KLUG Meeting Minutes and Agenda (#30) The 30th meeting of the Kingston Linux User Group was held Mon, Apr. 2, 2001 at 7PM at RMC. The meeting lasted until about 10:00 PM. The attendees were: Conrad-Avarmaa, Brigitte Drummond, Mark Farnell, Cam Lessard, Dave MacIntosh, Bob MacPherson, Alex Miller, George Mitton, Doug Paul, Derek Robichaud, Francois Szafranski, Mike Webster, Scott <7sw3@qlink.queensu.ca> Meeting Schedule: 31 - Wed. May. 2 at RMC. "Compiling a Kernel" - Doug Mitton 32 - Mon. Jun. 4 at RMC. "Introduction To TCP/IP Networking" 33 - Wed. Jul. 4 at RMC. "Connecting to an Internet ISP (PPP/LAN)" 34 - Mon. Aug. 6 at RMC. "Home Area Network" 35 - Wed. Sep. 5 at RMC. "Network Services" Summary Of Activities: - Web page and domain - http://www.klug.on.ca/ - Hosted by Internet Kingston! (Thanks!) - Mailing List - http://www.yahoogroups.com/search?query=klug- - You have to register for a free Yahoo account first. - Usenet Group - kingston.os.linux (General, not just KLUG) Agenda/Minutes: 1) Roll Call and Introductions (if required) - See attendees above. 2) This Meeting: There were 12 attendees to our 19th presentation "System Administration II" by Mark Drummond. Tonight Mark started off by distributing the draw prizes that were posted to the mailing list earlier. A perl script was used to randomly select names from the mailing list to receive some Linux merchandising that he had obtained. Prizes included T-shirts, CD's, mouse pads and stuffed monkeys. The prizes represented Ximian, Red Hat and Storm Linux. He then gave a guided tour of the KLUG web page and some of the new additions including the FAQ and references links. Mark started this months presentation with a description of hard drive partitioning and a minimal scheme for a production server layout including root, swap, var and home. He then progressed into filesystem creation on those partitions and some of the low level *NIX concepts of inodes, directory files and fragmentation. The discussion on inodes, directory files and the details of file storage led into the "links" discussion later on. This filesystem session then led into filesystems in images such as .iso files that we download in order to burn Linux distribution CD's. Mark then demonstrated how to use the "loop" filesystem to mount these and other image files without actually having to burn them to media. There was also some discussion of the encrypted file system support available at kerneli.org. We also got into the concept of file permissions and ownership with the 'chown' and 'chmod' commands and why this is different from other OS's (Operating Systems). There were some demos of the effect of file permissions on various system activities and the interactions between them. Also, the default file permissions and the 'umask' were discussed. The last subject covered was file links, soft and hard via the 'ln' command, these are similar to the Windows "shortcut" mechanism. Links allow multiple references to the same file(s) without wasting or duplicating space by simply copying it. The basic difference is that soft links work between partitions/file systems but can be broken or lose the link to the target file if the target is moved, deleted or renamed. Hard links, on the other hand, only work within the same partition but cannot be broken as it points directly to the files inode (permission and data block information) and not to a directory entry. There was also some discussion on the security implications of links, the second field from the left in an "ls -l" output indicates the number of hard links to a file. Also note that hard links do not work with a directory as the target. There was also a discussion and demo of the Distributed Net project that many of the members participate in as part of the KLUG and RMC team. The links are: http://www.distributed.net/ http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/tmsummary.php3?team=17822 http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/ Thanks to Mark and all who attended and participated. 3) Next Meeting: Wed, May 2 at RMC, 7pm room G307. "Compiling a Kernel"