KLUG Meeting Minutes and Agenda (#36) The 36th meeting of the Kingston Linux User Group was held Mon, Oct 1, 2001 at 7PM at RMC. The meeting lasted until about 9:45 PM. The attendees were: Conrad-Avarmaa, Brigitte Drummond, Mark Hammond, Andrew Healy, Art Jezak, Edward Lott, Rodney MacIntosh, Bob Miller, George Mitton, Doug Murrel, Brian J. Nagy, Daniel Szafranski, Mike Wirth, Edwin C. Meeting Schedule: 37 - Wed. Nov. 7 at RMC. "System & Network Security I" 38 - Mon. Dec. 3 at RMC. "System & Network Security II" Summary Of Activities: - Web page and domain - http://www.klug.on.ca/ - Hosted by Internet Kingston! (Thanks!) - We also have klug.ca registered but it is not yet activated. - Mailing List: Send an email with "subscribe klug-general" in the body to majordomo@klug.on.ca - or "subscribe klug-security" in the body to majordomo@klug.on.ca - Usenet Group - kingston.os.linux (General, not just KLUG) Agenda/Minutes: 1) Roll Call and Introductions (if required) - See attendees above. 2) This Meeting: Once again, due to a room problem we ended up moving to G223 about 7:20, I hope no one missed us but we did post a note and arrows. If anyone has ideas for future meeting subjects please post them or let Mark or I know. The idea of a demonstration setup of a mixed Samba network seemed to be popular as well as IPSEC/VPN, X Windows, QOS and IPtables. Also, the subject of co-locating our own hardware running Linux at Internet Kingston came up again. It is a great idea if everyone is willing to donate some hardware since KLUG doesn't charge dues or have a budget for projects like this. Mark mention checking with IK for any serious limitations to this then we can start a mailing list discussion on what hardware we have available. I have ISA network cards, a hard drive or 2, some ISA video and I/O cards and an old CD drive that may not read CDR's, but that is the type of participation that would help accomplish this. There were 13 attendees to our 25th presentation "Network Services II" by Mark Drummond. The main subject of the presentation was to set up a DHCP server. As Mark has mentioned in previous presentations some of these exercises are of a medium to high Linux subject level and are not required by beginning Linux users, but are intended to show the power of the standard Linux distributions and what can be accomplished by the "geek" users. As one attendee pointed out that for $200-$300 you can purchase a cable/DSL switch locally that will provide all these services transparently in a black-box. The intent of this and previous presentations on the subjects of NAT, firewall (ipchains/iptables), DNS, DHCP, general networking, security and the like provides examples of how to set up and administer these services yourself as a learning or money saving experience without resorting to the black-box approach. As for DHCP it was introduced as a system to automatically configure and maintain a network from a centralized location. In previous presentations on networking it was shown that every computer in a network must be configured with a certain minimum of information including IP address, netmask, gateway, broadcast and DNS information to name a few. If a network change is made the work of reconfiguring all the computers on it can be a huge task. Using the DHCP service can minimize or completely eliminate this type of system maintenance as when each computer is powered up it requests and receives all this information automatically from the server. This is similar to the automatic configuration that is completed when you connect to the internet via your ISP and clients such as DialUp Networking, Access Manager (for HSE) and (I think) DHCP for cable. The DHCP software includes dhcpd running on port 67 as the server daemon, dhcpcd on port 68 as the client daemon and dhclient. We weren't on a network so Mark configured the server and queried it using the client to show what details were provided. Basically the /etc/dhcpd.conf file was configured, the dhcpd server restarted and the service was available. The How-To document available from linux.com (among many other locations) explains the syntax in great detail and many features that Mark didn't use in his demonstration. Thanks to Mark and all who attended and participated and a welcome back to Andrew Hammond. 3) Next Meeting: Wed, Nov. 7 at RMC. "System & Network Security I"