February Meeting of the Chicago LUG

Disk Encryption: A Deep Dive for Adminstrators

Joel Luellwitz will kick things off with a discussion around disk encryption, largely focusing on things from an administrative perspective. With our ever-growing dependence on electronic data storage, hard disk encryption is a great way to keep your data safe and secure. However, with this added security, disk encryption adds greater complexity, especially when you want to do something out of the ordinary. Joel's talk will cover why one should use encryption, how to create a Linux system with disk encryption, how to efficiently boot a Linux system with multiple encrypted disks, how to remotely restart an encrypted system, and a new method for performing unattended upgrades on an encrypted system.

This will mostly be a technical talk, but there will be a little bit for beginners and hopefully enough background information for an astute novice to follow along with the rest of the talk.

ChicagoLUG Dotfiles Showdown So, you think you have the most efficient developer or administrator system setup amongst all of your developer or admin buddies? Prove it! Show us your best dotfiles in the ChicagoLUG Dotfiles Showdown!

We'll have a series of lightning talks (featuring you!). Share your dotfiles (http://zachholman.com/2010/08/dotfiles-are-meant-to-be-forked/) on our ChicagoLUG github repository (https://github.com/chicagolug/Dotfiles), and come prepared (or at least have enough nerve) to step us through how your dotfiles help you to be more productive.

Some helpful tips to consider as you think about what you might share:

Who will find your dotfiles beneficial? An introductory comment such as, "These dotfiles will be useful for vim-using admins" will help folks to get oriented as to what you have in store for them.What software will users need to have installed to use your dotfiles in their own environment? Are there certain plugins that they'll need to have installed for your dotfiles to work?How does your dotfile setup help you? What problem does it solve for you that you used to encounter? What does it not do to for you that you wish it did?Be willing to provide a demo of some of the main features that your dotfiles provide. You might not have enough time to demo everything of what your dotfiles do, so be prepared to share some of the main things. The best dotfiles demo will win a Raspberry Pi (not the latest model, sorry, but it's still cool).