Meeting agendas, summaries and resources.
Meeting Announcement and Agenda
We had 37 people attend the March meeting. I think that is great considering it was “off cycle”. In January we had 23, in February we had 30. So, that’s a good trend. We’ve also had as many as 22 people in our “virtual meeting” at irc.freenode.net #gatorlug.
Several budding engineers are thinking about ways to move the presentation display so it will be easier for a group that large to see it more clearly.
The group consensus was to extend the Logo submission period until the next meeting (April, 19). It was suggested to me that I should accept votes from people who send their vote to the meeting with someone who can vouch for it (if they can’t make it in person). I’m still thinking about that. I’m pretty sure I *don’t* want to take votes electronically. But, if someone wants to send me an argument for it, I’ll consider it.
We’ll try to have icecast working for the audio in time for the April 19 meeting.
Michael Crown from the VoIP Connection did a presentation for the group and donated the following equipment to support the group:
This equipment is brand new and we will auction it off at the April 19th LUG meeting. Michael is also making a five percent discount available. Use the coupon code 'gatorlug'. If you are in the market for VoIP equipment please consider The VoIP Connection to thank Michael for his donation to the group.
I'd also like to thank Bill Merriam for his presentation. The bit about putting telemarketers together in a conference call was hilarious.
Here are some useful Asterisk links that were discussed at the meeting.
http://www.thevoipconnection.com
http://www.asterisk.org
http://www.voip-info.org
http://gatorlug.billmerriam.com
Bill has also posted some great links in an article here.
Finally Updated!
OK, here's my picks for VOIP Providers with Gainesville numbers. Sorry for the delay but I figured I'd better get something posted soon or someone might come looking for me. :)
One tip I can share is that I have spent a lot of time on Freenode IRC in #FreePBX. It's a great place to meet people and see how Asterisk is being deployed firsthand.
-------------------------------------------------
Definitions/Criteria
Some of the things you want to look for in a DID Provider:
Affordable DID (Direct Inward Dial) Numbers
# of Channels: The number of channels that can simultaneously be used. Some providers limit channels per DID, some limit them per account. Pay close attention and make sure to ask what the number of channels you will get is and make sure they can clarify what the cap is.
SIP/IAX2 Connectivity for Asterisk: Do they allow Asterisk on their network? Some block asterisk because it has a tendency to be greedy of their resources. Not to mention it can trunk an entire business using a residential VOIP trunk, and they lose out on money. :)
Hard/Soft Limits or quotas on minutes used: Are there any minimum or maximums before overage fees are assessed?
Control Panel: Can you instantly add/remove services online via a control panel, or do you have to put in a support ticket and wait to get anything done? More specifically, are they the real provider or is this a middleman/reseller?
Failover: If your circuit is down, can they forward your DID numbers to another PSTN line? This is useful for residential and critical for business.
-----------------------
Pay-as-you-go Category
1) My favorite pick and The #1 overall-value winner is Vitelity. They met all my criteria and won hands down. Their per-minute rates make not going with an unlimited plan actually affordable. They are currently running a special, you can make up your own toll free number (provided it's available) and they're waiving the $10 connection fee for this week only (through 11/13 I believe). Toll Free DID's are only 0.50/month and incoming calls on your toll free DID's are 0.019/minute (which is down from their previous 2.5c/minute).
Vitelity's Gainesville numbers are on Level-3's backbone and start at 1.49/month and $0.011/minute (yes that's 1.1 cent per minute) but be careful as some GNVFL DID's have different per minute rates. One other caveat is they won't help you tweak your IAX2 settings. Any complaints about call quality on IAX will have them immediately tell you to switch to SIP. Otherwise I've been very impressed with them as a provider and use them for my home office and at work.
2) TelIAX. Pay as you go, but a little more expensive per minute and per month on the DID's. They also offer unlimited plans BUT they've got a "softcap" of 1500 minutes after which they will start hassling about overages. Because TNSTAAFL.
3) Junction Networks. They are much more pricey in the per-minute department but they have a huge level of redundancy and failovers. They are marketing themselves towards business customers only.
Honorable Mentions:
1) VoipSTREET - Asterisk/Trixbox friendly.
2) VoicePulse Connect - features sliding scale rates based on the market you're calling to/from. Also geared for Asterisk. NOTE: This is different from standard VoicePulse.
---------------------------
"Unlimited" Category
1) Viatalk. They don't "officially support" Asterisk, but they don't block it from their network, either. I have not tried them, but they have reasonable rate plans and I have read good reviews in their favor.
2) Broadvoice. While their pricing is attractive, their attitudes suck, and they won't help you get connected with Asterisk. It is touch and go, they are constantly changing their system as they grow and it breaks asterisk. There are tons of asterisk people out there who use them, but it takes a lot of tweaking and hair-pulling to get the service to work consistently. Just ask jwiens. :)
3) TelaSIP - This one has had mixed reviews. Need to do more research on this one.
----------------------------
Stay-far-away Category
1) "Sellvoip.net" aka Blue Voice Networks. This is a two-man operation. I signed up and have been unable to get my DID to work with them. Outgoing calls seem to work, but I can't register with any of their SIP servers. They are a paid advertiser on trixbox.org, but they were so overwhelmed with business that they can't handle it all. Avoid them for now until their growing pains subside.
------------------------------
Disclaimer
This is by no means a complete list of VOIP providers. It is a dynamic and growing business market. VOIP should not be considered a primary means of telephone connectivity. E911 service is not always available. Furthermore, the reliability of the connection rests primarily with your internet provider, so should it go out, your VOIP will too. As things change I'll be sure to update what I find.
Meeting Announcement and Agenda
April 19, 2006 Meeting Redux
I sent the meeting reminder to the wrong address last Monday. Regardless, we still had 29 attendees – a good turnout.
Jon Akers did a question and answer segment about the Really Large Linux Cluster on campus – also called the High Performance Computing Cluster. There is an upcoming conference about this great resource. See here for more details: http://www.gatorlug.org/node/39
Gavin Baker encouraged students to apply for the SG Technology Cabinet Director position that is currently open. If we want to increase the use of open software and open standards at UF and in this area we have to get involved and apply for positions like this one.
A lot of time was spent discussing and voting for the group logo. I’m pleased with the result. The best you can hope for when picking a piece of artwork that will represent group identity is something some people really like and something most people can live with. In my opinion, we reached a consensus about the logo and achieved that goal. As promised, we took donations for the winning artist and raised $76 at the meeting for her. If you want to make a donation to thank the artist please get in touch with me. I’d like to see the donations reach 3 digits. The artist’s name is Dao. If you have a GatorLUG user account you can view her profile here: http://www.gatorlug.org/user/34
The winning logo is here: http://www.gatorlug.org/node/61
A big Thank You! to everyone who took the time to create and submit logo ideas.
Michael Liesenfelt gave an excellent presentation about securing your linux box with a hardened kernel and an encrypted filesystem. His presentation slides will be available on the GatorLUG website. I didn’t have the levels set correctly for the audio so the recording level is too low and there is a lot of dead space during times when people other than Michael are commenting or asking questions. At the next meeting, we’ll have a mic available for questions and I’ll get the levels right.
Finally, JC Jones told us why GPG is useful and organized the keysigning party.
Next month (May 17), Jordan Wiens will show us how to catch bad guys trying to break into our computers with Snort, John Sawyer will show us some tools and techniques used in data forensics, and more GPG keys will get signed. Check http://gatorlug.org for more details as the date gets closer.
Warm regards,
Clinton Collins, President
GatorLUG, Gainesville, FL
Meeting Announcement and Agenda
May Meeting Redux
33 people attended the May meeting.
The meeting started with projector drama. We managed to unplug the projector during the pre-meeting setup before it had a chance to properly cool the bulb. Upon turning the projector back on the light would not come on. So, I raced back to my office at UF to see if I could find the spare bulb. What I found out is that we don't have a spare bulb. A new bulb for this projector is about $400. So, it doesn't surprise me that I decided years ago to wait until the bulb failed before spending that much money for a new one. Fortuitously, David McDonald, took the bulb out, reseated it into its socket, and revived the projector. Since the meeting was about security and data integrity, the projector drama created a good opening discussion about the problems created by single points of failure.
The next security lesson was the age old adage,"if someone gains physical access to the device all bets are off". This lesson was delivered by Ramzi. He showed us how to build a door buster for $20.
Download the video used for the presentation here (20mb).
After that, the main event was delivered by Jordan Wiens and John Sawyer.
Drive Imaging
Data Integrity & File Hash Signatures
Data & Timeline Analysis
Data Carving
Memory Analysis
Linux Bootable CD for Forensics and Incident Response
Antiforensics
Online Resources (forums, mailing lists & challenges)
Meeting Announcement and Agenda
June Meeting Redux
29 people attended the June meeting and I saw many new faces.
I had a small scare with MythTV box during the pre-meeting setup. It would not boot. This was necessary to continue the trend that some technology mishap must occur to cause me stress at a LUG meeting. This happened once before and the problem was a loose video card. Thankfully, that was the same problem this time. After reseating the video card, the MythBox booted up and my blood pressure went down.
I had planned to do my bit after Doug Goldstein. But ,since he showed up late, I dived in and demonstrated some of the things I like best about MythTV. Once Doug showed up, we tag teamed it from there.
We now have everything we need to get a good audio recording of the meeting and broadcast it live - a good mixer, two mics, and a computer sending the audio via icecast back to the GatorLUG server. My thanks to Martin Smith for working out the details for the streaming solution. Everything worked except the wireless network at Virtually Cuban. It's understandable because a lot of people bring laptops to LUG meetings and give the wireless network a beating. For the next meeting, we are going to try and connect the computer that is recording and streaming the audio to the network via a wired connection. We'll also record the meeting directly on the computer at the meeting instead of relying on the GatorLUG Icecast server to do the recording.
This is a good video introduction to MythTV: systm--0002--mythtv--small.xvid.avi (110mb XVID)
A friend of mine, Ed Baldridge, who owns a retail store dedicated to gaming called The BattleZone donated some computer parts to support the user group (before the gaming store he had a computer business). I combined those parts with some parts I've had laying about for awhile (for those projects I'm going to get to any day now) and made them available for donations to the user group. Sixty three dollars were donated to support the group.
Download the detailed specs of Clint's MythBox here: mythboxHardware.pdf (PDF).
Meeting Announcement and Agenda
One hour before the start of the meeting, some updates were applied to the laptop that had the streaming software setup on it. One of the updates broke the streaming software. At the next meeting we will have a computer that is dedicated to streaming and if it works we will set it in stone and throw away the mold. Or, at the very least we won't do any updates to it just before the next meeting.
Attendance was down a bit this month. We had 23 people at the meeting.
We debuted our shiney new WRT54GL running DD-WRT. I counted 7 people using the new access point without any problems. DD-WRT is "insanely great" software. It has a huge number of useful features including the ability to try overclocking your access point if you feel like living dangerously.
Martin Smith did a great job showing what Nagios can do. We have been running it for about 2 months now at the Bureau of Economic and Business Research and I am very impressed with what it can do. We have a view of our enterprise network that we have never had before. We keep tabs on disk space, server load, raid health, server temperatures, and more. Nagios makes it easy to track and alert on almost any condition you can dream up.
Martin's slides can be found here: Presentation Slides
Meeting Announcement and Agenda
August Meeting Redux
It worked!
We were able to stream the meeting live on the internet, we got a decent recording of the meeting, and we were able to make the call-in segment work. Andrew Warfield was able to listen to the meeting stream in Canada as he waited for the call-in segment.
We had a little trouble with mic levels and the call outgoing audio did not work at first but it worked marvelously for the first time out. Thus, I am pleased to give you the audio from the August GatorLUG meeting.gatorlug-meeting-2006-08-16.ogg (50.1 mb OGG Audio, 1 hour 55 minutes).
Here are the audio segment cue points:
Sections: Minutes:Seconds
000:00 Intro-Jordan Wiens talks about winning the hacking contest at Defcon
009:45 Gavin Baker-Software Freedom Day update, Free Your PC, OSCON
018:45 Jordan Wiens - Firefox and Thunderbird Extensions
033:23 Eli Ben Shoshan, James Oulman - Xen Virtuallization
075:24 Andrew Warfield, Xen Developer - Call in Q&A
109:47 NinjaSudoku Update, Next Month Announcements"