GNU/Linux

While creating materials for my bash class I needed to create some globbing exercises for my students.

It occurred to me that a string operator and a comparison to the null string can be used to check if something is a substring of another value.

Sure, you can use Substring Expansion to see if the substring is at a known location such as "Does the value of $foo start with 'bar'?", but length and location are often unknown.


$ foo=barfood
$ if [ 'bar' = "${foo:0:3}" ]; then echo $foo; fi
barfood
$


LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation's annual technology conference, was a great experience in March.

The conference started with a fantastic keynote from Deb Nicholson, "Free software forever."

Topics: Firejail, AppArmor and SELinux

In October Aaron will be teaching us about locking down processes via three diff
erent mechanisms.

• Firejail: sandbox to restrict the application environment
• AppArmor: a Mandatory Access Control system, common for debian based distros
• SELinux: a Mandatory Access Control system, common for Red Hat based distros

The PLUG security meeting is a monthly open entry security class ( 3rd Thursday ).

Free Software Stammtisch job networking event this Tuesday at 18:00.

We encourage engineers from groups that are hiring and hiring managers to attend. The goal is for prospective candidates to learn about the company and the actual job while giving the team a chance to meet prospective candidates. Interviews are bi-directional, so are job searches.

We have several confirmed employers this month:

Topic: Command Line Tools Seminar
Instructor: Ryan Hermens

This month's east side meeting is a seminar on important command line tools. It's a good month to bring friends and family that have interest in GNU/Linux.

Thursday, October 11th @ 19:00

SeaGL accepted one of my talks again this year! This year I'll speak about Joey Hess' excellent etckeeper.

etckeeper makes it easy to keep system configuration files in revision control. In addition to normal revision control, etckeeper includes important features to track file ownership and permissions, work with package managers and track empty directories. etckeeper supports git, mercurial, bazaar and darcs revision control systems.

I went to my first Tübix this year. Tübingen is a beautiful college town ( Universitätsstadt ) on the Neckar river in southwestern Germany.

I particularly enjoyed the talks on SSH and authentication, both of which led into my talk on privacy and security via a password manager. I picked up a couple new ways of explaining things from the SSH talk and look forward to listening to it again.

PLUG has two topics for August.

Ed Nicholson - Technical Debts and Digital Assets

Exploring the analogy of debt and real world financial obligations, as a context for a software's or system's life cycle. Debt and Software are both fundamentally types of Intangible Assets. This talk is an exploration of how the much older asset class, Debt, may be usefully applied in understanding the relative newcomers, Software and Systems.

der.hans - Introduction to /etc/alternatives

Thursday's PLUG meeting for July went well. We had a large crowd for mid-summer including lots of new faces.

Announcements included an opening for teaching electronics at a local community college. The department head showed up, so I handed it over to him for descriptions of the classes and what they need. He's adamant about a GNU/Linux infrastructure being vital to the success of the program and has hired 4 previous instructors from PLUG.

[This is an article I wrote for Linux Journal]

Internet and cloud companies do not have perfect security. We're all familiar with large scale data theft from big corporations. While most do a great job considering the attacks against them, you can do your part by protecting your own accounts.

It's common wisdom to use a different password for each account. Better yet is using a unique email address as well. That quickly becomes unwieldy, so we need an external brain.