[SGVLUG] Recap for January meeting

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,

I had a lot of fun at tonight's meeting.  We ended up with several short presentations that covered a variety of topics, and there was a lot of participation.  

SCALE (http://www.socallinuxexpo.org) is the weekend of Feb 22-24.  The conference costs $70 for the weekend, but our discount code (SGVLG) will cut the cost to $35.   You can probably get a free pass if you volunteer.  There is some planning and prep to be done before SCALE.  If you're more interested in volunteering during SCALE, there is a lot of work involved in setting up (Thursday) and teardown (Sunday).  In addition, they could probably use help with Friday morning registration.  Michael Proctor-Smith is the person to contact.  I think there may be mailing lists you can sign up for, but I don't remember.

I did a rambling talk about my frustrating efforts to root my Nook Simple Touch and half committed to doing a longer presentation at a later date, once I have a chance to fully root the device and set it up exactly the way I want it.  Also, I will give a shout out to Calibre, a cross-platform e-book library management tool that does a really good job of managing books, transferring them to various e-book readers, and doing any necessary conversions.  It does not handle DRM'ed files directly, but there is a plugin (not officially sanctioned) that can help overcome that obstacle.

Michael Starch had a really fun and easy to understand presentation on SSH Tunnels and Proxies with live demos that worked impressively well.  Though I think my favorite part was hearing about the poor man's dyndns.  Towards the end of the talk, we looked at sdf.org,  which had enabled Michael to set up his poor man's dyndns.  

For those of you intimidated by the long cryptic ssh commandline, you can actually configure your ssh client to automatically use these settings to connect to certain hosts.  This can be controlled through ~/.ssh/config, which you have to create, if it doesn't already exist.

Claude, could you post your tips on building an ssh config file to make it easier to manage ssh tunnel proxy connections?  

Joel mentioned that there was a way to redirect all traffic through the tunnel, but he doesn't remember the mechanism.  Does anyone know how to do this?

Doug gave a brief demo of  sysrq, which is a magic key combination that enables you to direct the kernel to take certain actions, even if the system is locked up.  The most useful aspect of this is being able to safely bring down your system after a system crash, which will keep you from losing data.  

See you all next month,

Lan
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