NYLUGblog

Adam Gandelman
- on -
DRBD and Pacemaker: Open source disaster recovery and high availability clustering
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

DRBD stands for Distributed Replicated Block Device and allows block
devices to be replicated over a network in a RAID-1 fashion. Since Linux
Kernel 2.6.33, DRBD has been accepted into mainline and with its ever
growing user base defines itself as the de facto Linux data replication
solution. DRBD acts as a block device and can be transparently inserted
underneath virtually any Linux application. Alone, DRBD’s replication
can be leveraged as a robust disaster recovery solution ensuring data is
kept geographically diverse between nodes, data centers or continents.
Coupled with other Linux clustering technologies (Pacemaker, Heartbeat,
RHCS, etc.), DRBD’s shared-disk semantics become the foundation of a
free, open-source high availability (HA) clustering stack used to
provide complete hardware and service level fault tolerance. From
databases to virtualization to centralized storage, DRBD and Pacemaker
provide a completely free, open-source availability and redundancy
solution using commodity, off-the-shelf hardware.

This talk will first provide an introduction to DRBD: what it does, how
it works, and some live demonstrations of replication-in-action. Basic
HA concepts will be covered as well as an overview of Pacemaker and the
Linux HA cluster stack as it relates to DRBD. To give a sense of its
flexibility, common and interesting use cases will be presented ranging
from simple, locally deployed HA clusters to geographically dispersed,
cross-site disaster recovery installations. Finally, attendees will see
how the current Open Cluster Framework (OCF) standards provide users
with a generic and easy way of integrating their own custom applications
into a highly-available environment using freely available open-source
software.

Attendees are expected to have some system administration experience
related to storage and networking. Knowledge of the Linux kernel and
other shared storage technologies is helpful, but not necessary.

More information:

• DRBD
• Pacemaker
• Heartbeat and Linux HA Project

About the speaker:
Adam is an expert in open-source clustering and high availability.
Originally from New England, Adam lives in Portland, OR where he has
been working at LINBIT, developers of DRBD and maintainers of Heartbeat.
Aside from providing top-level Linux High-Availability and Disaster
Recovery consulting for customers in the Americas, he also leads LINBIT
training courses in the US, doubles as a technical writer and regularly
contributes to related open-source projects. Adam enjoys his R&D work
creating new and exciting methods for DRBD integration into the fastest
growing arenas; cloud, virtualization, HPC and distributed computing
environments.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

Rob Spectre
- on -
Open Source Television with Boxee
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

The living room remains the final frontier of open source
software. With wide adoption from home office to enterprise, from
datacenter to dining rooms, consumers all over the world rely on OSS
daily to run their lives. However, the third screen that has
dominated eyeballs for the past sixty years has been the exclusive
dominion of proprietary, monolithic black boxes. With the average
American consuming eight full hours of television per day, one New
York startup aims to change this paradigm of closed software in the
single room in the house where most waking time is spent.

Boxee’s free, open source, downloadable media center software is
changing the way consumers experience media. Lead Apps Developer and
Community Evangelist Rob Spectre will discuss Boxee’s open source
heritage, hacker culture, and open API as well as answer your
questions and unload T-shirts a-plenty.

About Boxee:
Boxee is changing the way people experience home entertainment by
bringing TV shows, movies, videos, and music from the Internet to the
TV. Boxee's free software can be easily downloaded to any computer or
embedded into TVs, Blu-Ray players, game consoles, and set top boxes.
Boxee has quickly established itself as the best way to bring
entertainment from different sources into one place – anything from a
local collection of movies, TV shows, music, and photos, to streaming
content from websites like Netflix, MLB.TV, Pandora, Last.fm, and
flickr. Users can also discover new entertainment from their friends
and share recommendations with social networks like Facebook and
Twitter. More than a million people use Boxee to enjoy their
entertainment. Learn how you can join them at www.boxee.tv.

About Rob Spectre:
Rob is the Lead Apps Developer and Community Evangelist for Boxee
with the worst haircut in open source software. An eleven year Linux
user, he serves the Boxee family as the passionate advocate for the
open source community armed with over a decade of experience in OSS
and a hefty supply of hairspray. In what little spare time he has,
Rob likes to go to punk rock shows, speedcube and maintain his
unInternet service laughotron.com.

More Information:

• Boxee
• Developer's Site
• Developer Blog

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

Wietse Venema
- on -
Postfix: past, present and future
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

In the 12 years since its initial release by IBM, the open source
Postfix mail system has become part of the email infrastructure.
The system has proven itself on personal systems and on ISP
infrastructures with 10s of millions of mailboxes. After Postfix
reached completion by 2006, the focus of development has moved from
building new functionality towards making the system more extensible
and more survivable in the face of changing threats and requirements.
In this presentation Wietse will review lessons learned, current
developments, and some speculation about the future.

More Information:

• Postfix Homepage
• Homepage of Wietse Venema

About Wietse Venema:
Wietse Venema is known for his software such as the TCP Wrapper
and the POSTFIX mail system. He co-authored the SATAN network
scanner and the Coroner’s Toolkit (TCT) for forensic analysis, as
well as a book on Forensic Discovery. Wietse received awards from
the Free Software Foundation, the System Administrator’s Guild
(SAGE), the Netherlands UNIX User Group (NLUUG), as well as a
Sendmail innovation award. He served a two-year term as chair of
the international Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams
(FIRST). Wietse currently is a research staff member at the IBM T.
J. Watson research center. After completing his Ph.D. in physics
he changed career to computer science and never looked back. In his spare time he enjoys hiking and cycling with his wife, Annita.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

Richard Kreuter
- on -
NoSQL and MongoDB, Relating to Non-Relational Databases
Wednesday, April 21, 2010 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

This talk will introduce the whats and wherefores of the non-relational database world (often called “NoSQL” databases), followed by a detailed look at MongoDB, a dynamic, schema-free, document-oriented database. Topics will include key-value stores, dynamo- and bigtable-descendants, document-oriented databases, scaling strategies. Databases to be discussed include Memcached, Tokyo Cabinet, CouchDB, SimpleDB, Cassandra, Riak, Voldemort, and MongoDB.

More information

• MongoDB
• Tokyo Cabinet
• CouchDB
• Memcached
• Cassandra
• Riak
• Voldemort
• SimpleDB

About Richard Kreutzer
Bio: Richard Kreuter is a software engineer at 10gen, the sponsor of the open source project MongoDB. He has wrangled code in bioinformatics, websites, compilers, airfare search, among other randoms.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

Forest Mars and Jingsheng Wang
- on -
Drupal makes me hAPI: Open source social publishing architecture
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Drupal is open source social publishing software that empowers individuals, teams, and communities to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website as well as build more complex web applications. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different types of web sites, including community web portals, corporate web sites, social networking sites, personal web sites or blogs, and much more.

Drupal’s roots extend deep into the Linux and Open Source communities. Drupal had its “coming out” at the 2005 FOSDEM conference in Brussels and early iterations were mainly developed on Linux.

This talk will cover the Drupal framework with an emphasis on architecture and programming patterns while touching on a number of other topics such as performance tuning and hosting integration as well as considering the underlying reasons for Drupal’s wide-ranging success, all served up with a healthy smathering of awesome sauce.

The presentation will also include a short real world case study of a Drupal SaaS implementation “the BeerCloud” (an Android and iPhone application which uses Drupal as a backend)

More Information:

• Drupal
• Drupal + Services Module + Beer = BeerCloud on Android and iPhone
• Community Free Software Group

About Forest Mars & Jingsheng Wang:
Forest Mars is a Network Architect and Drupal Developer who presents on a variety of topics concerning the Future of Media including Open Source Models, Trusted Network Protocols, and Web Video Broadcasting. Coming from a background in Cybernetics and Information Theory, Forest Mars is known for his work as the Architect of New York’s first WiFi Internet Service Provider, the “Two Rooms” Free Internet Cafe located in Manhattan’s East Village, and “Yellow Hat” a Debian based LInux distro with Tibetan Language support. He also serves as a board member of the Community Free Software Group and Unigroup of New York.

Jingsheng Wang is a Drupal Developer, Android Developer and Reverse Engineer at GreatBrewers.com .

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.