Wireless is provided by the library, open and available to all. Light refreshments will also be served. The meeting will last about 2 hours, pending questions and comments from the group.

The library is located between 24th and 25th streets just a few blocks north of Washington Boulevard. The address is 2464 Jefferson Ave. in Ogden. We will be meeting in the board room in the basement of the building.

See you there.

This meeting was held just two days ago about VSFTPD. The meeting was given by Clint Savage of the Provo Linux Users Group, and was quite informative. For those that missed it, no worries- we’ll be holding the same meeting in person in May, this time, in more detail, and probably hands on.

Details to follow.

So, please attend if you can. It’s online on the Freenode servers in the #oalug channel. Connect with your favorite IRC client (XChat, Gaim, irssi, etc.). Details:

Date: Feb 17, 2007
Time: 10:00am-Noon
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #oalug

We need to discuss what we are doing for the 24th meeting, as well as future meets. Also, we need to go over the OALUG Constitution.

• Date: Jan 27, 2007
• Time: 10am - 2pm
• Place: WSU Davis Campus
• Address: 2750 University Park Blvd, Layton, UT
• Map: http://tinyurl.com/3crjkv
• Room: 311
• Presenting: Daniel Crookston and Brandon Stout

If you have a favorite Linux distro LiveCD, please bring that with you. The room that we will be using will not have Linux installed on the workstations, so we will be running off of the LiveCDs. If you do not have a LiveCD, Ubuntu will be provided. Yes, PHP5 and PHP5-CLI are installable and executable from a LiveCD. We will have working Internet connections.

See you there.

VirtualBox goesopen source http://virtualbox.org/
Linux Kernel in a Nutshell book available for free download http://www.kroah.com/lkn/
Description of Linux filesystem hierarchy http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

Now onto the howto….

LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl. A couple of easy ways to get a LAMP server running is the SLAMPP LiveCD or Ubuntu Server. Those are good if you are ok running the default configurations. I am a web developer and I have a need to have things running with special configurations. So instead of using apt-get or yum or whatever package manager to install 20 packages to get the functionality I desire, I would rather just install them from source. So in this article I will talk about configuring and installing Apache and PHP. In the future I may go over MySQL as well.

To get started I am using Ubuntu 6.06 as the base. But this will work with any linux if you have the prerequisites. For starters Ubuntu does not come with the tool necessary to compile software. The easiest way to get these is to do

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make flex

PHP will also require you to have libxml2 installed you can do this manually or with apt. The package you need with apt is libxml2-dev. That gets you the necessary header files that PHP uses to compile XML support. Also if you want MySQL integrated with this you will need to have it pre-installed. The Ubuntu packages are mysql-server and libmysqlclient15-dev.

OK now we have some of the dependencies out of the way. If your unsure how to compile for source please read this.

Lets start with apache. You can obtain the Apache server from here. This guide will go over version 2.0 but 2.2 should work just as well. The standard ./configure, make, make install will get you the default instillation of apache. This means that it will put everything under /usr/local/apache2 The folder it contains are as follows.


bin –Where the binaries are
build –Tools for build modules
cgi-bin –Location of PERL CGI scripts
conf –The conf files
error –Pages that are displayed when an error happens. eg 404
htdocs –Where all your website files go
icons –Icons used by apache when it create directory listing pages
include –Apache's header files
lib –Library files
logs –Where it keeps its logs
man –The manual pages
manual –The apache 2.0 manual
modules –where any modules are kept


Now I don’t like this layout. I think that your site files should be kept in either /var or /srv and the conf files should be in /etc and the logs should be in /var/log

One way to get a better layout is by some configure flags.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache --datadir=/srv/www –sysconfdir=/etc/httpd --mandir=/usr/local/man

This is good but you would still have to move the location of the log files in the httpd.conf file. Apache makes use of a file called config.layout This file contains several layout variations to choose from or you could create your own. If you wanted you could also choose a layout that is close to what you want and then use some other flags to make a few changes. I figure if I’m going to compile Apache every time a new version comes out I might as well just write a layout out for myself. My layout looks as follows.


<Layout Kevin>
   prefix: /usr/local/apache
   exec_prefix: ${prefix}
   bindir: ${exec_prefix}/bin
   sbindir: ${exec_prefix}/bin
   libdir: ${exec_prefix}/lib
   libexecdir: ${exec_prefix}/modules
   mandir: /usr/local/man
   sysconfdir: /etc/httpd
   datadir: /srv/www
   installbuilddir: ${datadir}/build
   errordir: ${datadir}/error
   iconsdir: ${datadir}/icons
   htdocsdir: ${datadir}/htdocs
   manualdir: ${datadir}/manual
   cgidir: ${datadir}/cgi-bin
   includedir: ${prefix}/include
   localstatedir: /var/log
   runtimedir: /var/run
   logfiledir: ${localstatedir}/apache
   proxycachedir: ${localstatedir}/proxy
</Layout>


The choice is really up to you on where you put everything. Thats the great part about compiling from source. To use a layout you would use the flag –enable-layout=[NAME]

One last note before I finish up talking about configuration, Apache has a few different MPMs (Multi-Processing Modules). These control the way in which Apache handles its connections. You can read about the different ones here. But PHP says that it runs its best with the prefork MPM. So to enable this we use –with-mpm=prefork

At this point you should have decided what configure flags you would like to use. There are other that I haven’t talked about that you may want, read the provided documentation to see if there is anything else you want. And then we can do the make and make install to install Apache.

Configuration

Now I will talk about some settings in the httpd.conf and setting up things like log rotation and init scripts.

In the httpd.conf file is where you set your various configuration on how apache should run. The default should be fine but if you want to make some changes you can. Some config options of note are:


Listen 80 --This sets the port on which Apache operates. Another popular choice is 8080
User/Group --You can set the user and group Apache runs as with the User and Group options, by default its User nobody and Group -1
ServerAdmin --This is the email address that will be shown when errors are generated.
DocumentRoot sets the path to the website files. “/srv/www/html” in my setup, “/usr/local/apache2/htdocs” in the defaul setup.
ServerTokens and ServerSignature specify how much in will be given out about Apache. Such things as what version Apache is and what modules you are running.


The other configuration options are well documented in the httpd.conf file so give it a read if your curious about other things.

So now you have Apache installed how do you start it? As root run “apachectl start” depending on where you put the apache bin files this may or may not be in your path. apachectl takes the following commands: start,stop,restart,graceful,startssl,and configtest. This is nice but we want to have Apache start itself when the system starts. For this we use an init script. Depending on what Linux systemyou use, your init scripts may be different. But Ubuntu 6.06 uses the SysV init style. The apachectl program is made to act like a init script, so you can like directly to it for your init. So in /etc/init.d create a link to the apachectl program.


cd /etc/init.d
ln -s /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl httpd


Then put the link to start it on system bot in the proper runlevel folder. By default Ubuntu boots to runlevel 2.


cd /etc/rc2.d
ln -s ../init.d/httpd S80httpd


Change the number depending on when in the sequence you want it to start. Also add a link in the rc0.d and rc6.d folders with a K instead of an S to stop Apache on system shutdowns and reboots.

Finally for Apache we’ll talk about log rotation. There are two ways to do log rotation with Apache. The first is the rotatelog script that comes with Apache. To use it you put something like the following in your httpd.conf file.

TransferLog “| /path/to/rotatelogs logfile rotation_time_in_seconds”

The other option is to use logrotate. Logrotate is a fairly common system utility designed to handle the log rotation for many program. It is run once a day by cron. To use it all you have to do is drop a config file for the logs you want to rotate into /etc/logrotate.d An example config is as follows


/var/log/apache/access_log {
   missingok
   compress
   rotate 5
   #mail webmaster@yourdomain.com
   size 10M

   postrotate
      /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
   endscript
}


The script says to take the log file found at /var/log/apache/access_log.
missingok says if its not there don’t issue an error.
compress compresses the old files using gzip
rotate 5 says to rotate the logs 5 time before deleting. So you end up with access_log,access_log.1,access_log.2,etc
mail email@address makes it so logrotate will email you the log files instead of deleting them
size 10M will cause the log to be rotated only when it has become larger than 10 megs
And that part after postrotate causes Apache to restart so it will start writing to a new log file.

Read the man page for logrotate to see some more of its options.

Thats it for Apache. Stay tuned for part 2 where I’ll go over the installation of PHP.

./configure
make
make install

Only the last one needs to be run as root (provided your installing it in the normal system location). A lot of sofware can take flags on the

./configure
command to change the way the software is configured. A standard one is
--prefix=[PATH]
to change the location the software is installed into. To find out what flags are available for a particular piece of software you can run
./configure --help
Also always read the INSATLL and README files that come with the software and any documentation that is available.

Date: Jan 17th, 2007
Time: 7:30pm
Place: WSU Davis Campus room 325
Topic(s): Installing and configuring Apache/PHP
Presenter(s): Kevin Carter
Map: http://www.weber.edu/wsuimages/WeberStateMap/regionmap_large.gif
Directions: Turn South from Hwy 193 onto 2000 E (University Park Blvd). Follow a slight “S” curve, and make your first left into the WSU parking lot.

Because we have to work our schedule around the school schedule at the campus, the Davis meets will now be the 2nd Wed of every month at 7:30pm. This month is an exception, due to the short notice from the school on when we could meet.

See you all there!

Monte Wingle gave a great presentation on Xen. Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Basically it allows you to run two operating systems at the same time. With the right kind of hardware it is possible to run Linux and Windows side-by-side.

Here are some links to help get you started on playing with Xen your self.

Official home page at University of Cambridge: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/

Download Xen source and binaries: http://www.xensource.com/

Installing Xen on Ubuntu 6.06 – http://www.howtoforge.com/xen_3.0_ubuntu_dapper_drake

Xen on Fedora Core 6 Quickstart - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraXenQuickstartFC6

Give it a try and hit up #oalug on freenode.net for help.

Details are as follows:

Date: Jan 6, 2007
Time: 10am - Noon
Place: #oalug on irc.freenode.net

In the long run, this meeting was short, but productive. Many topics were covered, planned and executed. Here are a few of the topics covered:

• Creating an OALUG Constitution using a wiki hosted under http://wiki.oalug.com.
• Benefits of being an “official member” of OALUG.
• Dec 14th Meeting: Xen Virtualization.
• Planning the PHP Workshop in January.

A Constitution is already in the works, and can be found at http://wiki.oalug.com/constitution. We encourage everyone to register an account, and get active it the process of creating it. This affects you as a member of the group, so you should be involved if you want to see certain aspects of the group realized. See other topics on the main wiki page.

I’d like to thank Monte Wingle for stepping up to the plate for the Meeting on the 14th. Xen Virtualization is a good topic- one that you won’t want to miss. With more and more hardware manufacturers getting on the virtualization bandwagon, this is a skill that you will want to keep with you.

Stay tuned on the mailing list for the details of the PHP Workshop on January 27th. It will be a great success, and I’m looking forward to working with everyone who will be involved. Already, we are in the talks of having a Ruby Workshop for February that will build on the success of the PHP Workshop.

Turn-based Strategy
Battle for Wesnoth - http://www.wesnoth.org/
UFO: Alien Invasion - http://ufo.myexp.de/

Guitar Hero clone
Frets on Fire - http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/uv/fretsonfire/

Real Time Strategy Shooter
SAVAGE: The Battle for Newerth - http://www.s2games.com/savage/ (Not open source)

Scrolling Space Shooter
AstroMenace - http://www.viewizard.com/astromenace/index_linux.php (Not open source)

First-person shooter
True-Combat Elite (requires Enemy territory) - http://www.truecombatelite.net/
AlienArena 2007 - http://red.planetarena.org/
Warsow - http://www.warsow.net/
Sauerbraten - http://sauerbraten.org/
Nexuiz - http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/

MMORPG
Planeshift - http://www.planeshift.it/

Rally Car racing
Trigger - http://www.positro.net/trigger/

Role Playing Game
Hero of Allacrost - http://www.allacrost.org/

Date: Nov 18, 2006
Time: 10:00am
Place: Weber State University Ogden Campus
Room:  Building 2
Topic(s): Linux Games, Cedega and Wine
Presenter(s): Tristan Rhodes
Map: http://www.weber.edu/wsuimages/WeberStateMap/ogdenmap_04.gif
Directions: Turn North on Dixon Drive from Harrison Blvd.  Turn right on Edvalson going East.  Edvalson makes a slight bend left.  In the bend, turn right into the A2 parking lot.  Building 2 is identified on the URL above as “2 B2″.

It should be a great meet.  Linux has always taken a lot of criticism for being behind the times when it comes to gaming.  Tristan is here to put and end to that and show that there are a lot of great games for the Linux platform.

See you there.

We had a good online meeting this morning.  I can really feel the ball rolling and the momentum picking up in the group, which is great.  Here are a few of the highlights:

• Saturday Meetings will be hands-on workshops that will be covered in two 2-hour segments.
• Our first workshop will be on PHP January 27, 2007.
• We hope to collaborate with UPHPU in setting up the workshop and getting some presenters.
• The November 25th meeting has been moved up to the 18th to make way for the Thanksgiving holiday.
• There will be no Saturday meeting in Dec, due to the Holidays.

Here is a breakdown of meeting dates up through January 27th:

• Nov 18, 10:00am, WSU Ogden Campus- Linux gaming presented by Tristan
• Nov 25 moved to 18th.  Happy Thanksgiving!
• Dec 2, 10:00am- IRC in #oalug
• Dec 14, 7:30pm, WSU Davis Campus- Topic TBD
• Dec 16, 10:00am- IRC in #oalug
• Dec 30- No meeting.  Happy Holidays!
• Jan 6, 10:00am- IRC in #oalug
• Jan 11, 7:30pm- TBD (date and time pending Spring semester class schedules)
• Jan 20, 10:00am- IRC in #oalug
• Jan 27, 10:00am- WSU Ogden Campus- PHP Workshop

The Jan 11th meeting could change to any day in that week.  I have to keep that schedule flexible due to scheduling around classes that meet at the Davis campus.  I will try to keep it the 2nd week and around 7pm or so.  Hopefully, we can just keep it on Thursdays.

Aaron is going to give a presentation on the basics of bash scripting. It will be entertaining and enlightening so don’t miss it.

Hope to see ya there
-Kevin-

On a side note things should be picking up on this site. I’ll be posting some more info about the book program within the next couple days and about other stuff. So stay tuned for that.

The distros that we will have on hand are:  Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Mandriva, Fedora Core, Debian and Gentoo.  We will also have some live CDs, such as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux on hand.  We should have a network connection with Internet, so if we don’t have something on hand, we can download it.

What you will need to provide is as follows:

• Blank CDs.  We will most likely have some there, but just in case there aren’t enough to go around.   The past few install fests were smash hits, and we were out of CDs fairly fast.
• Network cable (RJ45).  We just won’t have enough to provide for everyone.  Although I have a lot of cable, it’s in about 12′ lengths.  We will have switches and hubs at the meet though, enough for about 24-30 simultaneous connections.
• Computer.  Obviously, if you want a distro, or software, installed, you will need the hardware for us to install it on.  It’s just difficult to do long distance over-the-air installs.  You know how it goes. :)  Don’t forget keyboard, mouse, monitor and CDROM.  Yeah, they’re kinda necessary too.
• Surge supression.  Yes, we most likely will NOT have this on hand.  Especially for the crowd that will be attending.  And we won’t have enough outlets for everyone, so sharing is inevitable.

I know this will be a great meet, and I’m looking to see everyone there.  Again, just to emphasize that this isn’t for distros only.  Need help with a driver, software, server, etc., we should be able to help.  Heck, just want to talk, we’re game.

Date: Oct 12, 2006
Time: 7:00pm
Place: Weber State University Davis Campus
Room: 117
Topic(s): Liux Install Fest
Presenters: None
Map: http://www.weber.edu/wsuimages/WeberStateMap/regionmap_large.gif
Directions: Turn South from Hwy 193 onto 2000 E (University Park Blvd). Follow a slight “S” curve, and make your first left into the WSU parking lot.  Enter the building’s main entrance, and walk straight. The room is next to the elevator on the main floor.

If you’re not interested in reading the whole log, and I don’t blame you, then here is a quick rundown of everything that we covered:

• Sept 30th Meeting: Linux distro smackdown is finalized! The time has been pushed to 12 noon, instead of the standard 10am time to accomodate those watching LDS General Conference. The distros that will be featured are Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo and Damn Small Linux. Each presenter will be showing of on of those distros for about 10-15 minutes. Highlights will include advantages/disadvantages, unique features, security and portability. If you are curious about Linux, but not sure what to run, this will be a good, extensive meeting that may answer your questions. There will be distro CDs handed out to those in attendance.
• Oct 12th Install Fest: We are currently planning an install fest for the meeting following the Linux distro smackdown. Time, date and location are set in stone, but we may have a coordinated state-wide install fest with the Ubuntu-Utah group. Details pending that will be released to the mailing list. If SLLUG and PLUG are intersted, this could turn out to be a successful meet. Keep an eye on the mailing list for further details and plans.
• Oct 28th Meeting: This meeting is still very tentatively planned, and we are looking for ideas on what or who to present. So far, LFS, portable Linux, Internet safety, iptables and favorite application have been presented. Keep an eye on the mailing list and this page for more details about that meeting.
• Sponsors, book programs and free schwag: We have already received free schwag from Xmission, which looks like we may have them as a sponsor, which is great! Also, as mentioned on the mailing list, we have arranged a book review program with Sams and Prentice Hall publishers. Expect books to be at the next meet, with details on how the program works. We are currently in the works of setting up more sponsors, specifically those in the Ogden area. These sponsors could be our food, t-shirt and free schwag sponsors.
• Application of the month: At the start of each meeting, for a few minutes, the “Application of the month” will be presented. Meetings for the month may or may not follow the topic that the application resides in. This will help members be more familiar with apps that they may or may not know about.
• Volunteers: OALUG needs more volunteers! We have a solid team now that is excited about the future of the group, but we want your help. If you are interested, please send an email to either me or the group. Currently, the positions open are:
• Install Fest Coordinator
• Public Relations Director
• Weber County Represenative
• Student Ambassadors

Remember, as I have mentioned here already, to keep and eye on the mailing list. There, you will get the latest news announcements, meeting updates, job postings, and everything else. If you haven’t already subscribed, sign up! Google Groups also has on RSS feed for the list, if interested.
Further, Linux nerds just aren’t nerds if they don’t frequent IRC. We are on Freenode in the #oalug channel. Stop by, and be a regular OALUG nerd!

Basically, we have tentatively scheduled the following:

• Meet and Greet meeting on Sept 12th. This will mainly be a get to know you and your OALUG group. We will go over introductions, the mailing list, the IRC channel, and a number of other things related to the group. This meeting will probably be about an hour or less.
• Linux Comparison Smackdown on Sept 30th. During this meeting, we will compare a number of different distributions incluing Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Damn Small Linux and others. We’ll cover highlights and advantages/disadvantages of each.
• Linux Install Fest on Oct 10th. If you need help seeting up a workstation, mail server, web server, desktop, laptop or anything else, this will be the time to get it taken care of. We will have plenty of CDs on hand, and we will have a wide range of distros from which to pick.

That is so far the swing of things. We have discussed other things, and greater detail will be found on the mailing list. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already.

The next meeting will be September 12, 2006, and we will continue on our normal meeting schedule from there.

Of course, if any of you are willing to help out in the high school quest, it would be great.

• Vice President- Help the President oversee the general administration of the group, website and server.
• Secretary- Help coordinate the regular meeting schedules, dates and times.
• Install Fest Coordinator- Help coordinate install fests and general activities.
• Public Relations Director- Establish and keep relationships with local businesses, schools and groups.
• Weber County Represenative- The official represenative of Weber County, overseeing locations for meetings and helpng the Public Relations Director in the Weber area.
• Davis County Represenative- The official represenative of Davis County, overseeing locations for meetings and helpng the Public Relations Director in the Davis area.
• Student Ambassador- A full-time college student at any college, technical center or university.  Helps keep the college students informed about the group.  May need more than one Ambassador if needed.

These are what I am looking to create the steering committee.  The group seems to have died down during the summer, due to lack of involvement.  I hope to pick up this involvement to full swing by the fall.  So, if you are interested, then either comment below, or send me an email about the position that you would like to fill, and we’ll get started.

I should mention that I am looking for eager volunteers that will attend meetings, be active on the mailing list and advocate Linux.  There is no reason why this LUG can’t be one of the best.  This state certainly has the best talent.

There is no need to register for an account as with the previous site.  Commenting is turned on and completely available for anyone and everyone.

With the new site, comes a new RSS feed for those that would rather syndicate the posts than pull up their web browser and visit the site.  The feed can be found here.

Finally, if you are unaware, please check out our mailing list at Google Groups.  It also has an RSS feed if you would rather have the mail come to a newsreader than your inbox.  For those unaware of RSS, it is an XML stream of data that arrives to a program that syndicates the data.  I personally recommend Liferea if you are using Gnome or Akregator if you are using KDE.