Christefano Reyes presents on Redmine, a free and open source project management and issue tracking system written in Ruby on Rails. Prior to this presentation, attendees are welcome and encouraged to download it, use a shared demo or try a private, one-click install.

Popular with (but certainly not limited to) the Ruby on Rails developer community, Redmine is a full-featured system used by companies, open source projects, governmental agencies, and individual developers around the world. Big users of Redmine include open source projects such as Ruby, Puppet, Gentoo, Lighttpd, TYPO3, and the Redmine project itself.

This presentation will focus on how Redmine is used from the perspectives of developers, tech leads and project managers at a software development company. Features that will be demonstrated include:

• User and group management;
• Feeds, email notifications and web-to-mail and mail-to-web support;
• Per-project role-based permissions,
• Time tracking and reports; including calendaring and Gantt charts;
• Issue workflow management across multiple roles;
• Redmine’s plug-in architecture and growing developer ecosystem;
• Custom fields for extending user accounts, time entries, and other data structures;
• Redmine’s REST API and how it integrates with third-party platforms.

Christefano is one of the founders of Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, development and training company; and Droplabs, a coworking space and classroom near Downtown Los Angeles. As an advocate of open source software, he helps organize meetups and conferences all over the Greater Los Angeles Area. In his spare time, he trains as an amateur acrobat and gymnast at the Original Muscle Beach in Santa Monica.

Speaker: Christefano Reyes
Date: Thursday May 9th, 2013 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 107.
The Downs building is across from the tennis courts on California at Arden.

We are building the Internet-in-a-Box - A small, inexpensive device which provides essential Internet resources without any Internet connection. It provides a local copy of half a terabyte of the world’s Free information.

The device includes Wikipedia in a dozen languages, a library of 40,000 e-books, most of the world’s open source software and source code, hundreds of hours of instructional videos, and world-wide mapping down to street level.

We can deploy a “knowledge hotspot” anywhere in the world - even under solar power.

This Open Source project is being developed by SGVLUG and SGVHAK members.

Speaker: Braddock Gaskill (braddock .at. braddock.com)
Date: Thursday April 11th, 2013 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 107.
The Downs building is across from the tennis courts on California at Arden.

Steven Doran will discuss network router and wireless security, including replacing the stock routers firware with an open source alternative called DD-WRT.

Speaker: Steven Doran
Date: Thursday March 14th, 2013 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 107.
The Downs building is across from the tennis courts on California at Arden.

Lan Dang will demonstrate some of her favorite tricks for the Vim text editor as well as useful vi key bindings. She welcomes everyone to contribute their own tips. At the end, we hope to gather our tips and use cases into a document, which will be linked through the website.

Whether you use Vim as seldom as possible or you use it every day, you will learn something from this session.

Update: The Vim Roundtable presentation (with updates and notes) can be found here

Speaker: Lan Dang + SGVLUG
Date: Thursday February 14th, 2013 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 107.
The Downs building is across from the tennis courts on California at Arden.

Bio: Lan Dang spends the majority of her working hours monitoring and troubleshooting data processing systems on Linux-based computer clusters. She has accumulated a number of tips and tricks to deal with the command line, including extensive use of vim and vi key bindings.

Since the dawn of the internet, men have tried to restrict the freedoms of other men. Amongst those bound by the restrictions of the technocracy, enlightened individuals created technologies to sidestep the restrictions placed upon them. These technologies, although effective, remain cryptic to the bound masses of the technologically illiterate. What follow is a brief introduction to ssh tunnels and proxies…

Bio: Michael Starch was born in the far-frozen Northlands of the American Midwest. After being enlighten through a university education in Computer Engineering he set sail for the warm coasts of the Californian Southland. He is currently employed and has yet to die.

Speaker: Michael Starch
Date: Thursday, January 10th, 2013 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 107

Note: There will be a brief presentation before the talk where Lan Dang will share her experiences rooting the Nook Simple Touch.

Slides in PDF

Please note that we are in a different room this month. Signs will be posted, but please check out the directions given under Location:

A modern day Linux Infrastructure should be flexible, scalable and able to deal with the constant changes any business will require. Automation is key to a reliable and consistence server infrastructure, Automation also allows for easy integration of new changes.

The DevOps movement melds two traditionally siloed teams; Application Developers and Operations Engineers. Writing infrastructure as code presents a number of challenges and potential pitfalls, Operations Engineers need to write code (something they may not be familar with) and Developers need to have a strong understanding of the system (many Developers don’t want to be considered with anything other than web applications). There are several major projects related purely to the management of infrastructure as code.

We will examine Opscode Chef and make a strong use case for the implementation of Opscode Chef in a Linux Environment. David will demonstrate many techniques to utilize Chef quickly and efficiently to minimize the time of implementation. Although Opscode Chef can be run on Solaris, FreeBSD and even Windows, the presentation will discuss Linux and only Linux. David will also discuss the techniques to operate Chef on various Linux Distros which can provide a layer of abstraction from the package management systems (apt & yum). Finally David will discuss how Chef can be used to rebuild an Entire infrastructure (regardless of size or complexity) in a time previous thought impossible. The only limitation in speed of deployment is the hardware.

Speaker: David Rodriguez
Date: Thursday, December 13th, 2012 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Lauritsen 269. Lauritsen is connected to Downs; the room is a lecture hall on the 2nd floor towards northeast end. The buildings are located across from the tennis courts on California at Arden. If you enter near our usual room (Downs 107), go down the hallway, hang a right, go past the elevators, and take the stairs up one level. As soon as you come out on the 2nd floor, the classroom is on the left hand side. If you take the elevator, you will want to head left after getting off the elevator. (There is a map taped next to elevator on the 2nd floor that shows the layout of Lauritsen.)

There is no scheduled speaker. We will have open discussion, continued afterwards at Burger Continental.

Please note that we are in a different room this month.

Speaker: You!
Date: Thursday, November 8, 2012 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 119

strace: Practical Application Troubleshooting…
using the tool we all love to hate.

The Presentation will cover the Linux command line utility ‘strace’ and some of it’s many uses. It will cover the basics of Linux System Calls and their use. The presentation will use examples throughout to provide genuine use-cases for the tool. The Presentation is focused on Practical Application Troubleshooting, it will not be an in-depth guide to the various System Calls. I will demonstrate many techniques that can help you to gain a deeper understanding of application execution flow on a Linux system.

Speaker: David Rodriguez – otherwise known as… ‘D Rod’
Currently working as Linux Systems Engineer – managing various types of Linux servers (Web App, DB, Chef, Nagios, etc.)
3+ years as a Linux Systems Engineer
5+ years as a Windows Systems Engineer
10+ years as a Linux User
B.S. in Information Systems Security & A.S. in Computer and Electronic Engineering
Strong Advocate for Open Source
I like to break web applications… :-)

Date: Thursday, October 11, 2012 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 107

If you are interested in the group, please sign up for the [SGVHAK mailing list] (http://sgvlug.org/mailman/listinfo/hak “SGVHAK Mailing List Sign Up”). We will continue to crosspost announcements to the SGVLUG mailing list. We are in the process of setting up a website or subpage.

Do you like working on hardware projects? Did you just get a Raspberry Pi/Arduino/Kinect with the intentions of doing something cool? Did you wish that there was a local meetup group where you can meet up with like-minded folks and actually make progress with your projects?

Come to our kickoff meeting on Thursday to discuss starting up this special interest group. Connect with your fellow hardware geeks and share some of the projects you’ve been working on. And if we can decide on a name for the SIG, we can set up things like a mailing list, website, and wiki.

We have been kindly granted access to a room at Caltech for this meeting only. It is a small classroom with about 30 student desks and a teacher desk. We will have access to a projector and power. There is an open wireless network.

Date: Thursday, September 20, 2012 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 119 (around the corner from usual LUG meeting room)

Its time to face the music: There’s only a couple guys in Ops, and a lot of infrastructure to set up and it was all due yesterday. If only you could clone all the sysadmins of the world to get all of their expertise and know-how in deploying open source applications, you could actually get it done. Perhaps there is a way: Juju and Charms! Juju encapsulates services in a way that promotes sharing and collaboration the same way packages have done for open source software. If you are a sysadmin or a developer who is looking to get an infrastructure of databases, loadbalancers, and webapps up to speed rapidly, Juju may be interesting. If you are looking into deploying something massively scalable, like OpenStack or Hadoop, Juju is built to handle that task.

Speaker: Clint Byrum is a member of the Canonical Ubuntu Server Team, bringing years of Ops and Development experience in web environments to the task of making Ubuntu Server shine.
Date: Thursday, September 13, 2012 @ 7 pm
Location: Caltech - Downs 107