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First Flounder Meeting

Based on a comment from my previous post [1] I have named the new FOSS group for Australia and NZ Flounder. Here is the link to the agenda for the first meeting [2].

I am currently using a DNS name in my own domain for the group, but in the near future I’ll move it […]

A Linux Conference as a Ritual

Sociological Images has an interesting post by Jay Livingston PhD about a tennis final as a ritual [1]. The main point is that you can get a much better view of the match on your TV at home with more comfort and less inconvenience, so what you get for the price of the ticket (and […]

Maildrop, IMAP, and Postfixadmin

I have recently configured my mail server to use IMAP. I started doing this when I was attending Linux.conf.au so that I could read urgent mail using my EeePC while at the conference and then be able to deal with the more complex stuff using my laptop later on.

The next logical step is to […]

Employment Packages

Paul Wayper has said that he only wants to work for companies that will send him too LCA [1]. While that criteria is quite reasonable it seems overly specific. Among other things the varying location of LCA will result in the expense for the employer varying slightly year by year – which employers generally don’t […]

Voting and Linux Australia

Dhanapalan writes about the small number of voters for Linux Australia elections [1]. I guess that blacklist-voting is partly to blame for my inactivity in this regard. Linux Australia is running pretty well so I don’t think there’s a great need for me to go out of my way to vote.

One thing that could […]

Status of SE Linux in Debian LCA 2009

This morning I gave a talk at the Security mini-conf of LCA about the status of SE Linux in Debian. Here is a summary of the issues I covered:

General Status

In Lenny (the new release of Debian that will come out in a month or two) SE Linux is working well. Considerably better than […]

Security Lessons from a Ferry

On Saturday I traveled from Victoria to Tasmania via the ferry (to attend LCA), they grossly failed in their security measures and provide three lessons for others:

Make it possible for people to read security relevant documents . Make obeying the rules not be a cost and make the fact known. Don’t be lazy.

Here […]

Security Enhanced PostgreSQL

Today was the first day of Linux Conf Au 2009 [1]. KaiGai Kohei was unable to attend the conference and give a database mini-conf presentation about his work on Security Enhanced PostgreSQL [2], so I gave the presentation in his place. It was a fairly difficult presentation and required that I learn a lot about […]

Giving Away Hardware

For the last few years I have been actively seeking free hardware to give to members of my local LUG. Whenever a friend or business associate mentions that they are upgrading or replacing computers I enquire what they plan to do with the old ones and request that the old gear be given to me […]

Oracle Unbreakable Linux

Matt Bottrell writes about the Oracle Linux offerings presented at LCA 2008 [1]

The one thing that Oracle does which I really object to is the “unbreakable” part of their advertising. They have pictures of penguins in armour and the only reasonable assumption is that their system is more secure in some way. As far […]