BLUG was started in 1998 by a small group of computer geeks in Bellingham, Washington who wanted to get off Windows and learn from local Unix gurus. Our focus is on Linux and all Open Source software.
We hold a presentation meeting the first Thursday of the month at Bellingham Technical College in Campus Center room 201 (CC201). On the third Wednesday, we hold an informal organization meeting with the time and location being Bellingham Makerspace (located in the Bellisfair Mall, next to Dicks Sporting Goods). We also put on special events including the regional LinuxFest Northwest in the Spring.
Next Meeting
Security in the modern Environment
08/20/2025 at 05:30 PM
Josh will be discussing (and demonstrating!!) security tools, software, and hardware for the modern environment. Expect HAK5 gadgets and anything Defcon had in their store in the last few years.
Past Meetings
POTLUCK CHRISTMAS PARTY
12/06/2005 at 05:00 PM
This year’s Blug potluck Christmas party/LFNWfundraiser will be held SAT. DEC 17th from 6pm till 10pm in the Fairhaven Pavilion at Fairhaven Park (same place as last year) in Bellingham.
vi/vim, Unisom, diagnostics
12/01/2005 at 12:00 AM
For our last regular 7pm BLUG meeting in D bldg at BTC this year we’re having a great line up of presenters.
1. Mark Ashworth will make that infamous default editor “Vim” familiar and easy to use.
http://neolectric.com/ref/vim-tips.txt
2. John Blanford will cover a few more handy diagnostic commands to use in your terminal window.
3. Adrian Klaver will cover Unison. Unison is a cross platform file synchronizer. There is both a text based and GUI based interface. It falls between using tar and using a revision control system and it’s fairly simple to set up and learn.
Troubleshooting techniques
11/03/2005 at 12:00 AM
Troubleshooting and command line tips hosted by Wes Taylor. Bring your favorite tips and share them at the meeting.
Asterisk C Voice over IP
10/05/2005 at 12:00 AM
Have you ever thought that you might like toexperiment with or use an IPBX at home or in your business? Here’s your chance to see what it’s all about.
Asterisk C is an Open Source, Linux based, IPBX application developed by Mark Spencer of Digium, the company behind Asterisk. Asterisk @ Home evolved from the core Asterisk. It consists of several major components.
These were developed under GPL supported relatively by users themselves. It consists of applications, a provisioning system, an installer, and an operating system that, together, make a complete package ready for use as an out of the box PBX.
You might be asking, “What is Asterisk?” Think of Asterisk as the world’s finest telephony toolkit. Just about anything you’ve ever heard on a telephone can be built with Asterisk. It provides a rich collection of building blocks which allow people to call you using virtually any telephony platform including POTS (plain old telephone system) and VoIP (voice over IP).
I chose a bundled Asterisk product called Asterisk @ Home that provides Linux, Asterisk, Apache, MySQL, and PHP all rolled into a single CD.
I will bring in a working Asterisk @ Home system to give you a hands-on approach to what Asterisk is all about.
Xen and the Art of Virtualization
09/01/2005 at 12:00 AM
One of the hot topics at this year’s Linuxworld conference was virtualization, the abstraction of hardware to provide higher utilization, increased availability and easier management.
The open source Xen project (http://www.xensource.com/) provides software that partitions a physical server into several virtual servers. Xen uses a unique approach they call “para-virtualization” that provides much better performance than other virtual pc systems. Xen has been accepted into the mainline Linux kernel and is being embraced by the Linux community. For more information look at:
http://lwn.net/Articles/144765/
http://lwn.net/Articles/139964/
I will talk about the ideas of server and data center virtualization and demonstrate using Xen to run several virtual machines on a server. If I can get it to work, I will show the live migration of a running virtual machine from one system to another without interrupting running programs.
August BLUG mtg
08/01/2005 at 12:00 AM
TBA
M0n0wall
07/07/2005 at 12:00 AM
Jed Reynolds will present a demonstration about the FreeBSD based firewall, m0n0wall. M0n0wall is a run-from CD firewall that can save it’s rules to floppy or usb, and wieghs about 10mb. Jed will demonstrate how to get started with it using it’s slick PHP based interface, and point out advanced features, like traffic shaping, VPN, and DHCP options.
Disk Based Backup with Rsync, Ssh and Dirvish
06/02/2005 at 12:00 AM
With the cost of disk drives becoming so cheep, many users are ditching slow and expensive tape based backup systems and replacing them with disk based backup.
I will talk about 3 linux based programs that can be used for disk based backup, rsync, a fast incremental file transfer program created by Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame. Ssh a secure network communication program, and dirvish, a perl script that automates network backups using rsync and ssh. If time permits, I will also go over configuring dirvish to work with Bran Hatch’s authprogs
program to create secure unattended network backups.
INSTALLFEST
05/06/2005 at 12:00 AM
This meeting will be an install fest hosted by blug. If you, or someone you know, wants help installing linux this is the place to come!
LinuxFest video footage showing
05/05/2005 at 12:00 AM
Matt Hartley will be showing some LinuxFest 2005 footage from the Google presentation done by Chris Dibona.