Monday September 22, 2008 Stephen Smalley to speak at SVOSUG on Thur. 09/25/08
When: Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Mansion
(SCA07 just across the road from the Auditorium)
What: Security technologies to confine flawed and malicious software
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Live Broadcast at this link through ustream on the SVOSUG web page, if you can't make the meeting in person.
NOTE: Tamarah Rockwood will have an art exhibit that will feature the OpenSolaris Community Innovations Award Entry she submitted. It is possible she will offer some cookies for the event also, but we won't hold her to her gracious offer.
You are invited to hear Stephen Smalley, of the US National Security Agency
(NSA), speak on security technologies to confine flawed and malicious
software.
Stephen was instrumental in bringing the Flux Advanced Security Kernel
(Flask) and Type Enforcement (TE) technologies to Linux through the SELinux
project. Flask is a flexible form of mandatory access control (MAC) that has
been gaining popularity since its introduction in SELinux, SEBSD, and
SEDarwin.
Stephen is now involved as a project lead on the OpenSolaris.org Flexible
Mandatory Access Control (FMAC) project that is integrating FLASK and TE
into OpenSolaris.
Stephen Smalley Bio:
Stephen Smalley is a Technical Director in the Defense Computing Research
Office of the National Information Assurance Research Laboratory of the NSA.
Mr. Smalley received a 2005 Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Fellows
award for his technical achievements within the Intelligence Community.
Prior to his work on OpenSolaris and SELinux, Mr. Smalley performed research
and development in the area of operating system security through the
development and analysis on a series of secure research operating systems.
Mr. Smalley received his B.S. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics
from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
For additional info please see the following URLs:
OpenSolaris.org Flexible Mandatory Access Control Project Page:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/fmac/
NSA SELinux Reference:
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
Yahoo Maps to the Mansion
We may also have some pizza and sodas.
Wednesday September 10, 2008 Stephen Smalley coming to speak this month!
Stephen Smalley of the National Security Agency will be speaking this month at the SVOSUG meeting, on Sept. 25th, in SCA03, that is the room above the auditorium we used to meet at. We're moving over this month for the added space.
I will be inviting anyone around town that might be interested to hear Stephen talk about Flask and Type Enforcement. This is an excellent opportunity for all of the open source communities to hear and ask any questions about this technology they might have.
Flask and Type Enforcement is the technology used in SELinux today, and the same technology being worked on for OpenSolaris, where Stephen is leading the FMAC project with John Weeks, of Sun Fed.
You can find out more about FMAC at the OpenSolaris project page.
Sun Fed will be supplying pizza and beverages for this event. Please join us on the evening of Sept. 25th at 7:30pm.
Tuesday July 22, 2008 [SVOSUG] Summer Break, taking July off...
NOTE: Phillip "Flip" Russell is no longer working at Sun, and has helpedfor the past few years with SVOSUG. I would like to thank Phillip for
helping out and hope that you'll keep in touch with us.
I had been planning to host the meeting last week when Lori Alt was
visiting, but Lori was busy on Thurs., but we did tape a video for ZFS
Boot that can be seen on John Weeks' ustream account:
(first 10 minutes have some white noise in the audio)
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/563014
I would also like the let folks know about some dates coming up.
The August meeting will be moved up to PenLUG in Redwood City, please join
along in meeing with PenLUG. This will be on the same night SVOSUG
normally meets on, 4th Thurs., or August 28th.
http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Home/MeetingAgenda20080828
Sept. 3rd, James Gosling is speaking at the Silicon Valley Linux User's
Group. Here's a good chance to hear James speak at a small local venue.
http://www.svlug.org/meetings.php
Sept. SVOSUG meeting will be back at the Mansion, and I have a tentative
speaker but don't have it confirmed yet. Stay tuned for this announcement
soon.
Oct. SVOSUG meeting is being planned as a Arduino build-a-thon. The parts
to build an Arduino are only about $10-$15. We need to have a cross
compiler for OpenSolaris (gcc-avr) to support the Arduino, which is a full
open hardware and software platform to develop on. John Plocher recently
wrote a couple snazzy programs on the Arduino, one uses 2 servos with a
web cam to allow panning of the webcam with 2 potentiometers. This was
done with about 25 lines of c code, compiled and uploaded to the Arduino.
He also wrote a musical type program. Yes, John has discovered the
Arudino...and so can you...stay tuned for more info, we'll help you build
one for youself out of parts. This will be based on the Freeduino, bare
bones board. We will be inviting the local LUGs and BayLISA to join us.
http://www.moderndevice.com/
Have a nice summer break, I'm hoping for one myself.
( Jul 22 2008, 05:40:00 AM PDT ) Permalink
Wednesday July 16, 2008 Jonathan Adams is speaking at BayLISA tonight (07/17)
If you're in the bay area, don't miss out on Jonathan Adam's presentation at BayLISA tonight.
You can get info on the BayLISA website.
Hope to see you there!
Thursday June 26, 2008 [SVOSUG] Summer Thinktank, give your input, Tonight!
**** REMINDER **** REMINDER **** REMINDER **** REMINDER ****
Tonight!
Hope to see you there!
Tuesday June 24, 2008 [SVOSUG] Summer Thinktank, give your input, 06/26
SVOSUG members, help us decide what to do with our user group in Silicon Valley.
I've been running SVOSUG for 3 years and quite honestly I'm getting bored with the same old format...and we've had great presentations at SVOSUG, I've been quite happy with the group over the past few years. However, I don't believe it scales for the future, and I don't think user groups offer the same advantage they used to, with the web, use of video, and online-collaboration.
I don't feel we're able to accomplish too much as a user group, and there could be ways to expand and continue to grow the group in the future by changing the format.
A couple ideas that I have had are:
1) Shorter presentations so that folks could watch the content at their leisure, even if they're not local. I think of lightning talks in this regard, and could offer folks within the community to get up give a short presentation that is 5 minutes, and scale out our community, not just SVOSUG. The key here would be using the meeting to create content, as we've been doing, but to make the content more usable. I haven't figured out how to leverage it better.
2) Technical Architect Groups (TAGs) where a small group of folks with common intersts can get together and work on something together. This could possibly happen the same day as the meeting, and allow people to get together and discuss something that they could go off and work on over the next month.
3) More community participation from non-Sun folks. How can we get folks to talk about things they're doing. As an example, have you built a nice system that is low power, or small form factor? Have you been tunneling through VMs on your network to allow users to access inside a Virtual Box VM? How about ekiga, do you use it on OpenSolaris?
4) Possibly going around the room and just having people mention briefly what they're working on, what they doing, and if people are interested in such, they could talk after the meeting or in email/opensolaris.org.
5) ? (give a suggestion to something you think would work)
I will open my call-in number which is toll-free so that if anyone would like to voice an idea that is not local and/or how we can help you, please do.
Toll Free: 866-545-5227
Intnl/pay: 865-673-6950
Conference: 809-64-14
Please feel free to join us, for a drink, a snack, some good open source talk, and a chance to talk to some of the OpenSolaris engineers. Feel free to bring your own bottle, a snack, or something to share if inclined, no entry required so feel free to join us without concern of bringing something.
When: Thursday, June 26, 2008
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (SCA07, the Mansion)
What: Summer Thinktank
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=4070+George+Sellon+Circle,+Santa+Clara,
SVOSUG Project Page, for video:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/svosug/
If you haven't been to the Mansion before, as you enter the Sun campus on Palm, from Lafayette, the Mansion is the first building on the left, as I recall. There is parking all around, a small lot in the rear, parking on Palm, and a huge lot on the other side of the Auditorium.
Tuesday June 03, 2008 Silicon Valley Linux User Group, Wed. June 4th
I'll be speaking at the Silicon Valley Linux User Group on this Wed. If you're free, please stop by.
The information for the meeting is at this link, and here's a map.
Thursday May 22, 2008 [SVOSUG] Darryl Gove - Solaris Application Programming, Thur 05/22
**** REMINDER **** REMINDER **** REMINDER ****
Tonight is the meeting, feel free to stop by for a drink and conversation.
( May 22 2008, 09:55:33 AM PDT ) Permalink
Wednesday May 21, 2008 [SVOSUG] Darryl Gove - Solaris Application Programming, Thur 05/22
Darryl Gove, author of the recent Prentice Hall publication, "Solaris Application Programming", will be joining us for this month's meeting. This is an excellent book for OpenSolaris developers at large.
This month we're planning to change the format, in interest of a community meeting where members of the community can be more interactive with each other.
The typical format for a user group is to have a 1-2 hour presentation, with questions...and rather than focusing on a large presentation, I'd
like to try and have several small presentation, including the members of the community who have helpful or interesting things they're doing on OpenSolaris. I've thought of having several laptops that users could wander around to and watch a short presentation, but not sure we can have that setup this month or not.
We will continue meeting in the Mansion, and will try to use the space inside to suite our needs, please join us in this special space and enjoy the company of your fellow OpenSolaris and other open source community members as well.
I spoke at the BayLISA meeting last week, and will be speaking at SVLUG on June 4th, and EBLUG on June 18th. I'm inviting other communities to join us, and would like to hear from some of them if they would like to give the community a perspective on the system(s) they use, what they use them for, and/or if they have interest in OpenSolaris.
Please feel free to join us, for a drink, a snack, some good open source talk, and a chance to talk to some of the OpenSolaris engineers. Feel free to bring your own bottle, a snack, or something to share if inclined, no entry required so feel free to join us without concern of bringing something.
When: Thursday, May 22, 2008
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (SCA07, the Mansion)
What: Darryl Gove - Solaris Application Programming
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Google Maps Link
SVOSUG Project Page, for video:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/svosug/
If you haven't been to the Mansion before, as you enter the Sun campus on Palm, from Lafayette, the Mansion is the first building on the left, as I recall. There is parking all around, a small lot in the rear, parking on Palm, and a huge lot on the other side of the Auditorium.
Monday May 19, 2008 Community offer to John Loiacono at Adobe!
I was encouraged to read about future support for Solaris x86 with AcroRead posted at the Adobe Site.
I posted a comment to Adobe, and would like to post it here, as I am offering to wash John Loiacono's car when Adobe finally releases Adobe for Solaris on x86 platforms. Any other OpenSolaris community members that would like to join in on this festivity would be more than welcome to do so. The Adobe offices are in downtown San Jose.
I hope Adobe will update the SPARC version also, and although old, this is much newer than the 4.0.5 version most users on Solaris x86 is been crippled with for years, actually it could be more than a decade old...the SPARC version is only 3 or 4 years old I think.
We would need to make some stipulations for such an offer though, such as:
1) Both x86 and SPARC versions of AcroRead will receive a full wash, including windows and interior.
2) wash only the outside of the car, no windows or interior if SPARC version is not updated at same time.
3) Additional spiff for Thanksgiving 2008 delivery, a full tank of gas.
4) Additional spiff for July 4th 2008 delivery, in addition to a full tank of gas, you will also receive a lube job, it just don't get much better than that, Johnny!
I am very encouraged to see this on the Adobe page, very encouraged indeed.
Wednesday May 14, 2008 Bay Area OpenSolaris Presentations
I will be speaking around the Bay Area, the first of which is be BayLISA tomorrow, Thurs. May 15th, at Yahoo in Sunnyvale.
I will be handing out some OpenSolaris usb sticks which have the OpenSolaris image on it, so you can install from it. These are really handy, and a nice piece of swag. Jesse Silvers did a great job at getting these made up, a very nice design. Also joining me will be John Weeks to give some backing on the FMAC project. Don't miss these events, should be a good time for all.
BayLISA - Thursday, May 15th at Yahoo in Sunnyvale
Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG) - Wednesday, June 4th at Symantec/Veritas in Mountain View
East Bay Linux Users Group (EBLUG) - Wednesday, June 18th at Hurricane Electric in Fremont
Hope to see you folks there! Especially look forward to seeing some of my friends in the Linux communities.
( May 14 2008, 11:25:52 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday April 29, 2008 You are signed up for the OpenSolaris summit, aren't you?
Also, don't forget to sign up for the OpenSolaris summit in Santa Cruz this coming weekend.
You can sign up and find out more info at the following URL:
http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/OpenSolaris_Summit
( Apr 29 2008, 12:26:11 AM PDT ) PermalinkCommunityOne closing in on May 5th
CommunityOne is very close, on May 5th, and there's some special announcements to happen, so if you're not doing anything please show up. It's on Monday for JavaOne, but has several sessions for OpenSolaris.Please see the schedule here:
http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/pdfs/CommunityOne2008_agenda.pdf
There's gonna be a lot of festivity and fun, with several events in the evening planned for the community.
( Apr 29 2008, 12:21:11 AM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday April 22, 2008 [SVOSUG] Project Nitro, Venue Change to Mansion/SCA07, Thursday 04/24/08
For this month's meeting we have a change of venue, just across the road from the Santa Clara Auditorium, we will be meeting in SCA07, known as the Mansion. This is a very special venue, and I will remind our community that we will be using one of California historical buildings, no different than the auditorium, but this is where the Governor stayed when he visited the Agnew campus. Sun did a wonderful job at restoring this building, and we would like to ensure that we are able to continue using it in the future. As such, please help us "tread lightly" inside.
The rooms are smaller in the Mansion, but there are more than one, so we can spread out if needed. The intent is that it will be easier to manage the lighting for the video and hold the meeting in a different, more intimate setting. The alarm can't be disarmed, so you will need to knock on the door and one of us will open it for you. The Mansion is located almost directly across from the Santa Clara Auditorium, in the smaller building located to the left of the large structure directly across the street. Use the same parking along Palm, and in the parking lots. The Mansion also has an ice machine in the kitchen, where we can host the beverages and snacks for the meeting.
The first presentation will be given by Jonathan Chew and Sasha Kolbasov, explaining Project Nitro. Project Nitro was a performance project to speed up the builds, to better parellelize the build process to use the system more efficiently. Build times have dropped down on x86 and sparc both, and I'll let Jonathan and Sasha give real world numbers. I'm seeing about 15-20 percent improvement on x86 and more on sparc myself.
Jonathan and Sasha will explain to you how they went about this project, which is most applicable to many processes on OpenSolaris where similar improvements could also be achieved.
We will be broadcasting over the web through ustream, and you can get the embedded window on the SVOSUG project page of OpenSolaris.org. Please join us over the web if you can't make it in person.
When: Thursday, April 24, 2008
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (SCA07, the Mansion)
What: Project Nitro, better performance through better parellelization
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Google Maps link
OpenSolaris SVOSUG project page link
Hope to see you there, and if not, hope you see us!
Thursday March 27, 2008 [SVOSUG] Introduction to FMAC, Thursday 03/27/08 Tonight!
**** REMINDER **** REMINDER **** REMINDER **** REMINDER ****
This meeting is tonight at 7:30pm, 6 hours from now (aprox). I screwed up
and bad put 3/28 on the original message, but most know we meet on Thurs.
Sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused.
Please join us on the web if you're not local, for tonight's meeting.
You can get tonight's presentation at this link: http://blogs.sun.com/aland/resource/FMAC_intro.pdf
Tuesday March 25, 2008 [SVOSUG] Introduction to FMAC, Thursday 03/27/08
NOTE: I made a mistake on the date, should be 03/27/08, sorry about that. It is Thursday night.
This month's meeting brings us John Weeks to speak about a new and interesting technology for OpenSolaris. You will hear about the Flexible Mandatory Access Control, a recent project which seeks to add the Flux Advanced Security Kernel (Flask) architecture and Type Enforcement (TE) to OpenSolaris.
Joining John Weeks as a leader of this project is Stephen Smalley, the architect of Flask/TE.
FMAC can be read about on the OpenSolaris website at:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/fmac/
John Weeks works in the SunFed division of Sun Microsystems, and some of you might recognize his name. He was the other engineer that worked with me to assist in bringing OpenOffice and Mozilla products to Solaris x86 before Sun was able to provide them in the base operating system. Things have changed, but John has been there in the trenches trying to provide the community with better software. FMAC shows promise as being yet another great technology which John is trying to bring to your OpenSolaris systems.
In addtition to John's presention, I will be giving a short presentation on a QuickStart docment which John created to assist folks in being able to install, setup the tools, grab the sources, build, and install OpenSolaris to an existing system. I will be putting the document up on
Genunix soon under a wiki so that we can all add and tailor this document to accomodate the various communities at large. This is targeted as a QuickStart specific, not as a comprehensive document. Look for this OpenSolaris Build QuickStart coming to a wiki near you soon!
When: Thursday, March 28, 2008
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (SCA03 upstairs)
What: Introduction to Flexible Mandatory Access Control (FMAC)
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Web: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/svosug/
Hope to see you there, and if not, hope you see us!
Thursday February 28, 2008 [SVOSUG] Update on Virtualization along with OpenSolaris Governance! 02/28 Tonight!
Just a reminder that tonight is the meeting. Please feel free to join us on the web if you're not local. ( Feb 28 2008, 01:24:39 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday February 26, 2008 [SVOSUG] Update on Virtualization along with OpenSolaris Governance! 02/28
This month we have a very special meeting which brings Tim Marsland and Todd Clayton are back at SVOSUG giving an update on Virtualization.With Virtual Box on the scene, the OpenSolaris virtual solutions provide more and better ways to connect OpenSolaris to other environments. This is a very exciting space and both Tim and Todd have both been instrumental in driving virtualization in OpenSolaris.
Along with this special update on virtualization, we will also have Ben Rockwood, community member and long supporter of OpenSolaris, speaking on OpenSolaris Governance. Ben is always entertaining to listen to, and has been involved in the OGB, so I'd like to welcome Ben to give his
perspective.
We will be broadcasting over the web through ustream.tv, and hope to have things running a bit smoother this month. We hope to have 2 cameras with one providing an overview of the meeting, and the other will pan/zoom.
Please feel free to ask questions through the chat, you do not have to be registered or logged in to use it.
When: Thursday, February 28, 2008
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (SCA03 upstairs)
What: OpenSolaris Update on Virtualization
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
http://ustream.tv/channel/svosug
http://ustream.tv/channel/svosug-presentation
( Feb 26 2008, 12:50:00 AM PST ) Permalink
Wednesday February 06, 2008 Installing Studio Built KDE 3.4.3 w/script
Ok, KDE is getting going and KDE 4 is at least compiling on OpenSolaris, but we have a ways to go before we have a usable system.
In the meantime, I have a script that I created to help install KDE 3.4.3 from the Sunfreeware site, since it is available to anyone on the inet, to pull the Studio built KDE 3.4.3 and install on your computer. I realize this is a bit dated, but it is the most recent build we have that was done with Sun's Studio compiler. This is important if you plan to use plugins, since most plugins (including flash and java) are compiled with Sun Studio. Because of this, you can't use those plugins with a gcc built KDE, AFAIK.
It is possible that an error in the user/group for KDEkderequired-343 will warn you of the error, but you can tell it to continue. I added in an additional argument to pkgadd, passing a -n, but not sure if that will supress the warning or not, and don't have time to retest...This should help at least get the packages and get this installed, even if you need to tell the script to continue.
You can get the script at this link. Let me know if you try it and how it works for you.
*** DISCLAIMER ***
This script doesn't have much error checking, and it is possible that if you break out of the script that it will download duplicates and the matching names won't be valid files.
This script also assumes that you have installed en_US.UTF-8, so if you use a different flavor of UTF-8, change to suite.
Also, this is for x86/amd64, so if you have a sparc box, change the script to suit.
*** End of DISCLAIMER ***
Tuesday January 22, 2008 [SVOSUG] Jan. Meeting, Indian Preview 1
Hope all had a great New Year in the OpenSolaris community, this year has prospects of being a great years for us, and I hope we can continue to bring good content to the community. We can all help each other with sharing the information better.I will not be opening the call-in phone, since we will be broadcasting over ustream.tv instead. I do not see a reason to use the toll free call-in as I am charged for the usage, and I think we're better off with ustream.tv. If you really have no other means and do want to call-in on the toll free number, let me know and I'll start it, otherwise let's forge foward and move to the inet. This also allows everyone to join in all countries, with an Internet connection.
We are working out some of the rough edges, but hope to leverage more video this year, and please provide feedback in the chat area. One of the nice things about the chat is that we can do that while the presentation is going on. Please offer your comments and questions, we can pass them on to the speaker, and collaborate together online while the meeting is going on.
This months SVOSUG will be a live demonstration and discussion of the Indiana preview 1 installation, configuration and upgrade. Indiana is a live CD and repository model that allows a machine to be easily installed while also providing a user profile that is more familiar to Linux users.
The presentation will be given by James Hughes, Fellow and VP of Sun Microsystems. Currently James is the CTO of the Solaris Operating System. He has developed products, standards and published papers in the areas of Storage, Networking, Security and Cryptography. He is formerly with StorageTek, Network Systems and Control Data Corp, and has over 32 years in the computer industry. For more information see:
http://research.sun.com/people/hughes
When: Thursday, January 24, 2008
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (SCA03 upstairs)
What: Indiana Preview 1
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Web: http://ustream.tv/channel/svosug
Hope to see you there, and if not, hope you see us!
( Jan 22 2008, 11:23:10 PM PST ) Permalink