taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Mike Culver, Amazon’s “Web Services Evangelist”, will be in Dublin next week to evangelize about the goodness that is Amazon S3, EC2, SQS and so on. It seems he’ll be talking at the following locations:

• in the Auditorium of the Digital Exchange, Crane Street, Dublin 8 on Tuesday October 30th, 3-5pm; here’s a flyer the Amazonites have been passing around. (upcoming.org page)

• according to Damien, later that evening, he’s in the Westin Hotel on Westmoreland St., D2, starting at 7pm; note, it seems you need to book places at this, see Damien’s post.

• and again at the Irish Linux User’s Group on Thursday November 1st at 19:30 in the Irish Computer Society in Dublin (map).

I guess these are all going to be same talk, bar the Q&A ;)

There was some kind of an ICTE get-together mooted for Friday 2nd.

Also, the ILUG annual general meeting is scheduled on the following Saturday, 3rd November, also at the ICS. Gareth Eason notes ‘we’re hoping to start at 3pm sharp, with talks from Dave Wilson (HEAnet), Frank Duignan, John Looney (Google), and others, followed by a relaxing wind-down in the Schoolhouse pub later on.’ (upcoming.org page)

Hopefully I’ll get to at least one of the AWS talks (probably the Digital Exchange one) and the ILUG AGM… busy week!

Tags: amazon, aws, dublin, ec2, icte, ilug, ireland, linux, mike-culver, s3, social, talks

A last-minute notice — the Irish Linux Users’ Group are organising an introduction to Open Streetmap tomorrow:

Open Streetmap : An Intro

The ILUG committee is organising an introduction to the Open Streetmap project on Saturday, 1st September, 2007 in Dublin.

This will include info on how to use your GPS and upload your data to the project, to contribute to a free and open map of the world.

The Hamlet Pub, Balbriggan (N 53.61396 W 6.20608 degrees)

Sat, 1st Sep 2007 2pm ~ 5pm

If you have a GPS and a laptop, please feel free to bring them. Wireless internet is available in the venue.

To register interest, please e-mail chairman-at-linux.ie

Tags: balbriggan, dublin, geowanking, ilug, ireland, mapping, open-streetmap

UNIX: a quick recap of a good tip combo picked up from ILUG recently. To paraphrase Conor Wynne’s original question:

What’s the best way to set up a secure connection between two hosts, possibly over the internet, using SSH, suitable for use from cron so that it can run via crontab without entering authentication manually?

Barry O’Donovan replied:

I suggested ssh keys without passphrases … in
http://www.barryodonovan.com/publications/lg/104/ and it includes instructions. … You can invoke rsync over ssh and specify a specific key with:

rsync -a -e ’ssh -i /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa-serverbackup’

Colm MacCárthaigh followed up with:

You can restrict what commands an ssh account can run in the ssh public key. This is how some of our more important projects (like Debian, FreshRPMS, and a few more) push us updates. The key looks like (jm: all on one line, no space between ‘no-pty,’ and ‘command’):

no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty, command=”/home/ximian/rsync-ximian-nolog &”
ssh-dss keydata username@blah

So, create a passwordless public key like so, and just change the command to whatver rsync runs.

Combined, that’s a useful tip — I knew about the ssh command restriction technique, but being able to use a specific single-purpose key from the ssh client is very useful.

(updated: mbp mailed to note some missing quotes in Barry’s command above; they’d been eaten by WebMake. drat.)

Tags: combo, command, home, ilug, key, recap, rsync, ssh, tip, unix, username

Patents: Ciaran O’Riordan just posted a message to ILUG, regarding how concerned voters in Ireland can use their votes in tomorrow’s European elections to prevent legalising patenting of software ideas in Europe. Here’s the scoop:

Note the main thing I got wrong — some sitting MEPs from Fianna Fail and FG actually voted the right way! So a vote for FF in this case, is a vote against software patents. (I never thought I’d be saying that, but there you go ;)

Tags: area, brian, crowley, ilug, message, patents, scoop, software, south, tomorrow, vote

some ILUG regulars conducted a war-drive around Dublin and found 378 stations, with quite a high range of WEP use compared to previous surveys: 39%. BTW, is this the first use of warcycling? The green alternative!

Tags: alternative, btw, ilug, range, use, wep