If you were as bummed as I was that Tacoma Dorkbot won’t be meeting again until late winter / early spring you should know there are other outlets for your geeky attributes in this, America’s Most Wired City.
Every third Saturday the Tacoma Linux Users Group, Taclug, meets at the University of Washington, Tacoma. This meeting should be an interesting one. With the Cyber Defense Workshop kicking things off, open source network monitoring geekery, WiFi hacking and virtualization shenanigans it is one not to miss.
Francois Caen (RHCE, CCNA), long time member and former president of Taclug, will be lecturing on open source network management tools. Folks, it gets geekier than SNMP but not much. Francois is also the president of Turbosphere, a provider of turn-key proactively managed dedicated servers for your business applications and soon to be published author.
In addition to Francios’ presentation there will be a hack session on creating WiFi captive portals. What is a captive portal? When you open your laptop in Starbucks or Firehouse Coffee (sorry, Origin 23 Degrees) you are redirected to a page before being given access to the Internet. This hands on session will be centered around creating a captive portal for everybody’s favorite local watering hole, Doyle’s Public House. Several people are bringing a variety of computer hardware to experiment with different WiFi captive portal solutions.
Finally, in addition to the WiFi captive portal hack session there will be a hack session on Linux virtualization technologies. These technologies include Xen, OpenVZ, LKVM, QEMU and more.
More information is available at the Taclug website.
