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Do you want a copy of Fedora 11? (will have media for install at meeting)

Sun, 07/26/2009 - 23:09 — gjp
Fedora 11 x86 (32bit)
25% (2 votes)
Fedora 11 x86_64 (64bit)
13% (1 vote)
None, I will install from USB at meeting
0% (0 votes)
No thanks
63% (5 votes)
Total votes: 8
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Meeting Update (Future meeting info)

Sun, 07/05/2009 - 14:30 — gjp

The poll is finished and there is an overwhelming desire to keep the meetings on Saturday. The space search continues, but we have moved the meeting to 2nd Saturday starting in SEPTEMBER.

1 August 2009
Paul Frields will talk about Fedora at the Herndon Library
768 Center Street
Herndon, VA 20170-4640

12 September 2009
Reston Library
Topic: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV)

10 October 2009
Ubuntu and Mail Services

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Debate over Mono

Mon, 06/29/2009 - 00:54 — kevinchin5

There's a long running "discussion" about whether Mono and apps written in .NET/C# should be included, nay- used, in Linux. Apparently, Richard Stallman doesn't think so... [Thanks to Slashdot for the reminder] He doesn't really go into the details as to why, but rather appears to be using his "status" to be enough justification to his argument.

If you are open minded and not simply a Microsoft basher, check out this fantastic explanation on Why Mono Doesn't Suck to hear the other side of the story. Then make up your own mind.

Me? I love my Tomboy!!

DISA Unix STIGS and O/S Hardening

Tue, 06/23/2009 - 13:34 — Tony Murphy

As a former Sysadmin for a multitude of Unix varieties I was often hit with the task of adhering to some governing policy regarding lockdown or hardening of the O/S's that I administered. One of the more challenging was compliance with DISA UNIX STIGs. If you've ever had this task, you'll know that there are three components (the STIG policy document, the SRR scripts, and a manual checklist). There was never an automated way of getting the O/S in compliance, and worse, an automated way to ensure compliance as the servers evolved over time. This rather mundane task (finding, editing, and checking a series of configuration files, CHMODs, and the like) quickly became a daily "chore". Keeping servers in-sync with one another was a task in itself and making mistakes while editing O/S configuration files could set you back a day or two.

Do you like the current theme better than the previous?

Sat, 06/06/2009 - 23:37 — John W
Yes
90% (18 votes)
No
10% (2 votes)
Total votes: 20
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How I learned to stop worrying and love computers

Sat, 06/06/2009 - 22:16 — bdalzell

This is a tale that starts back in the ancient days of the 1960's when the pterydactyls flapped through the skys over San Francisco Bay and I went for 8 years without owning a television set...

When I was an undergraduate at UC Bezerkeley in the early 1960's computers were not appreciated outside of the engineering department and only super intense, generally male math majors were also interested in computers. In fact the overall response to computers could be summed up in the chorus of one of the Free Speech Movenment's holiday carols sung to the tune of "Joy to the World"

Joy to the world, the word has come
Clar Kerr* has called us red.
If you're not 49 percent, you can't work for the government
The Knowledge Factory
Produces more GNP
Without your subversion on its property

Chorus:

Oh do not fold or spindle, oh do not fold or spindle,
oh do not fold or spindle, or mutiiiilate.

(* president of UC B)

locate

Fri, 05/22/2009 - 01:31 — John W

So in the dizzyingly complex Linux systems I tend to work with (my Desktop being one of the worst), I've found locate to be my goto tool for locating anything and everything that's listed as a file. Locate is great, works blazingly fast, doesn't encounter permission denied errors like find. The only issue I've encountered with locate is that it uses an index database of the local file system to search for your pattern string. This database needs to be updated prior to searches, in some shared environments this update is controlled by a cron run, but if you have sudo rights or are the root user then you can run the "locate -u" command which is often aliased as "updatedb".

user@hp-laptop:~$ locate tcpdump.
/usr/share/man/man8/tcpdump.8.gz
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tcpdump.conffiles
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tcpdump.list
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tcpdump.md5sums
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tcpdump.postinst
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tcpdump.postrm
user@hp-laptop:~$

t()

Thu, 05/21/2009 - 18:19 — John W

In Drupal the ubiquitous "t" function is used to translate strings to a page language or a given user language. As such in module writing the "t" function should be used extensively to encapsulate all user readable text.

The "t" function works with special placeholders that signal "dynamic information" in a string that needs "extra" filtering or should not be filtered or translated at all, such as URLs. There are three different placeholders that offer three different exceptions to the normal operation of "t".

Placeholder Description
! Prevents all manipulation by "t", text is inserted as is.

Using GeShi filter for code highlighting

Wed, 05/20/2009 - 01:46 — John W

This website has the GeShi filter installed, so code can be escaped and formated with syntax highlighting. To have your code highlighted you must enclose it in "<code> </code>" tags. Just using these tags escapes the code and formats it as plain text.

To add syntax highlighting, set the "type" inside the tag like this, "<code type="bash">.

Supported languages are:

Language Name syntax "Type"
Bash bash
C c
C++ cpp
CSS css
Drupal 5 drupal5
Drupal 6 drupal6
HTML html4strict

drupal_goto()

Tue, 05/19/2009 - 14:45 — John W

drupal_goto($path = '', $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL, 
$http_response_code = 302)

This simple function initiates an immediate redirect of the user to the URL indicated. The function contains additional parameters to handle complex URL building and supports RFC 2616 by registering an HTTP code for the redirect.

The parameters are parsed by this code fragment:

$url = url($path, array('query' => $query, 'fragment' => $fragment, 'absolute' => 
TRUE));

The array is relatively straight forward with the [0] element as the actual address, and the query(if any) loaded into an associative part of the array and the fragments(if any) also loaded into an associative part of the array.

The PHP function 'header()' does the heavy lifting in the function by setting the destination and giving the response code to the users browser:
header('Location: '. $url, TRUE, $http_response_code);

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