JLUG Meet Up 14 July

Yet another successful meeting happened this past Thursday with a host of presenters at the ready. Denis was first on the floor and made a presentation on a structured exception handling(SEH) based buffer overflow exploit. He was running Backtrack 4 on his machine as well as Windows XP via virtual box. Using the program Metersploit which comes pre-installed in Backtrack, he able to gain access to the XP system and manipulate quite a few features and programs based on vulnerabilities attacked. Full details on this can be found here.
The next presentation was by George on the .NET Framework, and yes you are reading it correct, the .NET Framework! He detailed quite a few points on this platform, among them:

• the .NET Framework itself which is pretty much like the java API or C/C++ Library
• the C# language and its robustness in terms of speed and ease of use especially with Visual Studio software
• a feature presentation on silverlight

Mike was on there after and provided quite an invaluable and essential workaround on recovery of the Grub Loader for Linux. Through these two lines of code:

• sudo mount /dev/sda1/ mnt...(replace sda1 with your root partition number) ,and
• grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ dev/sdx...(replace the x in sdx with your partition alphabet)

one is able to recover the grub loader in situations where one is running a dual boot configuration and the loader for the Linux system is overwritten by Windows or is otherwise lost or corrupted.
On a separate issue, the frequency of meetings has been unilaterally changed from twice weekly to once every week, same time same place. See you then and tag a friend along!

Government Open Data Portal Official Launch

Happening this Friday at 8.30am is the official launch of Open Data Portal initiative by the Kenya ICT Board and the Government at the KICC. Get your tickets and more info here

Fourth JLUG Meeting

Yet another successful fourth meet up this past Thursday and although our featured guest could not make it, still it proved to be a rather engaging and candid discussion on the myriad viewpoints and issues discussed.
Top on the list was a question raised by most of the new members present for their first ever meeting which centered around just exactly what the club is all about. From the conversation that answered that question, it was made clear that it's all about the Linux experience, free software that works just as good if not better than 'the establishment' and the commitment to ensuring that we are part of the global community spreading the word as it were.
Hot on the heels of this topic was the discussion on the various software solutions available and the best platform on which to run it. Perhaps the best answers came from quite a few of the members sharing their own personal experiences most of which were all things Linux. Sigu, for example, gave countless renditions on just how versatile his particular distro was on the hardware, how reliable it is and the efficiency and throughput it gives him when running his applications and programs.
The challenge as Ian, our moderator, so rightly put it was to try out the various distros available and embrace the Linux experience on one's own. As a club, we are always there to assist in case of any questions or difficulties.
The next meeting is on in a fortnight and new members are always welcome.