[wellylug] Next Meeting

[Hugh Davenport]

Another addition to the talk lineup.

Michael Lawson is the lead dev for a company called Sphirewall, which
offers a kernel level firewall solution.

A bit about Michael.

Hailing from Christchurch, Germany and most recently Auckland, I am a
developer with a thing for security, networking and high performance
computing. Having spent the last 4 years working in both Christchurch
and Munich Germany working for one of Europe's biggest online 
advertising
agency as a developer and sysadmin, I decided to take a leap of faith 
and
pursue my pet project "Sphirewall". Prior to my work for Adscale, I have
worked for Telstraclear, Eftpos NZ, Online communications and a few 
other
small companies.

My passion is creating software that is available for everyone without
limitations or cost, and this is what fuelled my development of 
Sphirewall.
I hate companies that offer a half baked solution and open source it as 
a
marketing technique.

Talk
Why I created yet another open source router/firewall and why it kicks 
the
socks of other options available in the same market. I will lightly go 
into
what I found was missing in other products, why this was missing and how
having these features changes how you manage your network.


Cheers,

Hugh

On 2013-07-08 10:27, Hugh Davenport wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Thank you heaps for those who came to the meeting last month. Shiv
> gave a excellent talk
> on rasberry pi's, which I am planning on purchasing some today (or 
> RSN).
> 
> I'm happy to announce that I have scheduled the next technical meeting
> for this month. It will
> be on Monday 15th of July, at 6pm. The location is Level 3 Catalyst
> House. The front doors
> lock at 6pm, so best to come earlier, but there will be a number on
> the wall to get someone
> to come let you in.
> 
> Future meetings will be on the third Monday of every month and will
> hopefully be food and
> beverages supplied (this one should as well!).
> 
> We have one talk scheduled for this month, from Neil Ramsay, part 1 of
> a series of 3.
> 
> Bio:
> An agnostic computer enthusiast, Neil runs Windows, Mac, and Linux in
> different contexts.
> His passions are running services on Linux that are available to all of
> the above operating systems, and working out how to configure these
> services in a security concious way.
> 
> After spending far too long at university Neil escaped to industry.
> He did a stint in an application support team, keeping systems running,
> followed by working as a consultant in an IT security consultancy.
> 
> 
> Topic:
> Monitoring Part 1: Nagios and Cacti.
> 
> Do you know what you Linux servers are doing when you are not watching?
> You should.
> Nagios is a tool for monitoring hosts for availability and the services
> running on them.
> It can create dependencies between services, such as your web server 
> and
> database server, so that if your database goes down you don't get
> alerted on your website too.
> We will go through a basic setup and show you how it works.
> 
> Cacti is a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) client, which is
> exceptional at creating graphs.
> It is particularly useful for graphing CPU/RAM/Disk/Network usage.
> We will go through using Cacti to extract SNMP data from some Linux
> hosts, and briefly cover how Cacti can be used for your network
> infrastructure, such as hardware switches/firewalls.
> 
> 
> If anyone else is interested in talking this month, or next month,
> flick me an email.
> 
> 
> ****
> tl;dr; come to catalyst house, level 3 next week on the 15th by 6pm.
> Neil will talk about monitoring