Boston University
Linux Users Group

LUG Summer

Posted July 25, 2008

Happy Sysadmin Day everybody! I guess this is a good a time as ever to give a brief overview of what’s going on during the summer.

We plan on attending SPLASH for the first time on September 1st. All are welcome to swing by the table and say hello. We’ve been in touch with shipit.ubuntu.com, and hopefully will have 50 direct-from-Canonical Ubuntu CDs to distribute freely. This should be a good way to get a little exposure to incoming students - certainly beats flyer-spamming the campus, although the new school year should see a little more of that.

We’ll have meetings on the first Thursday of every month (consistency!) in PHO203 at 7:00PM. In addition to that, we’ll have “lesser” meetings in between the “official” meetings, but those will not follow a predictable pattern. We really liked the Thursday meetings last year, but we’ll figure it out once we get settled.

Hope the summer’s going well for everyone.

April Events: Meeting, SCV Tour

Posted March 24, 2008

First: There will be a LUG meeting at 7:00PM on Thursday, April 10, 2008, in room 107 of the Kenmore Classroom Building (KCB). Read more at this forum link for the second LUG meeting. If you volunteered to deliver a presentation at the first meeting, please email me (rmullen at bu) and give a brief (2-3 sentence) description of your presentation and its expected duration.

Second: There will be a tour of BU’s supercomputing and visualization installations the following day at Noon on Friday, April 11, 2008. We will meet in the Computer Graphics Lab. Description of how to get to the lab (and additional information can be found at this forum link for the supercomputing tour.

Discussion for each event can be carried out by registered users in the events’ respective threads.

Should be fun! See you guys there.

BU SCV Supercomputing Tour in the works

Posted March 5, 2008

The Scientific Computing and Visualization department has graciously agreed to provide a guided tour for LUG members. Their website is scv.bu.edu. This is not a chance you’ll want to pass up - the systems will be incredible.

We need to figure out a time during the weekday during which most LUG members will be available. We can’t make it during the evening because the SCV staff will not be around. Therefore, please visit the discussion thread at http://lug.bu.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?id=9 and make a note about what times work for you. The majority rules here.

This tour will take place after Spring Break. Let’s see some input.

Founder of Pandora.com to speak at BU

Posted February 23, 2008

On the day preceding the LUG meeting, Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora.com, will be giving a talk in Morse Auditorium on Feb 27 at 7:00 PM. You can read more about this event on the Facebook event listing.

The event is being publicized by BU Free Culture.

First Meeting Scheduled

Posted February 21, 2008

The first meeting has been scheduled. We will convene in SMG, room 210, at 7PM on Feb 28. While Wednseday was initially selected by the various voting mechanisms we had in place, Thursday was chosen because there are other events (SAO Consortium, BU-ACLU / BU Free Culture’s arrangement for the founder of Pandora.com to speak in Morse Auditorium) taking place on Wednesday.

At this meeting, our primary objective is to discuss the “direction” in which the LUG will point itself.  Because it is our first meeting, more emphasis will be placed on determining our mission instead of carrying it out. We will attempt to figure out a meeting framework that we can re-use each time, such as the frequency of meetings, a location, an agenda, etc for future gatherings. Hopefully, we can get some people to volunteer to give short presentations (for the following meeting - plenty of time) on something interesting about their favorite operating system or related tech topics.

Open preliminary discussion for this meeting is encouraged for registered members of our web foum at http://lug.bu.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5 . Please log in and state your piece.

See you all at the meeting!

BU LUG Approved

Posted February 10, 2008

The SAO has approved the Linux Users Group at BU. Please check out the forum and help select a meeting location.

The previous LUG used a second floor Photonics classroom for its meetings, and I wouldn’t mind following suit. However, I am very open to suggestions.

Website sort of deployed

Posted February 8, 2008

The website should now be able to handle traffic as it would be expected to. We have included a link (in the sidebar) to our web forum. Feel free to register. As time goes on, you may notice changes in appearance and behavior as we tweak, modify, and improve the experience. Please bear with us. We have an SSL certificate signed by CACert.org, a certificate authority that is campaigning for inclusion of their root certificate in web browsers by default. This reduces the cost of the largely non-intrusive SSL traffic encryption to precisely $0, allowing those without a budget to provide protection for their clients. By installing the CACert root certificate in your browser manually using these instructions, you can help them in their crusade for free security.

Note: The certificate will be set up to protect your session during logins automatically, but you can access the LUG Forum at any time over secure HTTPS by requesting it as https://lug.bu.edu/forum, after which your whole session will remain protected. The blog will require additional configuration to match this behavior, so bear with me. Our certificate fingerprint and possibly an “SSL On/Off” button will by provided once I get around to handling the SSL part of things.

Another note: It has been more than a week since I last met with the SAO, and they still have not given me word about our registration status. I emailed them and am patiently waiting for a response. Our first meeting will be held once I hear back from them, and it will occur on a Wednesday evening. I do not have an exact date or location yet. The first meeting will be used to determine a “direction” in which the BU LUG will turn in, a framework for future gatherings, future presentation topics, how to avoid the pitfalls that the LUG experienced four years ago, etc. Bring any and all ideas you have, for all will be heard.

Keep your ears to the mailing list and I’ll let you guys know what happens with the SAO. Thanks all.