# ls -l /root
total 88
-rw-------. 1 root root  1176 2008-11-23 17:22 anaconda-ks.cfg
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root  4096 2008-12-14 18:37 bin

See the . ? Where you ask?  Look closer!

drwxr-xr-x. <– look, there it is!!  At first, I thought it was just one file, but then I noticed it other places, then I looked further, and it seems to be everywhere.

What is up with that? Where does this come from?  What is it for?  LazyWeb, can you help me?

Cheers,

Herlo

Cooking with PAM

Thad Van Ry will cover the basics of Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). If you’re a Sys Admin who wants to know how PAM can help you or hurt you, this meeting is for you. Thad will go over the different stacks available as well as how to call modules and their control flags.

Thad is a Linux System Administrator for the LDS Church. He has been using Linux in his work life for the past 12+ years.

We meet in conference room A on the lower level of the Salt Lake Library.  Head down the stairs, make a left turn.  The conference room is directly under the foyer area (the area with all the shops on the 1st level)  If you aren’t clear, ask the information desk.  A map is available of all floor plans of the library.

Also, our meetings should be posted on the Electric Signs by the entrance to the library on the first floor.

The course is 15 weeks long, 3 hours per night and will be held in the Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 208 on Wednesdays from 6-9pm.  Basically, that means I’ll be teaching Linux once a week and keeping up my training skillz.

The only real drawback is that I’ll be missing the PLUG and SLLUG meetings for the better part of four months.

Cheers,

Herlo

What? A little early, you say? Sure is, but I thought I’d get an entire week’s head start and help out the crew with preparations.

Okay… That’s not really true, but I am in Raleigh already. Because of my employment at Guru Labs, I asked if I could fly into Raleigh after my classes on Friday. Instead, Dax, my boss made the deal even sweeter. He sent me to Raleigh to teach two Red Hat classes at Red Hat! Because of this, I’m currently teaching a RH133 this week, and a RH300 next week downstairs at the Red Hat home office.

On Thursday, my good friend Jared Smith, of Asterisk fame (and a good boardgame buddy) will be arriving just prior to FUDCon. I’m guessing he’ll be there to help F9 do more with Asterisk. Maybe we’ll have time for a quick game of Settlers or something, if he brings it – hint, hint Jared.

Over the weekend, I’ll be hacking away (or maybe just testing the eeepc) on the F9 release with the likes of Max Spevack and Greg De Koenigsberg. And since I’m already on Red Hat’s campus, I’m prepping my trip by making sure I know where all of the locations are for the events.

So, if you are at Red Hat this week and want to burn some time, come on by and say hi to me and my class. We’ll be learning about installation, filesystems, RAID and LVM, and much, much more.

I’m so stoked for this weekend! Its going to be an awesome FUDCon. Hopefully, I’ll be able to convince the boss to send me to the next FUDCon as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

The point of this post is to ask a simple question, however.  During the promotion of this event, I’ve received suggestions beyond the three big versions of Linux that are being released close to one month from each other.  For example, OpenBSD will be release soon, and Apple released Leopard for Mac OSX, among others.  And while every operating system is welcome to participate in the MDRP, I can’t help but wonder about certain definitions.

My question is what counts as a distro?.  I mean how do you classify yourself as a distro?  Is it a Linux only thing?  Or, is it just Open Source OSes?  Maybe its nothing, and I’m just bringing this up for no good reason.

Your comments are appreciated and encouraged.

Cheers,

Herlo