OldNews

Social: November

What might you want to do? Tell Tina. If we don't get a request we may skip a social this year (like we do many years), as people's schedules just get too full as the winter holiday season sets in.

No requests, so enjoy the extra free time.

Technical Meeting: Thursday November 14th

Bill Marshall will give a presentation on Ansible.

Ansible is an open-source configuration management tool for Linux, Unix-like systems with python, Windows and many network/security devices. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or remote PowerShell to do its tasks.

Bill has been using Ansible on Linux systems for over two years. He will have a presentation, demo and Q&A time. He can also compare and contract Chef, Ansible and CFEngine if there is interest.

6 pm, in or near RCTC Heintz Center's H1411 (note: For those of you that have been coming for a long time, we are still in the same place, the rooms in the Heintz Center were renumbered. Prior to March 20th this room had been known as HA108. If anyone finds updated maps, please let us know.)

Directions to Campus

Campus layout

Heintz Center Building Map

Anything else you want to see on the agenda? Let Tina know.

Social: October

What might you want to do? Tell Tina.

Never happened, sorry.

Technical Meeting: Thursday October 10th

Brent Vrieze will return to us from the Cities to present on his PFSense FreeBSD based firewall.

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https://www.pfsense.org/

pfsense is an enterprise grade firewall for your home. Based on FreeBSD with a custom kernel and many 3rd party software packages to do network monitoring, filtering, routing, DNSSEC, DNS over TLS, VPN. A virtual kitchen sink of security tools in one package...free.

It can be installed on any X86 or X64 based CPU with minimal memory and storage requirements. I personally use an AMD based Mini-ITX board that does not require a CPU fan with an old 4 port PCIe Intel NIC that supports VLAN tagging and so there are no moving HD parts a small SSD.

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6 pm, in or near RCTC Heintz Center's H1411 (note: For those of you that have been coming for a long time, we are still in the same place, the rooms in the Heintz Center were renumbered. Prior to March 20th this room had been known as HA108. If anyone finds updated maps, please let us know.)

Directions to Campus

Campus layout

Heintz Center Building Map

Anything else you want to see on the agenda? Let Tina know.

Social: Friday September 27th

Farm pizza!

Dream Acres near Spring Valley, Friday September 27th, 6:45 pm (you're welcome to arrive earlier if your schedule allows, but they're 40 minutes south of Rochester). They state to expect $15-25/pizza. It's a working farm, so please leave the dogs at home. You would need to bring your own beverages and place settings, from the pictures it looks like they'll provide some seating or you can bring your own. I'm hoping by waiting until late in the season, the bugs will have died down, the tradeoff means 6:45 will be pretty close to sunset although we'll still have twilight.

Social: Thursday September 12th, 6 pm

We do not have a speaker scheduled for the technical meeting that would be this Thursday. So instead we'll play disc golf.

Just up the road outside the RCTC field house. Meet at the parking lot edge / field house doors, 6 pm.

Here is a map.

Keep your eyes open as the evening of the 12th approaches, the weather forecast is questionable and we may need to switch to something with less soggy ground (such as a Pokémon Go walk) or under shelter (dinner somewhere).

We have once again succeeded in summoning the rain gods!  ;) So no disc golf. Instead we'll meet for 6 pm dinner at the Arby's that is Apache Mall-adjacent.

Depending on what the weather is doing, timelines, and crowd interest, after dinner we will either disperse or maybe some will go across Hwy 14 to Soldier's Field for some Pokemon Go walking on paved trails.

Social: Thursday August 8th

We do not have a speaker scheduled for the technical meeting that would be this Thursday. So let's take advantage of the weather forecast and try a Pokemon Go walk. We'll meet at the Silver Lake Park east shelter, which is on the north side of the lake.

6 pm, Thursday August 8th

No smart phone? Don't like Pokemon? Want to tote your camera instead? Just want to join us for the walk&talk? That's all fine. As usual, family, friends, and children all welcome. This one should be dog-friendly too if yours likes to walk, just beware all of the goose poop.

Social: Thursday July 25th, 6 pm

Disc golf! Just up the road outside the RCTC field house. Meet at the parking lot edge / field house doors, 6 pm. Here is a map.

Technical Meeting: Thursday July 11th

Tim Anderson will present on his customized keyboard, a Dactyl WIP. Attendees with their own customized input hardware to show off are welcome to bring theirs for "show and tell" that will occur after the presentation.

About the presentation:

Some if the benefits of, and my reasoning for, using an ergonomic keyboard. I'll cover some other open source keyboard projects that are available that I've discovered during my research into the topic, and finally a reasonably detailed overview of the process in which I took to build my Dactyl keyboard.

6 pm, in or near RCTC Heintz Center's H1411 (note: For those of you that have been coming for a long time, we are still in the same place, the rooms in the Heintz Center were renumbered. Prior to March 20th this room had been known as HA108. If anyone finds updated maps, please let us know.)

Directions to Campus

Campus layout

Heintz Center Building Map

Anything else you want to see on the agenda? Let Tina know.

RochesterFest lunch: Monday June 24th

June downtown lunch at RochesterFest (Soldier's Field track oval), Monday June 24th, 11:30 am, weather permitting.

For those of you downtown who aren't up to walking that far (or your schedule doesn't permit the extra time), they are doing free trolley rides again 11-2 from in front of the Marriott Hotel; and revised this year they're adding a trolley run from Bethel as a park&ride lot: "Park in the Augsburg University lot at Bethel Lutheran Church (810 3rd Avenue SE) and take the free trolley shuttle to Soldiers Field Park and back over the midday. Look for the signs in the south part of the lot along 9th Street."

Map of the vendors, listing of the items for sale and coupons are available.

As our goal is conversation, we'll try to find a spot away from both stage and speakers, on the south/far end of the Main Tent. If the weather is good we might look for a table in the sun in that same vicinity.

Technical Meeting: Thursday June 13th

We do not have a speaker for the June technical meeting, so we will make our first attempt at disc golf for the year! The weather report looks good, so keep your fingers crossed! We will use the RCTC course. Gather in front of the RCTC Regional Sports Center (aka the Field House, see the campus layout link below if you're not familiar with that location). Don't worry if you're not familiar with disc golf, we have all skill ranges and some discs to loan out if you don't have your own.

6 pm, in front of the RCTC Regional Sports Center.

Technical Meeting PIZZA! Thursday May 9th

No speaker, too wet for disc golf, sounds like a great night for pizza and socializing. The usual meeting date and time (6 pm, Thursday May 9th), but we'll relocate to the Stewartville Pizza Ranch pizza and chicken buffet.

We had a dozen people turn out, it was great!

Social: Thursday May 2nd

Our annual clean up a corner of the world event, helping de-litter a local park as a part of Litter Bit Better. As usual we're teaming up with the geocachers who get CITO credit.

Parking is here or here, in the SE or SW corners of the park. The official group gathering location is on the SE corner of the park.

6 pm start time.

Bags and trash are provided, you need to provide your own gloves and a sense of civic duty. If anyone has some waterproof boots and/or grabbers for cleaning the marshy stream edge, that'd be great too.

Technical Meeting PIZZA! CANCELLED: Thursday April 11th

The bad weather, courtesy of power outages, wins for tonight.

No speaker, bad weather, sounds like a great night for pizza and socializing. The usual meeting date and time (6 pm, Thursday April 11th), but we'll relocate to the Stewartville Pizza Ranch pizza and chicken buffet.

Social: March

What might you want to do? Tell Tina.

Technical Meeting: Thursday March 14th

Arhelger, on Wifi and Home Networking.

Everyone asks Kevin what he recommends for Wifi routers, so he's going to put all of his thoughts into slide form to document it for posterity. He'll cover the explosion of options over the past few years to help you figure out what the best option for your situation. If you're looking to upgrade, have complaints about Netflix constantly buffering, or want to make sure your network is secure, this ones for you.

This presentation will be recorded, FYI if that bothers you. For those of you who don't make it, look for the recording afterwards.

We will also have a shorter presentation by George Chatzisofroniou, he's the lead author of Wifiphisher, a free and open source tool that is available on GNU / Linux.

Wi-Fi Security Testing with Open Source Tools

In this presentation, audiences will learn about the open source tools available to penetration testers and the situations in which they apply. The presentation will demonstrate how to conduct attacks with the help of open source tools.

Happy Pi Day! The plan is to consume pie.

6 pm, in or near RCTC Heintz Center's HA108.

Directions to Campus

Campus layout

Heintz Center Building Map

Anything else you want to see on the agenda? Let Tina know.

CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER! Social Ice: Thursday February 7th, right after the Technical Presentation

Looking for a host to choose a time and location, and preferably at least one other person to commit to meeting up then/there, for this to happen yet tonight. Please email the list.

We're headed to Social Ice (aka SocialICE), an outdoor ice bar on the downtown Peace Plaza, which if the -25 degree windchills as I'm writing this is any indication, will have no issues with melting or crowding this year (it's Minnesota, that may change).

For those of you who also love photography, note that SocialIce 2019 is holding a photo contest, each of 6 winners will receive a $50 gift card, details on the SocialICE Page.

When and where? The group attending the technical meeting will head there whenever it's a good time to have wrapped up the presentation, and they'll have their own meet up location chosen. So plan to attend the technical meeting first.

CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER!! Technical Meeting: Thursday February 7th <- Note date change!

Due to weather, RCTC is closed, so there will be no technical meeting tonight. Rescheduled for the usual 2nd Thursday, but in March.

This meeting has been moved to avoid Valentines Day! I don't want to be in trouble with anyone's spouse or significant other.

Arhelger, on Wifi and Home Networking.

Everyone asks Kevin what he recommends for Wifi routers, so he's going to put all of his thoughts into slide form to document it for posterity. He'll cover the explosion of options over the past few years to help you figure out what the best option for your situation. If you're looking to upgrade, have complaints about Netflix constantly buffering, or want to make sure your network is secure, this ones for you.

This presentation will be recorded, FYI if that bothers you. For those of you who don't make it, look for the recording afterwards.

We may also have a mini-presentation by someone new to town, on wifiphisher, we'll let you know when we have more details ironed out.

Immediately afterwards, at whatever time the meeting wraps up, those interested will go to Social Ice downtown on the Peace Plaza for our February social, led by Arhelger. So if you want to attend this social, make sure you attend the meeting, or have coordinated communication with Arhelger in advance. See the separate Social Ice posting below too.

More presentation details expected to be posted on Friday February 1st.

6 pm, in or near RCTC Heintz Center's HA108.

Directions to Campus

Campus layout

Heintz Center Building Map

Anything else you want to see on the agenda? Let Tina know - but Tina won't be running this meeting, I'll let you know when I know who will be.

"January" Social: Saturday February 2nd

Sleigh rides! We will go for a sleigh ride at WinterFest for our "January" social. This is an annual favorite with the smaller geekazoids. In fact I think we've even made the advertising photo for this public event, I suspect that mini-Schmidt is in pink on the top of the snowpile and my own blaze orange snowpants can be seen behind the horses to the right of mini-Schmidt.

Saturday, February 2nd, at 10 am.

Park along the road on Salem Road, the sleigh rides are north of the road behind the History Center.

Plan to gather around the Schmidt family. Sorry, no easily identifiable blaze orange to gather around this year.

Technical Meeting: Thursday January 10th, 2019

Dennis DeLorme on his Garagenator (that's garage doing the work of a refrigerator), involving WiFi/Web based temperature sensor/logger:

Did you have the family gathering at your place for Thanksgiving? Did you run out of space in the refrigerator? Did you wonder if the garage temperature was safe for overflow food storage? If so you needed the GARAGERATOR - the WiFi/Web solution to garage temperature monitoring.

In this presentation I'll describe how to use an under $10 WiFi module as a web server to monitor and log temperature. The "user interface" is via a web browser on a laptop, tablet, or cell phone. No special hardware or software is needed on the user side.

I will demonstrate the web server as an Access Point (a stand alone network) to collect and download data. This requires no additional networking, so it is not dependent on a local network.

It can also be connected as a station on a local network and accessible to any device on the local network. I will describe how to do this (it is only a few lines of code difference). I don't know that I will be able to demonstrate this on the RCTC network - as I recall they had some additional interactions to sign on to their open network.

I will cover the hardware and software used in the project. For those that want to get a head start - the hardware is an ESP8266 module, a DS3231 rtc, and a DS18B20 temperature sensor. The software is developed using the Arduino IDE with extensions for the ESP8266 (https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino).

NOTE: This is not an "Internet Of Things" (IOT) presentation. It could be connected directly to the Internet, but I lack the security knowledge (or, alternately, the level of stupidity) required to do that. It can, of course, access the internet via a local network - like other devices on a local network.

KLUG officer nominations and elections (president, vice president, treasurer).

PCIG officer nominations.

6 pm, in or near RCTC Heintz Center's HA108.

Directions to Campus

Campus layout

Heintz Center Building Map

Anything else you want to see on the agenda? Let Tina know.

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