administrative tasks.
These are independent programs with substantially different purposes, but they
are often used in conjunction. In this talk, I describe a flaw in their
interaction, and then present our solution called public-key sudo.
Public-key sudo is an extension to the sudo authentication mechanism which
allows for public key authentication using the SSH public key framework. I
describe our implementation of a generic SSH authentication module and the
sudo modifications required to use this module.
Matthew Burnside is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at
Columbia University, in New York. He works for Professor Angelos
Keromytis in the Network Security Lab (
). He
received his B.A and M.Eng from MIT in 2000, and 2002, respectively.
His research interests are in network anonymity, trust management, and
enterprise-scale policy enforcement.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Configuration Management with Cfengine
Steven Kreuzer
2008-07-02
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Cfengine is a policy-based configuration management system. Its primary
function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of computers,
from a policy specification.
The cfengine project was started in 1993 as a reaction to the complexity and
non-portability of shell scripting for Unix configuration management, and
continues today. The aim was to absorb frequently used coding paradigms into a
declarative, domain-specific language that would offer self-documenting
configuration.
Steven Kreuzer has been working with Open Source technologies since as long as
he can remember, starting out with a 486 salvaged from a dumpster behind his
neighborhood computer store. In his spare time he enjoys doing things with
technology that have absolutely no redeeming social value.
meeting_2008-07-02.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
NYCBSDCon 2008 Organizing Meeting
Open Forum
2008-06-04
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This meeting will be focused on NYCBSDCon 2008.
The meeting will consist of an overview of the conference as it’s planned for
October 11-12 at Columbia University, in addition to plugging in individual
members of NYCBUG into roles such as publicity and in the mechanics of the
conference.
If you want to be involved with NYCBSDCon 2008, you should attend this
meeting.
Managing OpenBSD Environments
Okan Demirmen
2008-05-07
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This talk is the result of an after-meeting discussion with a few folks, when
it became apparent that there is some confusion as to how to deal with OpenBSD
in small and large environments. The topic of installation and upgrading came
up again. This talk is aimed to hopefully dispel many of the rumors, provide
a thorough description and walk through of the various stages of running
OpenBSD in any size environment, and some of the features and tools at the
administrator’s disposal.
Okan Demirmen has been working with UNIX-like systems for as long as he can
remember and has found OpenBSD to match some of the same philosophies in which
he believes, namely simplicity and correctness, and reap the benefits of such.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
ZFS on FreeBSD
Ike & Yarema
2008-04-02
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Ike & Yarema will tag-team this meeting.
ZFS - the breakthrough file system in FreeBSD 7 (ported from Sun’s Solaris 10
Operating System) delivers virtually unlimited capacity, provable data
integrity, and near-zero administration. However FreeBSD’s sysinstall(8) does
not yet support installing the system onto anything more exotic than a
commonly used UFS partition scheme. Furthermore, FreeBSD’s boot loader(8)
cannot yet load the kernel and modules from ZFS.
This meeting will cover installing FreeBSD 7.0 on ZFS as the root filesystem
with a boot partition on a GEOM gmirror. Attendees are encouraged to read,
download and try the zfsboot scripts
here
. The rational behind the
zfsboot script will be demystified and an install will be demonstrated.
Anyone who brings a (minimum 1 Gig) USB thumb drive can go home with a
bootable “root on ZFS” installer. Anyone who brings a hard drive can go home
with FreeBSD installed on a ZFS root.
"zfsroot" rel="nofollow"
Yarema has been a FreeBSD administrator for more than a decade. A contributor
to the FreeBSD ports collection. Likes to mouth off about his latest exploits
with the OS only to be rewarded by getting “volunteered” to do a lecture at an
upcoming NYC*BUG meeting.
Ike has been orbiting NYCBUG since the beginning. Not only does he not think
within the box, he doesn’t even know there
is
a box. He used to give talks
on jail(8) in New York, but since he’s been banned from it, he is forced to do
them for other unsuspecting BSD users at conferences like AsiaBSDCon 2007.
Building a High-Performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD
Brooks Davis
2008-03-20
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Since late 2000 we have developed and maintained a general purpose technical
and scientific computing cluster running the FreeBSD operating system. In that
time we have grown from a cluster of 8 dual Intel Pentium III systems to our
current mix of 64 dual, quad-core Intel Xeon and 289 dual AMD Opteron systems.
In this talk we reflect on the system architecture as documented in our BSDCon
2003 paper "Building a
High-performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD" and our changes since
that time. After a brief overview of the current cluster we revisit the
architectural decisions in that paper and reflect on their long term success.
We then discuss lessons learned in the process. Finally, we conclude with
thoughts on future cluster expansion and designs.
Brooks Davis is an Engineering Specialist in the High Performance Computing
Section of the Computer Systems Research Department at The Aerospace
Corporation. He has been a FreeBSD user since 1994, a FreeBSD committer since
2001, and a core team member since 2006. He earned a Bachelors Degree in
Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 1998.
His computing interests include high performance computing, networking,
security, mobility, and, of course, finding ways to use FreeBSD in all these
areas. When not computing, he enjoys reading, cooking, brewing and pounding
on red-hot iron in his garage blacksmith shop.
meeting_2008-03-20.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
User Interfaces and How People Think
Jeff Mau
2008-03-05
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
“User Interfaces and How People Think” will introduce concepts of designing
software for different users by observing how they think about and do what
they do. While much of design today focuses on the front-end of computer
systems, there is opportunity to innovate in every area where a human
interacts with software.
Jeffery Mau is a user experience designer with the leading business and
technology consulting firm Sapient. He has helped clients create great
customer experiences in the financial services, education, entertainment and
telecommunications industries. With a passion for connecting people with
technology, Jeff specializes in Information Architecture and Business
Strategy. Jeff holds a Masters in Design from the IIT Institute of Design in
Chicago, Illinois.
meeting_2008-03-05.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Open Meeting on OpenSSH
Open Forum
2008-02-06
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Febrary’s NYCBUG meeting is a broad look at OpenSSH, the de facto method for remote
administration and more. OpenSSH celebrated its 8th anniversary this past
September, and we thought this would be a great opportunity to discuss
OpenSSH, and for others to contribute their hacks and interesting
applications.
If you are interested in doing a short spiel on an interesting use, please
contact admin@ to let us know.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
SSARES
Angelos D. Keromytis
2008-01-09
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Pilosoft
SSARES: Secure Searchable Automated Remote Email Storage is a novel system
that offers a practical approach to both securing remotely stored email and
allowing privacy-preserving search of that email collection.
The paper on this topic is here.
Angelos Keromytis is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer
Science at Columbia University, and director of the Network Security
Laboratory. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of
Crete, Greece, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Computer and Information
Science (CIS) Department, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and
co-author of more than 100 papers on refereed conferences and journals, and
has served on over 40 conference program committees. He is an associate
editor of the ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security (TISSEC).
He recently co-authored a book on using graphics cards for security, and is a
co-founder of StackSafe Inc. His current research interests revolve around
systems and network security, and cryptography.
meeting_2008-01-09.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
2007 NYTC Holiday Party
n/a
2007-12-13
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Back in 2004, NYCBUG and NYPHP organized the best technical networking
event in the New York technical community’s memory.
This year we will be replicating that event, with a free open bar, free hors
d’oeuvres, sponsor exhibits and many other of New York technologies best and
brightest.
Unlike normal NYCBUG events, you will be required to register
for this event. You should register
as soon as possible and get ready to mingle and imbibe with your other technical
cohorts. The event will be held at Suspenders Restaurant, and we will
have the whole place.
IPv6 Workshop
Open forum
2007-11-07
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
While the October meeting focused on IPv6, November’s meeting will look at the
application of IPv6 by a number of NYCBUG members. Several people are setting
up their home or colo’d networks for IPv6 ability. Meanwhile, the NYCBUG
cabinet will be ready to provide IPv6 gateway services.
Bring along your laptop, and we’ll work to get more people on an IPv6
network for further exploration.
IPv6 Implementation
Gene Cronk
2007-10-03
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This talk will be on some of the basics of IPv6 including addressing,
subnetting, and tools to test connectivity. There will be a lab (network
permitting), and setups for an as of yet undisclosed flavor of BSD as well as
some of the well known daemons (Apache 2, SSHD) will be demonstrated. Setting
up a BSD OS as an IPv6 router and tunneling system will also be covered.
If you’re reading this and see something I missed (and plan on attending the
meeting), please drop a mail to the talk@ list and let me know what else
should be added. Presentation slides are also available here.
Gene Cronk, CISSP-ISSAP, NSA-IAM is a freelance network security consultant,
specializing in *NIX solutions. He has been working with computers for well
over 20 years, electronics for over 15, and IPv6 specifically for 4 years. He
has given talks on IPv6 and a multitude of other topics at DefCon, ShmooCon
and other “underground” venues.
Gene is from Jacksonville, FL. When not involved in matters concerning
IPv6, he can be found gaming (Anarchy Online), helping out with the
Jacksonville Linux User’s Group (jaxlug.org), being one of the
benevolent dictators of the Hacker Pimps Security Think Tank
), or fixing up his house.
meeting_2007-10-03.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Cryptography in Web Apps
Nick Galbreath
2007-09-05
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Using Cryptography to Improve Web Application Performance and Security:
Cryptography has a reputation of slowing down applications. However if done
correctly, it can actually be used to improve performance by storing
high-value/high-cost results “in public.” In addition the same techniques can
solve common security problems such as authorization, parameter scanning, and
parameter rewriting. All are welcome – no previous experience with
cryptography is required, and the techniques will be presented in a
programming-language neutral format.
Nick Galbreath have been working on high performance servers and web security
at various high profile startups since 1994 (most recently Right Media). He
holds a Master degree of Mathematics from Boston University, and published a
book on cryptography. He currently lives in the Lower East Side.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
NYCBUG-NYPHP Social
n/a
2007-08-23
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Delancy Lounge
We have planned a social get-together for NYCBUG and NYPHP and beyond at the Delancey Lounge in the Lower East Side.
The event will be held on Thursday, August 23rd, starting at 6:30 pm. The
Delancey Lounge has an all wood terrace on the roof filled with plants. It’s
a very nice location. No fee for coming, but it’s a cash bar, of course.
Nagios
Marc Spitzer
2007-08-01
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Nagios is a platform for monitoring services and the hosts they reside on. It
provides a reasonable tool for monitoring your network and you can not beat
the price.
We plan on covering the following topics:
what it is
how it works
where to get it
how to install it
how to configure it
how to customize it for your environment
where the data is stored
how to write a basic plug-in
Marc Spitzer started as a VAX/VMS operator who taught himself some basic
scripting in DCL to help me remember how to do procedures that did not come up
enough to actually remember all the steps, this was in 1990. Since then he has
worked with HPUX, Solaris, Windows, Linux, and the BSDs, FreeBSD being his
favorite. He has held a variety of positions, admin and engineering, where he
has been able to introduce BSD into his work place. He currently works for
Columbia University as a Systems Administrator. He is a founding member of
NYCBUG and LispNYC and on the board of UNIGroup. Most of his career has been
building tools to solve operational problems, with extra effort going to the
ones that irritated him personally. He takes a great deal of pride in not
needing a budget to solve most problems.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
The Real Unix Tradition
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2007-07-05
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
!!Please wear your your best shirt, a group photo-op will follow this month’s
lecture!! UNIX hackers, all standing on the shoulders of giants.
“…the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected…”
- Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, June 1972
“Well, it was all Open Source, before anybody really called it that”.
- Brian Redman, 2003
UNIX is the oldest active and growing computing culture alive today. From
it’s humble roots in the back room at Bell Laboratories, to today’s global
internet infrastructure- UNIX has consistently been at the core of major
advances in computing. Today, the BSD legacy is the most direct continuation
of the most successful principles in UNIX, and continues to lead major
advances in computing.
Why? What’s so great about UNIX? This lecture aims to prove that UNIX
history is surprisingly useful (and fun)- for developers, sysadmins, and
anyone working with BSD systems.
Isaac (.ike) Levy is a freelance BSD hadker based in NYC. He runs Diversaform
Inc. as an engine to make his hacking feed itself, (and ike). Diversaform
specializes in *BSD based solutions, providing ‘IT special weapons and tatics’
for various sized business clients, as well as running a small
high-availability datacenter operation from lower Manhattan. With regard to
FreeBSD jail(8), ike was a partner in the first jail-based web hosting ISP
in America, iMeme, and has been developing internet applications in and out of
jails since 1999.
Isaac is a proud member of NYC*BUG (the New York City *BSD Users Group), and a
long time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix Users Group (lesmug.org).
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
DOS Mitigation
Steven Kreuzer
2007-06-06
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Protecting your servers, workstations and networks can only go so far. Attacks
which consume your available Internet-facing bandwidth, or overpower your CPU,
can still take you offline. His presentation will discuss techniques for
mitigating the effects of such attacks on servers designed to provide network
intensive services such as HTTP or routing.
Steven Kreuzer is currently employed by Right Media as a Systems Administrator
focusing on building and managing high transaction infrastructures around the
globe. He has been working with Open Source technologies since as long as he
can remember, starting out with a 486 salvaged from a dumpster behind his
neighborhood computer store. In his spare time he enjoys doing things with
technology that have absolutely no redeeming social value.
meeting_2007-06-06.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
pkgsrcCon
Amitai Schlair
2007-05-02
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
The fourth annual pkgsrcCon is
April 27-29 in Barcelona. As might be expected when brains congregate,
pkgsrcCon traditionally results in a flurry of activity toward new directions
and initiatives. Mere hours after returning to New York, Amitai will give us a
recap of the
proceedings, including his presentation, “Packaging djbware.”
Amitai Schlair is a pkgsrc developer who has worked in such diverse
areas as Mac OS X platform support and packages of software by Dan
Bernstein. His full-time undergraduate studies at Columbia are another
contributing factor to his impending insanity. He consults in software
and IT.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
OpenCVS
Ray Lai
2007-04-04
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This presentation was inspired by the recent Subversion presentation. It will
talk about the origins of OpenRCS and OpenCVS, its real-world usage in the
OpenBSD project, and why OpenBSD will continue to use CVS.
Ray is an OpenBSD developer who uses Subversion by day, CVS by night. Taking
the phrase “complexity is the enemy of security” to heart, he believes that
the beauty of UNIX’s security is in its simplicity.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Enterprise Security Mgmt
Matthew Burnside
2007-03-07
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Security policies are a key component in protecting enterprise networks. But,
while there are many diverse defensive options available, current models and
mechanisms for mechanically-enforced security policies are limited to
traditional admission-based access control. Defensive capabilities
include among others logging, firewalls, honeypots, rollback/recovery,
and intrusion detection systems, while policy enforcement is
essentially limited to one-off access control. Furthermore,
access-control mechanisms operate independently on each service, which
can (and often does) lead to inconsistent or incorrect application of
the intended system-wide policy. We propose a new scheme for global
security policies. Every policy decision is made with near-global
knowledge, and re-evaluated as global knowledge changes. Using a
variety of actuators, we make the full array of defensive capabilities
available to the global policy. Our goal is a coherent,
enterprise-wide response to any network threat.
Matthew Burnside is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at
Columbia University, in New York. He works for Professor Angelos Keromytis in
the Network Security Lab. He received his B.A and M.Eng from MIT in 2000, and
2002, respectively. His main research interests are in computer security,
trust management, and network anonymity.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Subversion
Ivan Ivanov
2007-02-07
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
The presentation will discuss Subversion from both client and server points of
view. It will show how to create repositories and how to make them accessible
over the network using different access schemes like http://, file:// or
svn://. Pointers are given on securing the repositories and on authenticating
and authorizing the clients. Next, the presentation shows how an user
interacts with the repository and describes some of the important Subversion
client commands. Finally, it deals with administrating the repository using
“hook scripts”.
Ivan Ivanov is generally interested in Version Control Systems since his
student years in Sofia University, Bulgaria, where he set up and
maintained a CVS server for an academic project. When Subversion became
a fact and proved to be “a better CVS” he researched it and last year
deployed it for his NYC-based employer Ariel Partners. He intergrated
the Subversion repositories with Apache Web Server over https to enable
a reliable and secure way to access them from any point.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
pf(4)
Okan Demirmen
2007-01-03
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
We have had lots of meetings that have peripherally discussed OpenBSD’s wildly
popular PF firewall,
but finally we will have a meeting focused on it.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
Holiday Party
Open forum
2006-12-07
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This year’s holiday party with be held with our buddies at NYPHP.
We’ll have a couple of brief presentations, sure to put you in the right mood.
First, Alfred Perlstein will speak on “Captchas can be LOL.” Then, NYPHP’s
Hans Zaunere will speak on “Unfashionable FreeBSD: Why Their Threads Are So
Last Year.” Cash bar and food. So come one, come all, and have a blast.
NYCBSDCon 2006
n/a
2006-10-28
00:00 local (04:00 UTC)
Columbia University
We are pleased to announce the 2006 New York City BSD Conference
Saturday, October 28-29, 2006
NYCBSDCon planning
Open forum
2006-10-04
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
This meeting will be focused on building and organizing the upcoming NYCBSDCon 2006 conference to be held on
October 28 and 29th. If you want to play a role, have questions, etc., we
strongly encourage you to attend and take part in the discussion We’ll review
the conference details, and start plugging volunteers into various roles that
are needed at the conference.
m0n0wall and PFSense
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2006-09-06
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
UNIX professionals are busy these days. Setting up routers and firewalls are
fundamental to any network, but in environments where the focus is on various
applications, (servers, workstations, and the software that runs on them),
it’s difficult for a business not to choose off-the-shelf SOHO routers and
networking gear. The web management gui’s are understandable by everyone,
(even techs without UNIX knowledge), and the gear is cheap - this saves time
and money.
In the meantime, the features of your average Linksys or Netgear router often
leave MUCH to be desired, (https auth management, for one simple example).
Enter m0n0wall and PFSense, 2 BSD based packaged router/firewall solutions
that are as solid and full featured as you’d expect from any BSD system- PLUS
THEY HAVE HTML WEB INTERFACES FOR MANAGEMENT!
m0n0wall and PFSense become an easy sell in any small professional
enviornment, any competent tech can manage the network within minutes… At
home, in every hackers home network, they free the hacker to have trusted
tools available, but are as time-saving as using any Linksys router.
m0n0wall and PFSense are both light and clean, designed to run on embedded
systems- (Soekris, WRAP), but are monsters when unleashed on even legacy PC’s
around the office. If you manage UNIX networks and systems all day, do you
really want to manage the router for your DSL when you get home? But then
doesn’t it bug you to use a chincey Linksys box?
Ike has been a member of NYC*BUG since we first launched in January
2004. He is a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User
Group (lesmug.org). He has spoken frequently on a number of topics at
various venues, particularly on the issue of FreeBSD’s jail(8).
Event Audio
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Open Forum
Open forum
2006-08-02
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Our “Open Forum” meetings allow for short presentations on a variety of
topics, in addition to providing a better environment for attendees to
raise issues and problems they face day-to-day as *BSD sysadmins and
developers. We look to these meetings as a “live” version of our
dynamic ‘talk’ mailing list.
We have prearranged a number of short spiels for each meeting, including…
Steven Kreuzer & Nathan Boeger have some methods for scaling a large member
base. The technical challenges of scaling websites with large and growing
member bases, like social networking sites, are numerous. One of these
challenges is how to evenly distribute the growing member base across all
available resources. This talk will explore various methods that address this
issue. The techniques used can be generalized and applied to various other
problems that need to distribute data evenly amongst a finite amount of
resources.
Jesse Callaway will provide an overview of a *BSD solution to a Windows
environment, rsync from remote
Win32 systems to *BSD servers, and some fixes for commonly faced problems.
Sendmail Hacks
Alfred Perlstein
2006-07-05
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Alfred will discuss the hacks used to turn Sendmail into a high performance
solution for delivering millions of messages to OKCupid’s subscribers. Topics
covered will be system tuning and sendmail hacks used in house to achieve
massive throughput.
Alfred Perlstein is the CTO of OkCupid, the largest free online dating
site. He has been a FreeBSD hacker for five years, he’s worked on NFS,
VFS, pthreads, networking and general system maintenance during his
tenure on both FreeBSD and OS X kernels.
Event Audio
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Open Forum
Open forum
2006-06-07
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Once again, we are looking to alternate our technical presentation meetings
with a more open format that we hope can reflect the vitality of our ‘talk’
list.
This time, we have some speakers who will be giving short, ten minute
presentations: Ray Lai, who just returned from the OpenBSD
Hackathon, will be providing a summary of the event, including giving some
insight into the code that was created at this annual happening.
Brad Schonhorst will ‘pass-the-hat’ and let everyone know
about the current BSD
Certification User Group Competition for raising funds. A good number of
NYCBUG members are active with the BSD Cerification process, and we are
looking forward to a strong, community-based certification that could add to
the popularity of the BSDs.
Mikel King, who recently added much needed juice into Daemon News-land, will speak about how we
can make DN and BSDNews the CNN of the BSDs, and what you can do to help.
Plus, we’ll begin a discussion on NYCBSDCon, which this year’s will happen the
second weekend in October. We are looking to have active involvement from
people in NYCBUG and beyond.
Event Audio
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VPN & PAE
Mischa Diehm & Mickey Shalayeff
2006-05-03
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Suspenders Bar and Restaurant
Part 1: VPNs with OpenBSD in large corporate networks:
Large corporate networks are traditionally a mess. Historically grown,
designed and maintained by a number of different people and never really
intended to be secure. Above all big companies are operating globally and
often use the internet to connect their locations, employees and 3rd party
supporters. We need very flexible ways to deal with the vast number of
requirements to secure these networks. This talk will show different practical
approaches in building flexible secure VPNs with OpenBSD at different network
levels.
Mischa is working on VPN and Firewall deployment at GeNUAmbH in Munich, where
he maintains large scale network and firewall setups.
Part 2: Implementing PAE for OpenBSD/i386:
Not yet committed to OpenBSD, Mickey has been working on PAE for OpenBSD i386.
Essentially, it’s about supporting up to 64 gig of physical memory.
It is hard to find some code which Mickey Shalayeff has not at least
influenced in OpenBSD. He seems to be dextrous on any hardware platform and is
equally well versed in PCI as he is SCSI. Mickey is readily available on the
message lists and is always happy to help impart some of his vast networking
knowledge to beggars and sysadmins with a smile. He recently left New York
City to cause havoc in Berlin.
Event Audio
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Open Forum
Open forum
2006-04-05
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Baruch University
Past meetings have had a single speaker on a single topic. This time, we have
a couple of speakers on a couple of useful topics for about 10 minutes each.
Then the floor will be open for
you
to open up a discussion on a topic you
are dealing with now. We are looking for the meetings to be useful tools for
what
you
as an admin or developer is facing now. This is the time to bring
your funky solution or problem to the table, like we do with our talk list,
and open up a live discussion.
Event Audio
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Systrace for Slackers
Ray Lai
2006-03-01
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Baruch University
Systrace is a facility to confine programs to doing what they are supposed to
do. When do they do “bad” things? When they get exploited, of course!
Most people either never heard of Systrace or don’t know how to use it. I
hope to change both these problems. This meeting is co-sponsored with the
Baruch College CIS Society.
Ray is a full-time slacker. His interests include security, coding, and
documentation. One day he decided to systrace every process in his laptop and
realized that it’s not that hard.
Event Audio
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Xen and the Art of SysAdmin
Johnny Lam
2006-02-01
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
This presentation will be about using Xen in the real world to simplify the
maintenance of BSD systems. There will be a short introduction to Xen and how
it works, an in-depth look at the details of one particular Xen setup along
with some performance results, and how using Xen simplifies life as an admin.
Johnny C. Lam is a senior pkgsrc developer whose main area of work is
improving the portability and the capabilities of pkgsrc. He has headed the
organizing of two pkgsrcCon meetings in Europe to promote a better
understanding of pkgsrc infrastructure development. He is still looking to
dupe someone else into taking maintainership of the Perl package.
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Event Audio
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Java on FreeBSD
Trish Lynch
2006-01-04
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Trish will explain how Java can be a useful and stable environment on FreeBSD,
as well as the particulars that go into deploying Java in such a highly
stressed, highly attacked environment. Trish will also show where the pitfalls
and idiosyncrasies with FreeBSD’s java lie, and how to get the most of the
FreeBSD/Java production environment.
The name Trish Lynch is not unknown in BSD circles. Trish has been around
since the mid-1990’s doing advocacy and some small development, but what Trish
is known for is deploying BSD into companies that have networks in disrepair
or otherwise strained to the limits using Linux, and turning them into works
of gold. First doing this at VA Linux/Andover.Net, Trish is known for putting
BSD firewalls in front of Slashdot, a well-known and heavily trafficked Linux
news site, later on, Trish won an Emmy Award by using FreeBSD in a high
performance network designed to handle millions of viewers for interactive
television at ABC’s Enhanced TV. These days, Trish is deploying FreeBSD boxes
with java on them to multiplex video and voice at the 4th largest private
Instant Message infrastructure, Paltalk.
Event Audio
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Jail(8)
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2005-12-07
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Early unix mainframe computing brought elegant process and resource sharing
systems which helped get more application use out of expensive hardware. These
concerns have been largely been pushed aside in computing with the rise of
desktop PCs, and large farms of ever-shrinking pizza boxes in the data center.
Today, as more punch gets packed into 1u than ever, server resources can be
further consolidated and abstracted to securely separate complex and
sophisticated services in the same hardware server, by running secure virtual
UNIX machines. FreeBSD Jails are a time-tested, secure, reliable UNIX virtual
machine with endless uses.
Who wants jails?
System Administrators who need to securely separate small yet
important services.
Software Developers who always need more dev machines.
System Architects who need affordable high-availability systems.
Educators who could use virtual machines to provide clean unix server
systems for student use.
Anyone who wants
secure
virtual machines.
Why do these people want jail(8)?
The design of Jail(8) and jail(2) are secure, and because jails use native system utilities,
they are simple to work with.
What I would like to focus on:
How Jails Work, the technical low-down
How to setup jails, the practical how-to, cooking show style…
When NOT to use jails
jail(8) security vulnerabilities/considerations
Jails vs. Linux UML, XEN, VMware- technical and philosophical differences
Tools and management practices
Event Audio
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Time Mgmt for SysAdmins
Tom Limoncelli
2005-11-02
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Who has the time for time management!? Users interrupt you constantly with
requests, your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you
with requests for quick-fixed, and the machines you manage just never behave,
causing problems at the most inopportune moments.
Tom will discuss techniques he has developed over the last 15 years including:
How to find time to get projects done
The best way to manage interruptions from users
Open Source tools for tracking requests
How to turn chaos into free time
Tom Limoncelli has over 15 years of system administration experience and
has been teaching workshops on Time Management at conferences since
2003. Tom has worked for both large and small organizations, including
Bell Labs and AT&T. He speaks at conferences around the world. His
previous book, “The Practice of Network and System Administration”, is
considered a standard reference in system administration.
The Summer of Code
Jan Schaumann
2005-10-05
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
The Summer of
Code is a Google program designed to introduce students to the world of
open source software development. NetBSD, one of the oldest open source
projects and generally regarded as the most postable operating system in the
world, is pleased to participate in this project as a mentoring organizations.
The list
of possible projects for students to choose from shows that any completed
project will benefit the entire Open Source community. Here is the list of accepted projects.
In this meeting, Jan Schaumann (who coordinates and overlooks the NetBSD
Projects mentorship efforts within the SoC) will present an in-depth summary
of these exciting new developments within NetBSD, how the projects started
out, what progress they made, what difficulties were overcome and what final
achievements were made. New insights on Open Source mentorship and
user-developer relationships as well as lessons learned that apply to all open
source projects will also be presented. A full list of all accepted projects
will be made available soon; a full list of all completed projects will be
made available before the meeting.
Jan Schaumann works as a System Administrator in the Department of Computer
Science at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, USA, where he
maintains a large NetBSD environment across dozens of desktops, numerous
public laboratories, and a number of clustered high performance computing
facilities and servers. The tasks involved in all of this are, as any
SysAdmin will know, far too many to be listed here.
Event Audio
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NYCBSDCon 2005
n/a
2005-09-17
09:00 local (13:00 UTC)
Columbia University
We are pleased to announce the 2005 New York City BSD Conference
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Why would you want to come?
Participate, and support the BSD community
Network with some of the best and brightest
Attend presentations by prominent BSD figures
Sit in on lectures on the latest topics
Round out your technical knowledge base
Get together with like minded folks
Meet in person; put a face with an email address
Event pics:
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Challenges of large Unix environ
Hildo Biersma
2005-08-03
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
The firm I work at has a large Unix environment (over 5,000 servers) that are
kept as identical as possible through the use of networked file systems to
hold programs, combined with centralized large-scale administration tools.
The presentation will provide a minimal introduction of the environment, then
focus on the challenges that this environment poses when integrating software,
new hardware, or new operating systems. It will highlight both the pros and
cons of open source software and OSes.
I expect a lively discussion of why *BSD and the ports system are not
suitable, in their current form, to replace the Linux systems in use at our
firm.
Hildo Biersma has worked at a large Wall Street firm since 2000 and uses
open-source tools to manage commercial software products such as IBM MQSeries
and DB2. Before 2000, he was a perl/Unix/C++ trainer and web consultant.
Event Audio (a)
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Event Audio (b)
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OpenBSD IPsec stack
Angelos Keromytis
2005-07-06
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
A presentation will be made on the OpenBSD IPsec stack and the related
subsystems that make it work (or not). These include the mbuf tags, the
Cryptographic Framework, and the isakmpd key-management daemon. We will begin
with a brief introduction of IPsec from a 30,000 ft. view, and proceed to the
various IPsec components in the OpenBSD kernel.For those interested to do some
background reading, see:
ipsec.pdf
ipsecspeed.pdf
ocf.pdf
tmipsec-tissec.pdf
mbuf_tags.pdf
slides
Angelos Keromytis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia
University. He received his Masters and PhD from the University of
Pennsylvania, and his Bachelors (all in Computer Science) from the University
of Crete, in Greece. His research interests include network and system
survivability, authorization and access control, and large-scale systems
security. In a previous life, he had enough time to contribute code to the
OpenBSD project.
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Open Source Software
Phillip Moore
2005-06-01
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
A presentation will be made on The Evolving Role of Open Source Software in
Large Enterprises. Here is the Audio.
Phillip Moore recently left Morgan Stanley, where he was Executive Director of
UNIX Engineering. There Phil was a senior architect, responsible for the
evolution of the Firm’s UNIX/Linux infrastructure. His past accomplishments
include the deployment of Morgan Stanley’s perl development environment,
global filesystem (AFS), and transactional messaging infrastructure
(MQSeries), with over 15 years experience deploying solutions to problems of
extreme scalability. He is the original author of the MQSeries suite of perl
modules, and a member of the OpenAFS Advisory Council. Phil left Morgan
Stanley to more fully participate in the open source community. He is an open
source advocate and enterprise technology consultant.
Event Audio
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BSDCan 2005
n/a
2005-05-13
08:00 local (12:00 UTC)
University of Ottawa
BSDCan 2005
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Heimdal Kerberos on NetBSD
Roland Dowdeswell
2005-05-04
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
A presentation will be made on how to use Heimdal Kerberos on NetBSD.
Roland is an expert in the proper implementation of cryptographic tools, and
has written a cryptographic disk driver (cgd) which was a part of NetBSD since
version 2.0. He is a published mathematician but acknowledges there is always
more to learn about cryptography. Roland has extended himself to the community
as a gateway to the actual use of secure methods in computing. Take advantage
of this free lecture to edify yourself of these important tools.
Event Audio
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FreeBSD port maintenance
Yarema
2005-04-06
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Tutorial on port maintenance: Courier on FreeBSD: The entry point for many
people into BSD is using the ports system to install and run just about any
application one could ever want on a server. Yarema, yds at coolrat dot org,
will give an in-depth tutorial on how he maintains the Courier port to
FreeBSD. Yarema has worked out kinks with getting Postfix, Mulberry, and some
Ruby libraries to build consistently and easily. He will go line-by-line
through the makefiles and show the audience where to find the knobs and the
documentation for features such as the interactive configuration menus.
Emphasis will be placed on the “Big Daddy” bsd.port.mk, which is 1/5 comments,
4/5 shell code. This will take you into the depths of the Makefile which is
not covered in the Porter’s Handbook. After the talk Yarema will be taking
questions and firing back answers… a rare opportunity for those interested.
After meetings, we customarily go to Denizen to discuss. Here is a map.
OpenBSD on PA-RISC
Michael Shalayeff
2005-03-02
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Michael “Mickey” Shalayeff will talk about the hppa port of OpenBSD
which he maintains. He maintains many of the applications which run on this
peculiar platform and will provide some insight to the inquisitive as to what
this combo can do. Presentation Slides are here.
Mickey has contributed heavily to the CARP project which has become such a
success. It is hard to find some code which Mickey has not at least influenced
in OpenBSD. He seems to be dexterous on any hardware platform and is equally
well versed in PCI as he is SCSI. Mickey is readily available on the message
lists and is always happy to help impart some of his vast networking knowledge
to beggars and sysadmins with a smile (;
Event Audio
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pkgsrc
Jan Schaumann
2005-02-02
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
The
NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc) is a framework for building
third-party software on NetBSD and other UNIX-like systems, currently
containing nearly 5000 packages. It is used to enable freely available
software to be configured and built easily on supported platforms.
Jan Schaumann works as a System Administrator in the Department of Computer
Science at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, USA, where he
manages a large, almost homogenous NetBSD environment in an academic
environment; runs clustered High Performance Computing Facilities based on
NetBSD; ports and maintains NetBSD pkgsrc tools and packages on non-NetBSD
platforms such as IRIX and Linux; teaches classes in UNIX programming and
System Administration. (Other activities he enjoys that he unfortunately does
not get paid for usually involve a board often in combination with some form
of H20.) Jan holds a BS and MS in Computer Science and joined the NetBSD
Project as a developer in January of 2002. Within the NetBSD Project, he is a
member of the Communication Executive Committee, leads the www team and –
after having ported the pkgsrc tools to IRIX – finds himself maintaining the
infrastructure for this platform as well as numerous packages.
Trying to make him move out of NYC, where he lives together with his wife,
would be a futile endeavor. Jan can be reached at jschauma -at- netmeister
-dot- org.
meeting_2005-02-02.pdf
Event Audio
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Anatomy of a Hack
Manos Megagiannis
2005-01-05
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Manos E. Megagiannis is the CEO of Totally Secure, a company dedicated
to providing quality solutions and services for today’s network security
market. He is responsible for the conceptualization, design and
implementation of security applications, as well as senior level
consulting services.
Mr. Megagiannis has over 15 years of professional experience with
Information Systems and Security in several key areas, including LAN/WAN
architecture, voice and data communications, and commercial Internet
solutions. He has consulted with many Fortune and Global 500 companies,
pioneering technologies such as micro-payment systems, network storage,
search engines, commercial video and audio broadcast, network security
tools, and operating systems’ internal components.
Event Audio
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Holiday Party
n/a
2004-12-15
18:30 local (23:30 UTC)
Exclusive lounge space in Manhattan
New York PHP and the New York City *BSD User Group are proud to announce the
first annual New York Technical Community Holiday Party.
This is not a PHP or BSD only event, and will include participants from many
technology sectors, including Java, Linux, Perl, and .NET. We’re working hard
to make this event embrace all technologies - not only open source - and our
goal is to combine free and commercial software in one professional networking
event.
Flagship sponsors New York PHP and NYC*BUG are bringing together hundreds of
technical professionals from the New York metropolitan area for the New York
Technical Community Holiday Party. By uniting diverse skills and interests,
open source professionals, IT managers, and top authors and speakers, this
event begins a new era in technical, business, and social networking.
Free, including complimentary beverages and hors d’oeuvres. Business casual
attire is required.
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Lok Technology, Inc.
Simon Lok
2004-11-03
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Using OpenBSD at Lok Technology, Inc.
Founder, Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Lok
Technology, Inc., is pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science focusing on human
computer interaction at Columbia University. He also holds three Master’s
degrees. He has patents pending in microwave engineering, computer
architecture and network security. At the age of 14 he was a paid consultant
to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies paleo-climatology program.
Lok Technology, Inc., a private company headquartered in Vero Beach,
Florida, was founded in 1999 to continue with the development of trusted
computing applications based on an open source and ultra-thin client
computing platform incorporating an integrated PKI (Public Key
Infrastructure). LokTek utilizes OpenBSD, OpenSSL, and OpenPGP allowing
an enterprise to impose its trusted and secure environment on those
individuals and enterprises that reside and operate outside of the it’s
environment (as seen in Forbes).
Meet McKusick & Allman
McKusick and Allman
2004-10-16
14:00 local (18:00 UTC)
Columbia University, Mathematics building, Rm. 312
Marshall Kirk McKusick, known for his extensive work from the 1970’s to
FreeBSD in the present day, is the featured speaker at this special NYC*BUG
meeting. He has twice served as the President of the Board of the USENIX
Association. Kirk’s “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating
System” is being revised and republished this summer.
Eric Allman, of sendmail.org and past Vice President and Treasurer of the
USENIX Association, will be speaking about the recent controversies on sender
identification to prevent unsolicited commercial email (spam).
meeting
2004-10-16
flier.pdf
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)
meeting
2004-10-16
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Jail(8)
Isaac (.ike) Levy
2004-09-01
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Isaac (.ike) Levy will be talking about Jailing systems on FreeBSD.
jail(8) is a facility available in FreeBSD which one can use to create
extremely secure virtual machines, running on a single piece of hardware.
Isaac will discuss some of the use models for jailing, as well as sharing
practical information about how to run Jails.
Isaac’s background with jailing comes from his past working with iMeme, a
small open source web-hosting company which primarily provides FreeBSD Jails.
After the meeting, we meet at a nearby bar,
Denizen Lounge
73 Thompson Street in SoHo, map available
here.
meeting_2004-09-01.pdf
NYCBUG InstallFest
n/a
2004-08-06
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
Other
An installfest at Marco’s place in Brooklyn. Only one block from the Franklin
Ave stop on the C train in downtown Brooklyn. Email bsdfest at metm dot org
for directions.
Let’s make all those jerks with real vacation plans jealous! Interesting
problems and strange hardware welcome. Some of us will be bringing our Soekris
boxes plus some copies of DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Some beers will be available, but more are absolutely welcome. Food (pizza)
will be ordered.
OpenBSD on Soekris
Pete Wright
2004-08-04
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
Pete Wright will be sharing his experience installing OpenBSD on Soekris devices, small, inexpensive,
low-power computers. As a number of NYCBUG members are now official Soekris
hackers. One of them, Pete Wright has stepped forward to give a 40 minute
presentation on how he got his Soekris hardware up and running with OpenBSD.
Additionally we’ll have a short discussion about the new website, and
hopefully look towards launching it in the near future!
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Secure Architectures
Brandon Palmer
2004-07-07
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Apple Store (SoHo)
The OpenBSD operating system is a secure, stable, and powerful operating
system that is attracting many new and old UNIX users to it. The OpenBSD
legacy is peppered with some ingenious security features throughout the OS,
and Brandon Palmer is extremely close to all of it. Brandon Palmer will be
giving a special overview of OpenBSD to the NYCBUG attendees. Brandon’s book
received a rare 9/10 rating when reviewed on slashdot, and this is sure to be
a special nycbug meeting!
Brandon Palmer is the author of the book “Secure Architectures with OpenBSD”.
Hacking Your iBook
Bob Ippolito
2004-06-02
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
TekServe
Bob Ippolito & Isaac (.ike) Levy on Hacking Your iBook While it was our
smallest meeting yet, with just under 20 people in the room, the topic was a
bit more narrow than usual, but the discussion was again great.
Bob and Ike gave a great presentation, and we managed to collect $126 to send
to Dan Langille of BSDCan, Freshports and FreeBSDDiary, who had his laptop
stolen recently.
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BSDCan 2004
n/a
2004-05-13
08:00 local (12:00 UTC)
University of Ottawa
BSDCan 2004
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BSD Consulting
Wes Sonnenreich
2004-05-05
18:30 local (22:30 UTC)
TekServe
While the meeting was somewhat smaller than usual, with about 35 people
showing their faces for at least some of the meeting, the topic was narrow in
its focus. Not everyone is a consultant or interested in the practical
questions consultants face. Nevertheless, most people agreed after the meeting
that the discussion and presentations were brilliant.
This wasn’t some cheerleading session, it was filled with the good and bad
realities that consultants face, particularly those performing *BSD related
work. Unfortunately, due to time restrictions, Marc’s section on using the
ports system was cut short due, but we can plan to have a meeting exclusively
based on the ports system at some point in the near future. And once again, a
big thank you to Tekserve, who provided us space and were very gracious
hosts.
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OS X, Darwin and BSD
Edward Eigerman
2004-04-07
18:00 local (22:00 UTC)
Sage
Some 44 people crammed into the meeting space for Edward Eigerman’s great
presentation on OS X, Darwin and BSD. The Apple engineer spoke for some two
hours, but no eyes were glazing over as he covered everything from RAID
devices and supercomputers, to security and open source issues. We look
forward to getting the video of the meeting online, in addition to Edward’s
slides.
NetBSD crypto disk
Roland Dowdeswell
2004-03-03
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Sage
March 3rd Meeting on NetBSD’s cgd - About 43 people attended Roland
Dowdeswell’s presentation on NetBSD cryptographic disk driver. Ike is in the
process of getting the video online and Roland will be posting his notes. The
basis of his talk is a FreeNIX paper that is located here. The slides
are also there in postscript.
meeting_2004-03-03.pdf
OpenBSD Security
Wes Sonnenreich and Jason Albanese
2004-02-04
18:00 local (23:00 UTC)
Sage
February 4th Meeting on OpenBSD Security - Up to 40 people jammed the room on
West 23rd Street to hear Wes Sonnenreich and Jason Albanese speak about
OpenBSD security.
The meeting discussion was thriving, and those discussions continued on as
most people went on to the bar afterwards. For some, the discussions didn’t
end until 3:30 am. Thanks Wes and Jason.
Event Audio
(recorded and processed by someone - who?)
NYC*BUG BOF @ LinuxWorld Expo
n/a
2004-01-24
00:00 local (05:00 UTC)
Other
NYCBUG successfully reached out to hundreds of people at the BSDMall and New
York PHP tables.
We handed out fliers for the meetings, answered questions conference attendees
had about the BSD family, gave a presentation on the backup port Bacula and
held a birds-of-a-feather meeting.
Our bof meeting had some fifty participants. Speakers included Michael of
NYCBUG, Jeremy Sohn from Wasabi Systems, Don Witt from BSDMall/Daemon News,
author Wes Sonnenreich and Dan Langille, organizer of BSDCan.
The audience well represented the various members of the BSD family.
Discussion ranged from meeting topics to NYCBUG’s relation to vendors.
There’s no question that we’ve started with a BOOM. Our mailing list already
has over 75 members.
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