Table of Contents

• Next General Meeting is April 11
  • Tutorial: PM Firewall by Ed Wehner
  • Presentation: System Monitoring with HP OpenView/VantagePoint by Ramin Pasha
• Next Linux Meeting is April 19
  • Presentation: Firewalling with Linux 2.4 by Karl Mueller, Asynchrony Solutions
• Book Specials
• Upcoming Events
• Meeting Directions
• Articles
• Organizational Proposals
• Linux Installfest Wrap-up
• ITEC Show in May -- Making Progress
• New SLUUG BBS Home (Again)
• Quotes
• Interesting Browsing
• Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
• St. Louis Linux Users Group
• Steering Committee
• Sponsors
• SLUUG on the World Wide Web
• SLUUG Administration is volunteer based.
• /usr/groups/other
• Contacts
• Submitting Articles to the SLUUG CRONicle
• SLUUG PO Box

Next Meeting Details

Tutorial

Abstract:
PM Firewall is a script that makes it easy to configure your Linux system to act as a firewall. It uses ipchains, but knowledge of ipchains is not required. Ed will show how to use PM Firewall, walking through the process of configuring it. He will show how to modify the configuration file to open or close various ports to allow or deny traffic.

Bio:
Ed Wehner the Manager of Infrastructure Technology for MEMC. Ed is currently President and sits on the SLUUG Board of Directors.

For more information on PM Firewall, check out the web page at http://www.pmfirewall.com/PMFirewall/.

Questions and ideas about this discussion are welcome; please send mailto:wehner@mail.sluug.org?subject=SLUUG+Apr+2001+Tutorial

Presentation

Abstract:
HP OpenView VantagePoint Operation is a tool designed to consolidate the administration of multiple systems in an enterprise-scale environment. From a single system, you can monitor the health and performance of multiple systems including various Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, NT, and Novell systems.

Each system to be monitored runs an agent that communicates with the central management console. Syslog files and SNMP traps can also be monitored.

Reports can be generated to get a feel for the overall health of the network. "Immediate need" events can be sent to a central monitoring screen, e-mail addresses, and beeper/pager alerts, so that the administrator may respond.

Vantage Point Operations was developed by ITO and was bought by Hewlett-Packard last year. HP then integrated it into their OpenView management system.

For more information, check out HP's web site at http://www.managementsoftware.hp.com/products/vpoperations/

Bio:
Ramin Pasha has experience installing and maintaining TNG UniCenter, IBM Tivoli, and other systems and network administration tools for multiple systems. He has a dozen years experience in IT. He has an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Parks College of St. Louis University. He has worked for Maritz, TactX, and SLU. He is currently a consultant on Enterprise Administration for Global Solutions Group Inc. in Fenton.

Ideas, questions and suggestions are welcome; please contact us by sending mailto:editor@mail.sluug.org?subject=SLUUG+Apr+2001+Presentation

Next St. Louis Linux Users Group Meeting Is April 19

Abstract:
The Linux 2.4 kernel includes a new modular packet mangling infrastructure called Netfilter that replaces the ipchains-based firewalling and masquerading in the 2.2 kernels. It includes support for connection tracking, network address translation, and other advanced features.

Items that will be discussed include the following:

• Changes from 2.2
• Differences between ipchains(8) and iptables(8)
• How packets traverse the chains
• Using iptables(8)
• Masqerading 101
• Other examples

Bio:
Karl Mueller works as an IT consultant for Asynchrony Solutions (http://www.asolutions.com/). Asynchrony specializes in middleware architecture, system integration and custom application development, including wireless and web applications. The company believes in implementing solutions using Open Source technology, including using Linux as a platform for firewall and VPN solutions.

Asynchrony Solutions' sister company, Asynchrony.com (http://www.asynchrony.com/), provides a virtual community for Open Source software developers, where members can share ideas and form teams to collaborate on software projects. Asynchrony markets the finished software and gives the lion's share of revenues to the team members who created the software.

Meetings of the St. Louis Linux User Group (LUG) are held from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM every THIRD THURSDAY of each month. Location: Indian Trails Branch - Saint Louis County Library. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Refer to http://www.stllinux.org for details and maps.

Comments, questions and ideas for the St. Louis Linux Users Group are welcome; please send mailto:matthew@linuxguys.net?subject=St.+Louis+LUG+Presentations

Special Promotions

Titles of the Month The April special will be 25% off of all Networking book titles. There will be a special 30% discount on all books marked with a red sticker and a 20% discount on all other books this month.

This month we have some FREE "Anatomy of a Linux System" posters and O'Reilly route maps for those who ask for them.

The O'Reilly and Associates line of books is available at each monthly general meeting as a convenience to our members. Each month we feature book titles related to that month's presentation or tutorial topic. Discounts off retail prices are offered to all members and each month's featured books may be additionally discounted. Usually, all titles are discounted 10%, while special titles are discounted 25%.

Upcoming Events

Meeting Directions

Directions From Downtown

1. Take 40 West to the Hanley exit.
2. Turn left (south) onto Hanley.
3. Turn left (east) onto Manchester, then turn right ASAP into the Sunnen Products driveway.

(NOTE: A security guard from Sunnen is scheduled to be at the door from 6:20 PM to 7:20 PM to allow entry. After 7:20, the door will be unattended and attendees may not be able to enter.)

The SLUUG Steering Committee meets the Monday following the general meeting at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor training room of Daugherty Systems, One City Place in Creve Coeur.

The St. Louis Linux Users Group meets the 3rd Thursday of every month at the Indian Trails Branch Library.

See map at http://www.stllinux.org/directions/

• Organizational Proposals
• Linux Installfest Wrap-up
• ITEC Show in May -- Making Progress
• New SLUUG BBS Home (Again)
• Quotes
• Interesting Browsing

NOTE: These articles may express personal opinions and SLUUG exerts no more editorial control over such content than does a public library, bookstore, or newsstand. Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers, or other information or content expressed herein are those of the respective authors and not necessarily supported by SLUUG. SLUUG does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content, nor its merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose.

Organizational Proposals

All SLUUG members,

The St. Louis UNIX Users Group (SLUUG) Steering Committee wish you to know the following:

There has been an increase in interest in the management of our Linux User's Group (LUG). Proposals for management structure including development and definition of the relationship between LUG and steercom are being taken under advisement.

We are seeking input to this process from all interested members. Proposals and comments should be submitted by April 15, 2001.

The SLUUG Steering Committee is open to anyone who wishes to attend. Members are encouraged to learn how the group works and to help guide us in the future. As a result of this open nature, SLUUG has undergone various adjustments in management throughout the years. Now, again, is one of those times.

As you may be aware an appointment of a LUG chairperson from a panel of interested parties was made in June 2000. See the CRONicle article ( http://www.sluug.org/cronicle/2000/0007.html#Article3) for the history of this. Subsequently, in November 2000 a proposal was made to incorporate the LUG chairperson into the election process in February 2002 and a management structure formulated during that interim period.

At the March 2001 steercom meeting, a proposal was submitted by interested steercom members for the restructuring of the relationship between LUG and steercom.

We ask you to look at submitted proposal and submit alternative proposals or comments to Ed Wehner at president@mail.sluug.org. You can also join the steercom list for a more interactive discussion.

With the help of the webhead group, all proposals will be available for review by 12:00pm (noon) on April 16, 2001 at http://www.sluug.org/LUG/. Proposals and comments will be reviewed and discussed at the April 16, 2001, steering committee (steercom) meeting.

Again, all steercom meetings are open to the public. Your participation is welcome and solicited. For meeting location information see http://www.sluug.org/info/map_daugherty.html. The steercom meeting will begin at 6:30pm, Monday, April 16, 2001.

To provide our membership an opportunity to review and participate in the development of a new governing structure, it was proposed that steercom provide the interim management until the final proposal is ratified by the Board of Directors.

Please participate in the development and management of your organization. A review of the current steercom discussion can be found at http://www.sluug.org/~archive under the STEERCOM archive. You are encouraged to join and participate in this discussion.

Sincerely,
Ed Wehner
President, St. Louis UNIX Users Group

Please do not discuss this issue in the DISCUSS mailing list!! Please join the STEERCOM mailing list to comment on this and other issues!

Linux Installfest Wrap-up

The St. Louis Linux InstallFest 2001 was held on Saturday, March 24th, and was a great success.

Our sincerest thanks goes to Wave Technologies for hosting this second St. Louis Linux InstallFest for our growing community of Linux and Unix users.

Putting it together was a lot of fun and some hard work too. The primary organizers were Rod Hauser of Wave, Tony Zafiropoulos of CTiTek, Craig Buchek (editor) and Stan Reichardt (me).

This was our second Linux InstallFest/Party here in St. Louis. We added effort to get a better handle on understanding what processes were working and how to make improvements.

We looked at other web sites and got some good ideas. First Craig Buchek built an instructional web page listing things for the novice to do before the install. To give us some idea of how many might show, we added some pages for people to register for installation or as volunteers.

The organizing committee worked on a one page flyer based on another site's example. We added Tux the Linux mascot and listed the sponsors and supporting local groups. It was built with ApplixWare using Times fonts, then saved as PostScript, converted to PDF and made available for download from our web site.

The preparation, expertise, facilities and support provided by Rod Hauser, our main contact at Wave proved to be invaluable. He provided us with two training rooms, workbenches, power, network connections, and many current Linux distributions and updates.

Don Head, also of Wave, provided assistance well beyond solving the usual crisis problems. He was able to scrounge odd-ball equipment, network cards, keyboard adapters, and even serial mice. He came up with many technical solutions and many suggestions in the installation room.

The first thing that struck us, the crew, was how helpful it was that the Wave staff had made up the sign in sheets and dealt with new arrivals. That freed up two of our crew to make events flow much smoother. We had made up some sign in sheets, but Wave's worked out much better.

Rod Hauser, Don Head, Craig Buchek and Tony Zafiropoulos provided training sessions through out the day. Rod gave a welcome message and an introduction to Linux and Open Source. Craig provided an overview of the 2.4 Linux kernel changes. Don provided a demonstration of some common desktop applications and showed off a dual headed X configuration. Tony showed how to secure a linux system.

This year I decided to act, for lack of any better designation, as the "beachmaster" at the InstallFest. As a self-proclaimed controller of events in the installation room I was able to co-ordinate work that had to be done at the last minute. My goal was to some how get a better overview of the whole event as it ran. I believe the function is a good idea, however, someone else should do it at our next event.

Our brave volunteer crew that helped with installs: Phil Bunch, Matt Porter, Charles Wells, Harry Treece, James Pattie, Jason Pattie, J. Dodson, Don Ellis, Mike Ducy, and Ray Sadowski.

Gary Meyer kept the master list for installation so that participants stayed in a relatively fair sequence. Sue Hurst and Karen Renke kept things working smoothly running down our hosts with our ever changing requests and questions. Joe Pattie helped move and set up hardware.

Going thru the sign in sheets, the over all count was 105, there were some duplicates. Maybe five or six. So we had an attendance of around 100 bodies, including the volunteer crew. This was quite an increase over the 60 that attended our first InstallFest.

Since I have been collecting and processing the sign in sheets at most of the SLUUG and St. Louis LUG meetings for the past year, many of those names looked familiar. Roughly, there were 53 new names and email addresses. My best guess is that from 30 to 40 of those names were totally new to us.

It seemed that we did more multi-boot configurations than at our first Linux InstallFest. This was quite amazing despite the fact that some of our best experts that were at the first InstallFest were not able to attend because of personal commitments.

We had a few configuration problems with incompatible video cards that could not be resolved. A few that came too late to complete an installation. They were still very happy with the assistance, and knowledge of the volunteer crew that assisted and the availability of follow-up help.

The Hazelwood LUG, Missouri Open Source LUG and the St. Louis Area Computer Club plan on assisting anyone that has un-resolved configuration problems at meetings that fall within the next month.

We had made up small event posters for each of the upcoming local UNIX/LINUX meetings for the next month. This was really good for quite a few of the attendees and should increase some new attendance for each of those groups.

Individual thank you notes and comments directly back to our host Rod Hauser at rhauser@wavetech.com would be highly appreciated. If nothing else, a polite thank you note would be in good order from every attendee. You may also wish to thank Tony Zafiropoulos (tonyz@ctitek.com) for providing the pizza, and Craig Buchek (craig@buchek.com) who brought the drinks.

We are already thinking about the next InstallFest. We would like to build on the lessons we have learned, and would like to start the planning earlier. The next InstallFest will likely be held in August. So that we can improve our process, please send your comments, questions, and suggestions to Stan Reichardt at stan@mail.sluug.org.

ITEC Show in May -- Making Progress

The ITEC show is right around the corner (May 23 and 24). The planning is starting to become fast and furious. We have accomplished several goals since last month:

• Bob Young of Red Hat will be the keynote speaker, attending as our guest.
  (Special thanks to Kara Pritchard for her help in getting Bob to come!)
• We will be doing 2 training tracks: executive and technical.
• We have gotten commitments from the IMark, the show organizers.
• We have designed bookmarks and business cards to hand out.
• We have decided how to process credit card transactions more quickly.
• We have begun to determine the floor plan layout for our booth.

We need your help to make this event a success. You can volunteer your help by sending email to itecteam@mail.sluug.org or by browsing to http://www.sluug.org/members/ITEC/2001/.

New SLUUG BBS Home (Again)

Last month we reported that we had moved our group's servers to a new location due to the fact that Phoenix Networks was pulling out of St. Louis. Linuxgruven was kind enough to let us locate our servers with them. Unfortunately, things with Linuxgruven have not been going well. All the management has resigned and most of the employees have been laid off. We appreciate their kindness in letting us use their resources, but they are no longer able to host our systems. Special thanks to James Hibbits and Mike Lebb for their assistance.

Several other businesses have offered to host our systems, but the Washington University chapter of the ACM was able to accomodate us quickly. We moved the servers to a room in their offices. In exchange, we will soon be donating one of our (many) AIX systems to the ACM for their own use. Special thanks to Sean and David of the ACM, who helped us move in and set up.

To all the other companies who are offering us space, we do have several other systems that we would like to set up, and would appreciate whatever you may be able to offer. A secondary location would help us to have some redundancy and to put more systems on-line for our members to access.

Quotes

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
    -- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

Customer: I'm running Windows 95.
Tech: Yes.
Customer: My computer isn't working now.
Tech: Yes, you said that.

In the beggining the code(software) was created. This has made a lot of people very rich and has been widely regarded as a good move.
    -- IamLarryboy on Slashdot (with apologies to Douglas Adams)

If knowledge is power, and power is sexy, then why am I still single??
    -- macdaddy on Slashdot

If I memorize DeCSS, is my mind a circumvention device?
    -- macdaddy on Slashdot

People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die.
    -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban

First they came for the Communists,
        and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
        and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
        and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
        and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me --
        and by that time no one was left to speak up.
    -- Pastor Martin Niemolle

When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the first amendment, and I can't say nothing about it.

    St. Louis UNIX Users Group
        P.O. Box 411302
        Creve Coeur Post Office
        St. Louis, MO  63141-9998