Dublin Hacks: Disaster-Smart Cities

Come hack for urban disaster preparedness!

Geeks Without Bounds is hosting Dublin Hacks in the TOG hacker space as a way for technologists and coders to contribute to the wellbeing of their city during a disaster scenario – and help response efforts go as smoothly as possible. Urban disaster preparedness seeks to create technologies that help empower people in the face of uncertain circumstances to be the architects of their own rescue.

So what are we doing?

Curated challenges for urban disaster preparedness will be presented by local humanitarian and disaster groups, and participants will form teams around those challenges. You are also heartily encouraged to pitch your own related idea at the event and submit your project at the final judging. Teams will have all day Saturday to work on their projects before final submissions are due at 18:30.

Safe Space.

Coders of all genders and presentations are welcome, and we provide a safe space to learn, make mistakes, and try again. We encourage techies of all skill sets and experience levels to attend, from the brand new coder to the veteran C+er. We set the expectation of mutual respect for everyone at the event, and work to make sure participants feel welcome.

Schedule:

Friday, Nov. 1st

  • 19:00 – 19:30: Doors open – snacks and beer
  • 19:30 – 20:30: Overview, intros, talks, and challenges
  • 20:30 – 21:30: Team Formation
Saturday, Nov. 2nd
  • 9:00 – 9:30: Doors open – breakfast and caffeine
  • 9:30 – 13:00: Hacking!
  • 13:00 – 13:30: Lunch
  • 13:30 – 17:30: Hacking!
  • 17:30 – 18:30: Presentations
  • 18:30 – 19:00: Judging
  • 19:00 – 19:30: Prizes and closing summary

Registration at https://dublinhacks-smartcities.eventbrite.com/

Free Firewalling – All it costs is patience

There are many open source choices for a firewall these days and Packet Filter is one of the more common ones. This talk will go through the setup and structure of a Packet Filter firewall and a walk through of a complete Packet Filter firewall rule set.

Networking knowledge would be handy, as well as some Linux/UNIX experience since we will be using the command line.

LDAP – Its Mysteries and Example Use

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a well known and tempered method for storing information in a directory based hierarchy.

This talk will discuss the core concepts of LDAP and you will be shown how to use LDAP to represent user accounts in an LDAP data store with the hopes of using this single store as the primary data source for applications, wiki, blogs, e-mail accounts, etc.
Suitable for home users, businesses and complete beginners to LDAP.

Unsocial Networking

There has been a fair amount of work recently on the TOG network. We have the normal wireless and then a number of wired network points that allow people to plug their machines into the TOG LAN.

But what mysteries lie behind this amazing service? Curious? Of course you are. But fret not, all mysteries shall be revealed.

An “Intro to the TOG network” will be held on Wednesday 11th August 19:00 IST.

Topics discussed will be

  • TOG firewall (running OpenBSD)
  • TOG LAN switches (Cisco)
  • TOG wireless (Linksys)
  • Future plans for the wireless (guest and member access)
  • Network graphing for the network and servers (xymon and cacti), netflow accounting for the network (http://nfdump.sf.net/), Firewall IDS.
  • Services available (rack space, hardware, virtual machines) and lots more (maybe ;).

This is only intended as an intro, just a “here it is” rather than a “how it’s made” discussion.

Please reply if you’re interested so space available can be assessed.

For now check out the photos of the TOG server room which you’ll get a tour of on the night.

http://gallery.tog.ie/v/serverroom/

Schrodinger.

TOG Servers

Dragons Everywhere

Don’t celebrate Christmas?
Hate spending time with the family?
Kids annoying you to death with their new toys that will never live up to the Transformers/Barbies of olde?

Are you looking for a getaway this Christmas?

Well….. There Be Dragons!

This year sees the 26C3 Chaos Communication Congress on in Berlin, taking place from December 27th to December 30th 2009.

For those fortunate to be attending, Enjoy and bring us all back some stickers!

For those of us unable to attend there is a plan for people to share in the CCC community remotely from their respective Hackerspaces. There are already a fairly substantial list of countries attending CCC remotely.

Dragons Everywhere

  • Osterreich
  • Letzebuerg
  • Poccna
  • Spain
  • Schweiz
  • USA
  • Hungary
  • Australia
  • Belgium
  • Canada
  • Ireland
  • Macedonia
  • etc…..

With this in mind we plan to be attending CCC via TOG.

The proposed plan is to attend TOG and watch the CCC talks from the live stream and chat with people there via IRC. Maybe get some projects going or work on existing projects.

We also hope to have a VPN to the 26C3 network that will allow us to talk to the internal congress network and if the need arises they can talk back to hosts in TOG.

Go the Fahrplan and see what talks you would like to watch and watch them in TOG. It’s that simple.

So yes, COME ONE COME ALL 🙂

Bring:

  • Your good self
  • Food
  • Drinks
  • Laptops
  • Generic nerd apparel
  • Warm Clothes
  • TEA
  • Sugar, Sugar, Sugar
  • Films

If anyone has any ideas for projects ‘Get to the chooper!’ and/or your nearest mailing list or IRC client. We’re also suggesting some film watching, so bring your favourite Christmas flicks and we’ll ourselves a very merry Hackmas.