Posted by Tim Inkpen on Jun 22, 2010
On June 17th, Pythian hosted the June of meeting of OVSAGE. This month, there was a presentation by Bill Stuart, CEO and VP Engineering , Karoly Molnar of Eseri. Eseri is a local Ottawa company that has integrated a full organization IT solution from the best of the world’s open source, from hosted Intranet to desktops to applications, and host it in the cloud for access on virtual desktops.
Essentially, Eseri provides an “office in a cloud”. Within the organizational cloud, clients have access to a wide range of tools, like wiki, documentation management and e-mail. All of the software used is proven open source products such as Ubuntu for the operating system, Evolution as the e-mail client and Mediawiki for the wiki.
The meeting focused on the technical aspects of Eseri’s offering. Eseri uses Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as the basis for its architechture. Access is provide using NoMachine client software.
There was much discussion about security, with Eseri emphasizing that each organization is a completely separate entity, with all data being kept with the organizational cloud. Access to the cloud is protected by multiple firewalls. In addition each server/desktop has it’s own firewall enabled.
There was also a great deal of discussion about the tools Eseri applications and how these applications are upgraded. There was much interest in this area since some of the applications that Eseri provides (i.e. Drupal) have complex upgrade paths.
OVSAGE’s next meeting is scheduled for July 17th.
Posted by Tim Inkpen on May 13, 2010
Hi folks,
A quick note to say that The Ottawa Valley System Administrator’s Guild (OVSAGE) is holding its monthly meeting on Thursday May 20, at 7pm at Pythian’s Ottawa office in the St. Laurent Centre (Suite 261), just steps away from the Rainbow Cinemas (office entrance at the top of the escalator).
This month we will continue the OVSAGE’s Linux System Administration course. The first part of the meeting will cover installing and configuring the Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server. The second half of the meeting will be devoted to securing connections. Detailed notes for previous course sessions can be found on the OVSAGE website. Note that you need to be a member to access the previous sessions.
The meeting is free and all are welcome to attend. Hope to see you there!
Posted by Tim Inkpen on Feb 12, 2010
Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been an interesting week in the IT world, with Microsoft security issues being the major focus of attention.
Security
Once again, security flaws in Microsoft Operating Systems caused major problems for system administrators this past week. It began with Microsoft’s Security Response Center’s posting of February’s security bulletin.
Microsoft’s attempt’s to fix a 17-year-old bug resulted in a large number of computers having problems restarting. More information can be found here Restart issues after installing MS10-015 and Security patch results in BSOD, stops Windows from booting. It appear that this issue may have been caused by machines being previously infected by a rootkit
Another patch from Microsoft, the reliability update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, turned out to be not so… reliable.
But what was of most concern to many system administrators was Microsoft’s security advisory concerning a vulnerability in the TLS and SSL protocols, since this affects not only the Microsoft Windows operating system but as TLS/SSL are an Internet standard, multiple vendors. Emil Protalinski at Ars Technica provides full coverage of the TLS/SSL flaw in Windows.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Tim Inkpen on Feb 12, 2010
Pythian is hosting the February meeting of the Ottawa Valley System Admistrators Guild (OVSAGE). This free event is open to all those interested in System Administration.
Date
Thursday February 18, 2010
Time
Start: 19:00
End: 21:30
Location
Pythian Headquarters
Suite 261
1200 St. Laurent Blvd.
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
Directions
From the Queensway, take the St. Laurent exit and proceed north. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Tim Inkpen on Feb 5, 2010
On Thursday, January 21, Pythian hosted the Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE) Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE).
The highlight of the meeting was an interesting presentation on security by the founder of OVSAGE, Scott Murphy. The focus was on the fact that security is a mindset, not a product. Scott’s presentation looked at a large number of security issues and explained in detail while technology alone cannot fix security issues. The presentation was a response to the Amrit Williams Blog post Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It.
Scott’s presentation can be viewed here: security-quagmire-pdf. I hope you find it useful.
Posted by Tim Inkpen on Jan 15, 2010
Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been a busy week in the IT world. Here are some of the most interesting highlights.
Security
Without a doubt, the topic of the week is security. The revelation that China has been hacking into Google and over 30 other US companies sent shock waves through the IT World and beyond. There were a huge number of articles generated about this in the last week. Ironically, the best source for articles on this issue turned out to be Google’s own news aggregator: see China Google hack.
In another China-related security issue, The Money Times reports that Iranians hack China’s Baidu; Chinese hack back.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
