Minutes of the LUG meeting.
Of June 2001.

The previous LUG meet had been postponed for a bunch of reasons. The previous meet in the year had been a bit of a damp squid, so lots of people were looking out to this one. The meeting was held at FedTec [1], thanks to the kind generosity of Hanish Menon, who took the trouble to make the place and their projector available for us. Many Thanks, Hanish! One sad side effect of this change of venue was that we were missing snacks, something that became more and more evident as the evening progressed. Also interesting to note was that since this was being held in Hanish's place, nearly every speaker seemed to be in 'Hanish' mode. If you don't know what that is, well, you've missed something ;).

The meeting began with a small intro by Biju, who then passed the mike to Atul. Atul began with an introductory set of slides that explained what the rest of the Secure Corporate Network talk was going to be like. In addition, he touched upon some of the aspects of the Redhat based distribution that is to be released with next month's PCQ CD. The primary and most evident difference is that now the install options have two new entries: Gateway and Intranet server. He then went into some of the aspects involved in a secure installation of a corporate network touching upon the need to seperate the two, reasons for insecurities present at the gateway and the seperate services that are to be made available at the gateway and the intranet server. Having done that, he handed the mike over to Sony, who then proceeded to freshly install a Gateway machine.

Sony [2] then proceeded to install a machine,simply pressing enter from time to time (and who says Unix isn't user friendly - except it chooses it's friends with great care!). The install went off smoothly (slightly more than 2 minutes) and he rebooted into a fully secured machine. This machine has very few services switched on, no compiler, minimal packages - you get the picture. Basically, this is pretty much the exact install that an intelligent sysad would do - using the Expert option.

Vaibhav [3] then took over to explain the configuration of this gateway machine. He considered two main classes of connectivity - dynamic and static IP to the Internet. The PCQ CD ships with sendmail (8.11.2-14 grumble... postfix [4] ...grumble) and he went into some detail of how to configure it using macros to achieve various highly useful things (hold mails, smart relay, etc). He also touched on fetchmail and how to setup the MX record for a domain. Finally, he discussed Firewalling for this machine using ipchains (iptables NOT being the flavor of the month!).

Shanu [5] finished up the Secure Corporate network with discussion of how an ideal intranet server should look like. He first discussed what it looks like and what it serves up (auth, internal DNS, NAT, DHCP, Mail, Squid, Samba). First touching upon NAT, he explained how to setup ipchains to ensure a clean segregation between the gateway and the internal network seperate segments). He went onto DHCP and setting up both the server and client systems, including DNS based IP allocation ( sounds nice!). Then he started with Bind (v9 grumble...djbdns [6] ...grumble) and dealt with it in depth, finally ending off with some Samba instructions as well. He ended with a bringing it all together section that dealt with the important but normally forgotten physical configuration of gateway to intranet server and intranet server to LAN configuration. He also has promised to post configuration files to BLUG-tech. [7]

Atul has promised to put up the slides for these talks at [8], post July.

Deepak Shenoy [9] has volunteered for a Kylix demo to the LUG and boy were we surprised or what! For all those old Delphi fans out there - your dreams have come true. Deepak tooks us through a flying demo of what is very soon going to become the de-facto RAD on Linux. Kylix is smooth, slick and very very fast. It uses Object Pascal as a language and uses QT as it's toolkit. As it was pointed out to me - you can't even see the compile - code seems to execute directly from the source. The code is cross platform compatible, works with a whole bunch of DB's and had tools to talk to various entities on the net ( ftp, http, etc.etc). Yumm! While Deepak was showing us the commerical version (retails at $199 [10] ) the free version is expected to be available soon. While I expect the free version to be a little less jaw dropping, trust me, you better be careful. One interesting little detail - the free version cannot be used to write commercial applications! This was a lovely little presentation that really proved to me that as of now if we are to have a Desktop war starting now, perhaps, just perhaps Linux may poke it's head ahead!

Thanks to the fact that we had no snacks, some hungry Linux fans departed soon after the presentations ended while others hung around to chat, eventually wending their way home. Till the next meet: adios.

[1] http://www.fedtec.com
[2] sony @ exocore . com
[3] vaibhav @ exocore . com
[4] http://www.postfix.org/
[5] shanu @ exocore . com
[6] http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html
[7] Promises, promises and some more promises ;)
[8] http://www.linux-bangalore.org/meetings/20010623/slides/