“The Art of Community” tackles a very difficult question in the Open Source world: how do you build a strong community around your project?  Jono addresses this by using anecdotal evidence of good community organization, and discussing the facets that apply to community development.  Jono’s varied experiences are shown through anecdotes about the Ubuntu community and other communities he has participated in.  The stories he shares are concise and clear, but demonstrate their points effectively and thoughtfully.  Jono’s writing skills are first-rate, with strong points made clearly.  He builds the community idea from grassroots to the enterprise and shows how community participation can help — and harm — at each step along the way.  It’s obvious that Jono knows what he’s talking about, and he communicates it well.  I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the dynamics of a community or any project leader looking to build from the ground up.

Free IT Athens is a group of like-minded citizens who realize that computers are a necessary component of everyday life. We believe that everyone deserves access to low-cost computer equipment and computer-related services. Our goal is to provide access to information technology resources to Athens-Clarke County residents and organizations. We also aim to create well informed advocates in free software and open information technology.

I’m interested in helping/starting a similar organization here in the Atlanta area.  I know there are a lot of deserving individuals and community organizations, and it provides a great opportunity to showcase the strengths of open source software.  Unfortunately, there is no way I can get this off the ground myself.  I’m looking for some more individuals who might be interested in a meeting (either in-person or via IRC/dim dim/etc.) to discuss the feasibility and planning for such a group.  This (hopefully) serves as my “feeler” for others who might be interested in participating in/organizing such a group.

Mackenzie over at Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks has called attention to the greatest dark spot on the face of the FLOSS Community: a man who calls himself MikeeUSA.

This “man” has been posting sexist, misogynist, and violent comments on blogs in the FLOSS Community advocating rape and violence towards women.  His behavior is, to say the least, nauseating and despicable.  Worse, the “man” is a coward who hides behind pseudonyms and tor in protecting his identity.  Whether he really feels the way he does or he gets his jollies on trolling in this dirty manner, he is no better than the likes of Hitler and Stalin.  Needless to say, comments by him on my blog or any site I work with (e.g., LinuxQuestions.org) will not be tolerated.

That being said, I thought today would be a good day to address my take on the numerous issues of sexism in open source that have been going around lately.  I’ll first discuss a few points brought up via Mackenzie’s link to the Geek Feminism Wiki, which I wasn’t even familiar with until today.

• Hoss Gifford’s Flashbelt Presentation: Hoss’s presentation clearly presented a sexist message which was inappropriate for the venue.  It was unprofessional and disappointing.  That being said, it didn’t seem (to me) to be anything worse than immature attention-getting, and I doubt it reflects his personal views towards women.  (Or at least, I hope it doesn’t.)
• Richard Stallman’s emacs virgin joke: It was a joke, and a bad one at that, but it was delivered by RMS.  Who has ever expected anything politically correct from him?
• Mark Shuttleworth’s Keynote: While his comment was probably politically incorrect, it was hardly sexist to me.  In fact, I doubt anyone would have noticed were it not for all the other gaffes made at conferences this year.  Are we now asking every statement open source leaders make to be run by legal?  Maybe his comments were misinterpreted, or I just interpret them differently than others do.  What I do at work, and what I do in the open source community, can be VERY hard to explain to my fiancee.  From his perspective, this is “hard to explain to girls.”  This is not to say that women are not both valued and welcomed in the open source community, but it is more about the technical nature of the work and that being a doctor or a lawyer or a banker is easy to explain, and being a contributor to an open source project is not.  (I am in no way suggesting that Mark Shuttleworth’s comments were appropriate, only that they stem from common usage, and I don’t believe they reflect a sexist attitude.)

I fully support the movement to reduce sexism in the FLOSS Community, and I welcome and encourage the participation of women in the open source community.  I hope the proportions continue to normalize, and I don’t intend to offend by posting these views.

All that being said, I think that it’s inappropriate to expect someone to use “he slash she” every time they want to refer to a person in a speech.  The political correctness involved will quickly overwhelm and swamp the efforts that are being made elsewhere.  If we are to spend all of our time thinking about being politically correct, there would be no time for any forward movement, both technically and socially.  The idea that terms like “guys” are sexist is one I cannot wrap my mind around.  Show me a list of suitable replacement words that doesn’t make a presentation sound stilted and detract from the central idea, and only then can we expect ideas to change.

As for those who are refusing to use Ubuntu over Shuttleworth’s “remark”: overreact much?  It’s not like the Ubuntu wallpaper has nudes of women on it.  Perhaps when an attitude of discrimination is demonstrated, then it will be time for a boycott.  Until then, words are words and actions are actions, never confuse the two.

Edit: I have earned myself a comment from MikeeUSA, which is interesting in that he seems to be seeking out a fight.  Big surprise.

The root access allows tethering from a notebook computer, so I can get 3G internet on something where I can actually read most of the sites. Looks like I might have to consider another platform.

Google: nice way to show how you can use FOSS to choke off an active development community. You should update your site where it says “Do no evil” to be “Do no evil, unless it makes even more money.”

Big thanks go out to fellow planners Nick Ali, Jim Popovitch, Joshua Chase, and Amber Graner! If any one of us had been missing, I doubt things would have worked out. Also a big thanks to the spawn of akgraner for filling in the gaps and keeping us rolling in stitches!

Slides are available here: SSH & GPG. They don’t show everything, as a lot of it was Demo and Q&A, documented below.

This is Part 1 of a two part series.  I got far more questions about the OpenSSH content, so I’ll be focusing on that here.  I’ll add GnuPG content shortly, time permitting.

SSH Basics

Connect to a remote server via ssh:

ssh USERNAME@HOSTNAME [Optional command to execute]

To generate a SSH keypair and transfer it to remote server for authentication:

ssh-keygen -t rsa && ssh-copy-id HOSTNAME

You can then send it to more HOSTNAMEs just be repeating the ssh-copy-id HOSTNAME step.

Setting up a Config File

By creating a file .ssh/config, you can permanently set certain options.  Each server is represented by a Host stanza, and the value of this is how you refer to the server.  For example:

Host router1
    HostName router1.example.com
    Port 2222
    Username admin

Performing “ssh router1″ with this config file is equivalent to “ssh admin@router1.example.com -p2222″, saving a lot of typing for those servers you connect to all the time!  In the advanced section below, I’ll demonstrate both the command-line option and the config file option.

Advanced SSH Features

The following sections demonstrate some of the more advanced ways SSH can help secure your communications and save you time.

TCP Connection Tunneling

If you want to create an encrypted tunnel out of your current network for a service, you can use the -L SSH option.  It takes -L localport:remotehost:remoteport.  You then connect your application to localhost:localport, and it acts like you’re connecting from your SSH server!  Great for getting around/behind firewalls.

ssh -L 25:mailserver:25 user@host
ssh -L 1080:socksserver:1080 user@host

In .ssh/config:

LocalForward localport remotehost:remoteport

If you want, you can also have SSH act like a SOCKS server, and all communications between your client and this virtual socks server will be encrypted!  Set up your client application to connect to a SOCKS 4/5 proxy on localhost, port 8080, and then connect to an SSH server via:

ssh -D 8080 user@host

In .ssh/config:

DynamicForward 8080

Multiple SSH sessions in one connection

You can use a single TCP connection for multiple SSH sessions to the same server.  This reduces latency in starting the 2nd and further connections, and does not require additional authentications.  This is very useful when doing frequent operations over SSH.  This is only really useful when specified in the .ssh/config file as this:

ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p

Using ssh in a pipe.

It can be useful to send data from one side to another via an ssh connection.  Perhaps there is some filter only installed on the remote system, or you wish to copy over a large directory structure but rsync is absent on the remote system.

# copy dir1 to dir2 on target without rsync, as one command:
tar cz dir1 | ssh target tar xz -C dir2
# use hexdump on the remote system
cat somefile | ssh target hexdump

Store your SSH key in memory for your session.

You can store the SSH key in memory, already decrypted, to avoid having to put in your passphrase repeatedly.  This allows it to stay encrypted on disk and protect your key from tampering.

eval `ssh-agent`
ssh-add

You can also use Keychain from the Gentoo project (though now available in most distributions) to maintain a per-reboot ssh-agent session.  This is very useful on desktops as it is available to all terminals and applications rather than a single shell session.  Full documentation for keychain is available at: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/

Conclusion

If you have any questions or feel anything needs a clarification, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to update with more content!