- Roundtable - muug.ca

Linux patching best practices
by Kevin McGregor 29 Nov '10

29 Nov '10

At work I have two Ubuntu and two CentOS servers. What do you recommend as the best practice for applying updates? Specifically, do you do any testing on test machines first, or just wait until the updates are a certain age without hearing of any issues? Automatically apply them, or manually? Do you reboot the servers regularly regardless of whether you've patched them (something Windows administrators still do for their Windows servers!), or just wait until a kernel or other update requires it? Kevin

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CloudCamp Winnipeg Dec 6
by Bill Reid 28 Nov '10

28 Nov '10

From Dave Nielsen: We're organizing CloudCamp Winnipeg Monday evening December 6 at the Winnipeg Convention Centre. I thought some Muug people might want to participate in this free event. CloudCamp is a free Cloud Computing event structured as an unconference. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to share experiences, challenges and solutions. There will be lots of networking, food and discussion. Does anyone have experience in Cloud Computing in Python? Would you like to share it with a quick lightning talk? We have some great 5-minute lightning talks set already but there's room for more. Topics so far include resource pricing, mobile apps, and Azure. Contact me and we can have your talk added to the list. For more information, refer to http://www.cloudcamp.org/winnipeg, follow us on Twitter @CloudCampYWG, or contact me. Cheers, Dave Dave Nielsen Co-founder, CloudCamp twitter: http://twitter.com/davenielsen gtalk: dnielsen; skype: davenielsen m: 415-531-6674

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Big Nerd Ranch coming to Winnipeg!
by Sean Cody 27 Nov '10

27 Nov '10

Those of you familiar with Mac OS development may have heard of these folks. They offer training for Mac and iOS development and NewMediaManitoba has contracted to have them come for two events this coming February. The first is a two day (weekend) introduction to programming with Objective-C on Feburary 5th and 6th. http://newmediamanitoba.com/events/145/primer-with-big-nerd-ranch The second is a five day (whole week) bootcamp on developing for iOS (iPhone,iPad,iPod). http://newmediamanitoba.com/events/144/ios-5-day-boot-camp-with-big-nerd-ra… Taking the first course will help a lot for the second as it will be pretty intensive. I have signed up for both as was seriously considering the full offering at the Big Nerd Ranch so this option is a steal of a deal considering the full price of the classes. -- Sean P.S. I have no affiliation with either organization other than as a customer and since they are not advertising it too heavily I figured I'd send this along in case there are other like minded and interested folk.

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A charitable raffle for the December meeting.
by Sean Cody 27 Nov '10

27 Nov '10

As part of the December meeting's gathering we'll have our usual meeting raffle but we're going to ruffle the feathers a bit to help a charitable organization given the holiday season. As such if you would like to put in for the raffle the entry fee will be a donation item for Winnipeg Harvest. Donations in the form of non-perishable food items is requested and linked below is the ten most wanted items that Winnipeg Harvest has identified. http://www.winnipegharvest.org/help/food/wanted We will be raffling off the following books for this event: Linux Server Hacks Time Management For Systems Administrators Network Security Hacks If you have any ideas or anything you would like to add to the raffle or to sweeten the pot please contact me directly. Regardless, not only is this a deal for your it is an even bigger deal for the less fortunate. On behalf of the board, thanks and we'll see you at the meeting! -- Sean P.S. While we won't be accepting cash donations you can make a donation via their site: http://www.winnipegharvest.org/help/money/ P.P.S. Show us a receipt (dated between now and the meeting) and we'll enter you in to the draw/s as well.

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Linux on eMac
by Kevin McGregor 27 Nov '10

27 Nov '10

I noticed (what used to be) MacHelper is advertising eMacs (refurbished, of course) for $99. Just of of curiosity, what would be the most recent version of Linux that will run on these PPC-based machines? Kevin

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CloudCamp Winnipeg Dec 6
by Dave Nielsen 25 Nov '10

25 Nov '10

Hi MUUG folks, We're organizing CloudCamp Winnipeg <http://www.cloudcamp.org/winnipeg>Monday evening December 6 at the Winnipeg Convention Centre. I thought some MUUG people might want to participate in this free event. CloudCamp is a free Cloud Computing event structured as an unconference. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to share experiences, challenges and solutions. There will be lots of networking, food and discussion. Does anyone have Cloud experience and would like to share it with a quick lightning talk? We have some great 5-minute lightning talks<http://www.cloudcamp.org/winnipeg>set already. Topics so far include resource pricing, mobile apps, and Azure. Contact me and we can have your talk added to the list. For more information, refer to http://www.cloudcamp.org/winnipeg, follow us on Twitter @CloudCampYWG <http://twitter.com/CloudCampYWG>, or contact me. Thanks, Gilbert, for letting me post this invite! Cheers, Dave Dave Nielsen Co-founder, CloudCamp twitter: http://twitter.com/davenielsen gtalk: dnielsen; skype: davenielsen m: 415-531-6674

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Re: [RndTbl] rural internet access
by Adam Thompson 20 Nov '10

20 Nov '10

I'm not sure if they go that far south, but Prairie Mobile Communications has (or had) a fixed-wireless service through parts of southern Manitoba. Working with a fixed-wireless provider in NW Ontario, I can also confirm that "you get what you pay for". A free-standing pole with guy wires anchoring it is cheaper in equipment/capital cost but requires more (and more skilled, and more expensive) labour to install. Also not legal in some places. There are many people in southern MB who can erect towers & poles (cheaper than WiBand), the challenge is finding them... And then convincing WiBand to just use the existing tower. For halfway-decent or halfway-reliable service, expect to pay about $3k in install costs w/o a contract. On a contract, that often drops to $1k, $100-$300 or even $0 depending on contract length and provider. Barret's Xplorenet is a good option if a) no-one else can reach you, or b) installation of a tower or mast is contra-indicated for some reason (land unsuitable, prohibited by wife on aesthetic grounds, etc.). Otherwise, NWO has mostly the same experience with them - it's better than dial-up, but worse than everything else. -Adam

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Re: [RndTbl] rural internet access
by Adam Thompson 20 Nov '10

20 Nov '10

I'm not sure if they go that far south, but Prairie Mobile Communications has (or had) a fixed-wireless service through parts of southern Manitoba. Working with a fixed-wireless provider in NW Ontario, I can also confirm that "you get what you pay for". A free-standing pole with guy wires anchoring it is cheaper in equipment/capital cost but requires more (and more skilled, and more expensive) labour to install. Also not legal in some places. There are many people in southern MB who can erect towers & poles (cheaper than WiBand), the challenge is finding them... And then convincing WiBand to just use the existing tower. For halfway-decent or halfway-reliable service, expect to pay about $3k in install costs w/o a contract. On a contract, that often drops to $1k, $100-$300 or even $0 depending on contract length and provider. Barret's Xplorenet is a good option if a) no-one else can reach you, or b) installation of a tower or mast is contra-indicated for some reason (land unsuitable, prohibited by wife on aesthetic grounds, etc.). Otherwise, NWO has mostly the same experience with them - it's better than dial-up, but worse than everything else. -Adam

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rural internet access
by Ian 20 Nov '10

20 Nov '10

Hi all. What's the best value in rural service? I'm just north of the US border, 14 miles, off highway #59. There is wifi service all around me, but not "to" me without at least a 60' tower. I'm looking at Explornet satellite service and really don't like their contract. Are there smarter options? Ian

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html pretty code
by Trevor Cordes 18 Nov '10

18 Nov '10

Adam thought someone might find this useful, so here it is. It's a perl program I wrote to "pretty" html for easy readability/debugging by applying indenting. The neat thing is, it's entirely contained in 1 regular expression; no loops! Well, except for the weird nl while loop. This ain't your father's regex! Yes, there's a zillion html pretty programs out there but none did what I wanted in a few ways: 1. Just fire & forget, no 200 options to worry about. 2. Works on random html snippets not just whole pages, so you can view source from the web and just paste a few lines from the middle of any web page and it will pretty it up. 3. Challenge to do something like this only using regex! There may be a few tags it doesn't catch yet (just add them to the main tag list), but that won't hurt the output very much. Run like: html-pretty < html-file | less html-pretty ======================= #!/usr/bin/perl -w # # Copyright 2010 Trevor E Cordes, Tecnopolis Enterprises # # This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. $l=-1; # indentation level $s=join('',<>); $s=~s#>\s+#>#g; # rm ws after tags $s=~s#\s+<#<#g; # rm ws before tags while ($s=~s#<([^>]*)\n([^>]*)>#<$1$2>#g) { 1; }; # rm nl in tags $s=~s#>#>\n#g; # put newlines after all tags $s=~s!(?:<(/)?(?:(div|span|head|b|a|i|u|ul|ol|li|tr|td|th|form|table|p|style|script|body|html|head|title)\b)?([^>]*>\n)|([^<]+))! $4 ? # non-tag text ( (' 'x($l+1)).$4."\n" ) : ( ( $2 ? # a recognized triggers-indent tag ( $1 ? # tag starts with /, decrease indent ( $l--,($l<-1 and $l=-1) , ((' 'x($l+1)).'<'.(defined($1)?$1:'').$2.$3) ) : # tag is opening tag, increase indent ( $l++ , ((' 'x$l).'<'.(defined($1)?$1:'').$2.$3) ) ) : # a non-triggers-indent tag ( (' 'x($l+1)).'<'.(defined($1)?$1:'').$3 ) ) ) !gemx; # indent print $s;

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