[SGVLUG] Recap for January meeting

[Homan Chou]

This was a super informative meetup, I'm glad I came.  The demo was
very well put together and helped solidify these ssh tunneling
concepts more concretely in my mind.  Thanks Michael!  Also +1 on the
way to hack a poor man's dynamic dns.  Love it!  Lan, I unfortunately
cannot make SCALE, I'm for sure in Vegas for my friend's bachelor
party weekend...

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 1:23 AM, Lan Dang <l.dang at ymail.com> wrote:
> 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