Adam Gandelman on DRBD and Pacemaker: Open source disaster recovery and high availability clustering

August 9th, 2010

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:

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.

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Tonight: Coding Workshop/Hacking Society Meeting 6-8 PM

July 20th, 2010

Coding Workshop/Hacking Society Meeting: 7/9 6-8 PM

NY Public Library, Hudson Park Branch
66 Leroy St.
New York, NY 10014
Calendar & Directions

Coding Workshops/Hacking Society: This is a group of people that wants to learn about and work on coding in Python, Smalltalk, C++, and other languages, and hack on code. Sometimes they go out to eat afterward. Bring something to show off and discuss! The workshops meet every other Tuesday, at the NY Public Library, Hudson Park Branch. 66 Leroy St. NY NY from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

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Gabriella Coleman, James Keenan, Jon Stanley on Debian & Debconf 10, Rakudo*, and New Fedora Performance Tuning Features

July 16th, 2010

Gabriella Coleman, James Keenan, Jon Stanley
- on -
Debian & Debconf 10, Rakudo*, and New Fedora Performance Tuning Features
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Professor Coleman will tell us about Debconf 10 which will be held August 1st through 7th right here in New York City. This will be the first time the conference is being held in America, so it is a great opportunity for us to participate and learn. She will cover some of Debconf’s history and update us on the schedule of events and talks. This will also be a chance to volunteer to fulfill some remaining roles that could help make the conference even better for our guests.

On July 29, Rakudo* (pronounced “rakudo star”), the first user-friendly
distribution built around an implementation of the Perl 6 programming language, will be released. In this talk, James Keenan will provide a brief introduction to Rakudo*:

  • What is it?
  • How does it differ from Perl 6 itself?
  • Who is its intended audience?
  • How do you get it?
  • How can you learn it?
  • What does that asterisk in its name mean?

Fedora has some great new performance analysis features that can help you obtain the best performance from your hardware possible. Jon Stanley will introduce us to some of these tools such as perf, latencytop, and systemmap in a hands on demo. He will also make an overview of Fedora 13 features.

More information:

About the speakers:
Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman examines the
ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the
law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political
activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on
computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as
those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She
is completing a book manuscript “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the
Ethics of Free and Open Source Software” (under contract with Princeton
University Press). She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards,
including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research
Council. She is on leave during the 2010-2011 academic year at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

James E Keenan has been hacking Perl since 2000. He is the author or maintainer of 15 distributions on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). He has co-led Perl Seminar New York since its founding ten years ago and has spoken or led workshops at numerous Perl conferences and user groups in the United States and Canada. He is active, principally in testing, in the
Parrot virtual machine project, one of the underpinnings of Rakudo Perl. Jim first attended NYLUG in 2000 and spoke at NYLUG in October 2006. He is a senior software developer at a leading email services and campaign management provider in New York City.

Jon Stanley is a longtime Fedora contributor and is currently a member of the Fedora Board. He has previously presented at NYLUG. He is currently most aligned with the Fedora Infrastructure team, where he keeps the servers that make Fedora possible running 24/7. He can be found on IRC as jds2001 in various Fedora channels and #nylug on Freenode.

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.

No tags for this post.

Coding Workshop/Hacking Society Meeting: 7/9 6-8 PM

July 6th, 2010

Coding Workshop/Hacking Society Meeting: 7/9 6-8 PM

NY Public Library, Hudson Park Branch
66 Leroy St.
New York, NY 10014
Calendar & Directions

Coding Workshops/Hacking Society: This is a group of people that wants to learn about and work on coding in Python, Smalltalk, C++, and other languages, and hack on code. Sometimes they go out to eat afterward. Bring something to show off and discuss! The workshops meet every other Tuesday, at the NY Public Library, Hudson Park Branch. 66 Leroy St. NY NY from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

No tags for this post.

Rob Spectre on Open Source Television with Boxee

June 7th, 2010

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:

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.

No tags for this post.

Wietse Venema on Postfix: past, present and future

May 3rd, 2010

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:

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.

No tags for this post.

Richard Kreuter on NoSQL and MongoDB, Relating to Non-Relational Databases

April 14th, 2010

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

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.

No tags for this post.

Forest Mars and Jingsheng Wang on Drupal makes me hAPI: Open source social publishing architecture

March 12th, 2010

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:

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.

No tags for this post.

Luke Kanies on The Future of Puppet – What a Model-Driven Infrastructure Means to You

February 12th, 2010

Luke Kanies
- on -
The Future of Puppet – What a Model-Driven Infrastructure Means to You
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Please join us on February 17th, 2010 for a special guest, Luke Kaines, the founder of the Puppet Project.

This talk will have a general focus on the future of Puppet, and will
particularly delve into how Puppet’s model of the world will be used
to drive new tools and capabilities. While Puppet is obviously about
configuring your infrastructure, the fact that it uses declarative
models rather than merely relying on chunks of opaque code is critical to
both how we got here and where we go in the future.

This year will be the year of data for Puppet. For example, its most
recent major release provided the means to address a host’s compiled
configuration as a separate, manageable entity, meaning it can be
stored, controlled, and validated at will. The next full release will
have granular event reporting, with correspondingly greater ability to
correlate configurations to the resulting changes.

Each successive release thereafter will further expose the data that
lies at the heart of a Puppet infrastructure. This talk will discuss
some of the kinds of data we’ll be bringing to the forefront of your
Puppet infrastructure, along with how you can take advantage of it and
how it will change your view of the world.

More Information:

About Luke Kanies:
Luke is the founder and CEO of Reductive Labs and the founder of the
Puppet project. Previously, he was a consultant, open source
contributor, and article author. He has focused on tool development
since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools
and contributing to established products like Cfengine. He has
presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at
OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.

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.

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Meeting January 27th: Edward Capriolo on Hadoop – Computation clusters at Scale

January 23rd, 2010

Edward Capriolo
- on -
Hadoop – Computation clusters at Scale

** Please note important information about: this meeting **

This presentation gives a brief high level overview of Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.

After the overview, we will delve into a with a practical example of Hadoop solving a “big data” problem.

Finally we will discuss how the demonstrated Hadoop processing model scales out to terabytes of data and hundreds or even thousands of computers.

More Information:

About Edward Capriolo:

Edward Capriolo does System Operations at About.com. He researches high/traffic high-availability and scalable solutions. Edward is a committer to the Apache Hadoop Hive sub project.

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