The following are past presentations from NoVaLUG meetings.

If you would like to present at NoVaLUG, please contact us with this form.

Meeting notes and agendas can be found here.

Geekathon (Installfest/Swap Meet/Geek T-Shirt Contest)

This meeting is intended to be more of a social event than a presentation. We'll be doing a swap meet, installfest, and geek t-shirt contest.

  • Swap meet: bring gear you don't use and trade with others.
  • Installfest: Bring some hardware and we'll see if we can install Linux on it. Also, if you have things you'd like to show off, bring them.
  • Geek T-shirt Contest: Does this really need explaining? There will be prizes.

Meeting Details:

Meeting Notes: TBD

Agenda Slides: TBD

AI: Real World Software Development

This presentation is on the practical application of Artificial Intelligence to develop software, not be a theorist but by a practitioner. Learn how AI is really used to enhance and improve software development.

Presenter: Bryan Weber, founder of Cobenian.

Demo: github

Meeting Notes: hedgedoc

Agenda Slides: hedgedoc

Video: YouTube

Wildcard Certificates and Let's Encrypt

Wildcard Certificates can be used with multiple hosts under the same domain. Let's Encrypt paved the road for browsers to be less tolerant of wrongly provisioned certificates. This presentation will give practical examples of how to use wildcard certificates with Let's Encrypt.

Presenter: John Place.

Slides: html

Meeting Notes: https://hedge.novalug.org/Hxds0bEcSLSb-fv1zxo-AA#

Agenda Slides: https://hedge.novalug.org/p/A_eJoihhX#/

Video: https://youtu.be/osblJk84X8k?si=PpgJvHKBAgeoCtLT

Robot Operating Systems

A light introduction to fundamental concepts in autonomous robotics including a brief overview of robots/robotics, the sense-plan-act paradigm that defines the discipline of robotics as the study of embodied intelligence, and ROS - Robot Operating System ("the Linux of Robotics").

Presenter: Sravan Balaji.

Slides: html

Meeting Notes: https://hedge.novalug.org/49-WX7OvQ7qxQnphuIbfZQ?both

Agenda Slides: https://hedge.novalug.org/p/G2MrXqhy_#/

Video: YouTube

DNSSEC and DevOps - 17 August 2024

Improving security and reliability in DevOps deployments.

Presenter: John Franklin.

Slides: pptx

Meeting Notes: hedgedoc

Agenda Slides: hedgedoc

Video: Unfortunately, lost.

AI Security - July 2024

A Discussion of the Security Implications and Issues Regarding Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence by Kevin Latchford, CCNA, AISEC.

Slides: PDF

Meeting Notes: HedgeDoc

Agenda Slides: HedgeDoc

Video: Lost, unfortunately.

Tech Job Hunting Seminar - June 2024

This Seminar features John Kennedy and Brandon Trimble, Managing Director for Motion Recruitment, giving tips, tricks, and advice on hunting for a tech job in 2024.

Slides: HedgeDoc

Video: YouTube

Meeting Notes: HedgeDoc

May 2024 Virtual Meeting

This was a last minute virtual meeting where we discussed a number of topics, such as NixOS, Raspberry Picos, cron vs fcron, and more.

Video: Video

I/O Loadtesting with Fio

Fio is an open source program for testing storage devices. It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, *BSD, etc.

https://github.com/axboe/fio https://fio.readthedocs.io/ https://lore.kernel.org/fio/

Presenter(s): Vincent Fu

Materials:

Video: Video

Host Files and DNS

Presenter(s): Darren Kara

This presentation is an introduction to how DNS works on Linux, how to configure and override settings, and a historical perspective of DNS on Linux.

Darren Kara is an infrastructure engineer and manager at ICANN, where he is responsible for the operation of one of the Internet’s 13 root DNS servers.

Video: Video

Notes:

Babashka and Clojure

Overcome frustrations, when writing bash and Make, without looking at stackoverflow. Frustrated with python? Wish something was there to enable instant feedback when developing scripts? Finding that python isn't as easy as it seems? Tearing your hair out with python package management?

Rahul will introduce Clojure, a language that was not made for scripting — now made possible with Babashka. Learn how the Clojure Babashka ecosystem makes scripting and programming a much better experience — imagine a world without need for stackoverflow!

More useful links:

Presenter(s): Rahul De

Materials:

Using Linux File Access Policy Daemon (fapolicyd) / Security Enhancements

Derek will discuss and demonstrate the use the File Access Policy Daemon (fapolicyd), including enhance security on Linux systems.

Presenter(s): Derek Thurston

Materials:

Video: Video

Introduction to Database Forensics

Zak will present a primer on getting information from a database when obtained from forensic sources. Planned topics:

  • Open and closed source databases
  • Unicode and other character sets
  • Tools to use on linux systems

Presenter(s): Zachary Zebrowski

Materials:

Making Hardware Work (With Linux) Sponsor: Shropshire (UK) LUG

John will speak on Making "it" work — how to break incompatibility and dependency hell for your hardware without mashing your desktop. He will present an overview of Linux features to get awkward, custom, or, unusual hardware working without destroying a system or descending into madness.

Sponsored jointly by NoVaLUG & Shropshire Lugs — SLUG

Presenter(s): John Alexander

Intro to Mastodon & the Fediverse

Going Off Grid —A Practical Guide Sponsor: Shropshire (UK) LUG

Sponsored by Shropshire Linux Group (SLUG)

Hosted by John Kennedy & Great Britain's John Alexander

Andy will spaek onr the design and installation of renewable energy at his home in South Shropshire. Beginning with overall energy requirements for power and space heating, the talk will cover the design and implementation, followed by a discussion of how well everything works.

Issues identified during implementation and predicted performance led to some re-engineering. As demand changed, an EV was purchased. The talk will cover these changes and issues which arose.

In sum, it is possible to run 100% solar power with a small generator boost at the end of December at a reasonable cost. However, implementers need to really understand needs and design accordingly. Andy will describe key requirements and design features required for a successful project. Andy About Andy

"As a child I used to rip apart anything electrical to see how it worked and on occasion even put it back together afterwards. Became a licensed radio amateur at the age of 16 and worked designing PMR radios and infrastructure since the early 1980s. Involved public safety network design and operations for various organisations for around 20 years.

"First played with Linux in 1995 (Slackware 0.98 kernel). Managed the ongoing Linuxbierwanderung mailing list since 1998. Linux has been my daily driver since about 2000.

"I developed a strong interest in the decarbonisation of energy over the last decade and now live off grid (100% solar) in South Shropshire.

"I recently got back into embedded design after a gap of about 20 years and am really enjoying the rediscovering those skills."

Presenter(s): Andy Fletcher

Linux Q&As

Bring your questions for answers from the NoVaLUG community.

Presenter(s): John Kennedy

Decoding Radio Signals w/ an SDR on a Raspberry Pi

Learn how to build a public safety radio scanner or under $100 and manage wtih an icecast server.

Presenter(s): Rich Lucente

Materials:

Build a public safety radio scanner for under $100 using the Raspberry Pi 4. Discover what digital trunked radio is and how to set up hardware and software on the RPi 4 to decode Project 25 radio traffic and stream to an icecast server. The icecast server, running on a separate Linux system provides client access to the stream and archives the streams using systemd timers/services. Connect over WiFi with VLC to the Icecast server and listen live to public safety radio traffic. At this meeting, Rich will share his experiences assembling and operating this method.

The GIMP   

Presenting at an intro to intermedate level, Roger will discuss how to use The GIMP with tips & tricks, demos, organizing images, relevant shooting tips. Best watched on large screen.

Presenter(s): Roger Broseus

Materials:

The GIMP — GNU Image Manipulation Program — is a free and open source program licensed under the GPLv3+ license. It is very powerful alternative to non-free (expensive) image editing programs. It is available for Linux, Windows and macOS. The GIMP has been under continuous maintenance and development since 1995 and is widely used by amateurs and professional photographers for post processing of their images. Session Objectives

This talk is aimed both at introducing prospective users to The GIMP as well as moving on to intermediate levels of usage. Expect the following:

  • Intro to basics of imaging as they relate to editing photos.
  • A few basics about shooting photography.
  • Some basic setup info for The GIMP, including,
    • Setup and layout,
    • Short-cut keys.
  • Demonstrations of editing tools for basic and intermediate operations.
  • Tips and tricks.
  • Q & A.
  • How to get The GIMP
  • References / Resources

Lightening Talks — Rasp Pi

Led by John Kennedy, speakers will talk about things they have done with their Raspberry Pi computers. He will speak on using a Pi to deploy to AWS with Terraform and Ansible.

We have had previous, relevant presentations at NoVaLUG meetings. Look for them on our Presentations page. Examples: science experiments aloft, kite photography, Pi Hole.

Presenter(s): John Kennedy, et. al.

CentOS Is Not Dead

Presenter(s): Peter Larsen

Materials:

On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced a big change for the CentOS project. Peter Larsen from Red Hat will talk about the changes and how it brings CentOS ("Stream") than CentOS Linux is today. He will discuss how Fedora, CentOS and RHEL get software, updates and how the process works. The process of converting CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream will also be described.

Getting started with Traefik Container Edge Router / Reverse Proxy

Presenter(s): Docker Captains Michael Irwin, Phil Fenstermacher

Containers enable quick installation of new applications and scaling of existing apps. Then comes exposing them to users, load balancing across replicas — even at home. Reverse proxies are a great at exposing services, terminating SSL, and modify traffic during a request. Traefik is a popular reverse proxy for exposing containers because of its flexibility, as a load balancers, and its but ability to with Docker, Kubernetes, Let's Encrypt, and more.

We will demonstrate the whys and hows of running Traefik at home and in an enterprise. To follow along with demos:

  • Pre-install Docker, including docker-compose.
  • Expose port 443 to the internet too to use Let's Encrypt.

Traefik works on ARM so it works well on a Raspberry Pi. Knowledge of containers will help, but isn't necessary — we'll review the important stuff as we go.

Michael and Phil are Docker Captains from Virginia Tech.

Reverse Engineering Example — Migrate & Re-engineer Closed Source Solutions Sponsor: Shropshire (UK) LUG

Presenter(s): Heather Lomond

Materials:

Derived from closed source Minitouner, Longmynd is an open source an application that "talks" via USB to a DVB-S/S2 demodulator. It is mainly used by the Amateur Television Community to receive Transmissions of video pictures.

The Longmynd re-write is a transmitter solution to run alongside a Portsdown,a Raspberry Pi based Transmitter solution for DVB-S/S2 pictures. This allows for both TX and RX of video pictures on one, Raspberry Pi box. Hence, the Longmynd Receiver was born. The biggest challenge was that the specification and documentation of the DVB-S/S2 hardware (the Serrit NIM) was only available on an NDA basis and the USB interface between the hardware and the Windows PC (an FTDI board) contained custom code.

The presentation will tell the tale of some reverse engineering, trial and error, lucky guesses and hours of analysis of many GBytes of data which finally led to the fully functional, Longmynd Receiver on the RPI. The implementation has been used as the software basis for three new receivers, is fully Open Source (available on GitHUB), has been widely adopted in the ATV community. Longmynd is a two, significant, awards for innovation in the Amateur radio world.

The Rocky Linux Project Sponsor: Wolverton (UK) LUG

Presenter(s): Greg Kurtzer, R. Leigh Hennig

With the EOL of CentOS 8 coming this year and transition to a rolling release model, Greg Kurtzer is initiating the Rocky Linux Project, a free, community-run drop-in replacement for CentOS and RHEL. Greg is original founder of the CentOS.

After a whirlwind start of 3 months of infrastructure building, the first release candidate of Rocky Linux is expected by 31 March 2021; the official release is expected in mid-2021.

Greg and Leigh will speak and answer questions on:

  • The formation and status of Rocky Linux,
  • Address questions that sysadmins might have about migrating a CentOS system to Rocky Linux, and,
  • How users can contribute to the success of the Project.

Introduction to the Enterprise Kubernetes Container Platform — OpenShift

Presenter(s): Peter Larsen

Materials:

Video: Video

Home AutomationSponsor: Shropshire (UK) LUG

Presenter(s): Alistair Swaffer

Password Cracking With A GPU — Why Complexity MattersSponsor: Wolverton (UK) LUG

Presenter(s): Adam Sweet

Materials:

Getting Started w/ Linux Containers

Containers now go hand-in-hand with Linx with more and more workloads created for them as a first step. Peter plans an into to containers as a foundation for a container platform talk next month. He'll cover what Linux containers are, they're use, making them and why they are so useful. A hands-on demo is planned.

Presenter(s): Peter Larsen

Materials:

Video: Video

Building A Server For / By A "Noob!" International/virtual meeting w/ Shropshire LUG

Presenter(s): Nick Cook

Materials:

Video: Video

Job Hunting Seminar

Presenter(s): John Kennedy, Suzie Grieco, Brandon Trimble, Adam Avitabile

Materials:

Video: Video

Intro to PostgreSQL & Beyond International/virtual meeting w/ Shropshire LUG

Presenter(s): Chris Ellis of Intrbiz

Materials:

Video: Video

Playing with Strings: An Introduction To The Tcl Scripting Language

Presenter(s): William Giddings

Video: Video

PostgreSQL for IoT (Subtitle) International/virtual meeting w/ Shropshire LUG

Presenter(s): Chris Ellis of Intrbiz

Materials:

Video: Video

Video Recording & Editing of Web Sessions

Presenter(s): Mark Walker

Materials:

Video: Video

Forth Programming Language

Presenter(s): Carsten Strotmann

Video: Video

Science Experiments with Weather Balloons & Raspberry Pi International/virtual meeting w/ Shropshire LUG

Presenter(s): Heather Lomond, John Alexander

Materials:

Video: Video

Nix & NixOS - The "next-gen" Linux distro

Presenter(s): Carsten Strotmann

Materials:

Video: Video

Open Source Creation of Podcasts An international, virtual, inter-LUG meeting

Presenter(s): Mark Walker

Materials:

Terraform (& much more)

Presenter(s): Tameika Reed

Video: Video

Intro: Docker & Docker Compose — An international, virtual, inter-LUG meeting

Presenter(s): Bret Fisher, Docker Capt.

Video: Video

Intro to Python Teleconference Meeting from Czech Rep.

Presenter(s): Petr Viktorin

Video: Video

An Intro to Salt Teleconference Meeting

Presenter(s): Nick Vissari

Materials:

Video: Video

Bergamot Monitoring — An international, virtual, inter-LUG presentation

Presenter(s): Chris Ellis

Materials:

Video: Video

42 Years of vi - Teleconference Meeting

Presenter(s): Sam Chessman

Materials:

Video: Video

Intro to Rundeck Teleconference Meeting

Presenter(s): Damon Edwards

Video: Video

Introduction to Cryptography

Presenter(s): Xavier Belanger

Materials:

Video: Video

Blockchain

Presenter(s): Ren Shan

Materials:

Video: Video

Running Linux on Android — Termux, etc.

Presenter(s): Zak Zebrowski

Materials:

Video: Video

Data Analysis using UNIX tools (No video)

Presenter(s): Rahul Kumar

Materials:

Block Chain & Mangoes

Presenter(s): Sufian Alkhaldi

AI and Machine Learning

Presenter(s): Mahmuda Liza

Materials:

Video: Video

Intro to Git / GitHub / GitLab — Details

Presenter(s): John Kennedy

Materials:

Video: Video

An Introduction to Linux — from getting started to finding new & better tools.

Presenter(s): Peter Larsen

Materials:

Video: Video

Three Short talks: Pi Hole / Fish Shell / Trafik Edge Router w/ Docker

Presenter(s): John Kennedy, Andy Newton

Materials:

Video: Video

Sharing America's Code: Code.gov

Presenter(s): Joe Castle, Amin Mehr, Ricardo Reyes

Materials:

Video: Video

Gravitational Teleport

Presenter(s): Hunter Madison

Video: Video

Running AudioPi

Presenter(s): Sam Chessman

Video: Video

Open Source Overview and Zabbix

Presenter(s): Peter Larsen

Materials:

Silkscreen CMS Installation and configuration

Presenter(s): John Franklin

Video: Video

Kite Photography with the Raspberry Pi

Presenter(s): Zak Zebrowski

Materials:

Video: Video

DNS: Name Resolution and Beyond

Presenter(s): Xavier Belanger

Materials:

Video: Video

Docker for Everyone

Presenter(s): Doug Toppin

Materials:

Video: Video

EFI and GPT Multi-boot Practices

Presenter(s): Brian Smith

Video: Video

CJDNS - IP6 Mesh VPN

Presenter(s): Stuart Gathman

Video: Video

Red Hat Satellite and FreeIPA and Audacity

Presenter(s): Tom

Video: Video

Easy Partitioning/Volumes w/ RHEL7 Installer — LVM / RAID5

Video: Video

Logical Volumes and How to Use Them

Presenter(s): Peter Larsen

Video: Video

Docker: What Is It and Why Do I Care?

Presenter(s): Dave Kline

Video: Video

Cross Compiling, Emulation and Virtualization

Presenter(s): Eric Johnson

Video: Video

Photographs & Linux

Presenter(s): Roger Broseus

Materials:

Video: Video

Introducing Linux In A Developing Country — El Salvador

Presenter(s): Roger Broseus

Materials:

Mdp — Presentations from the command line

Presenter(s): John Kennedy

Materials:

Video: Video

Peter Larsen's collection of video of presentations at NoVaLUG mtgs.

Presenter(s): Multiple

Video: Video Index