[NCLUG] Tuesday October 8th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

jdewitt at verinet.com wrote:
> What: Tuesday October 8th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting
> When: Tuesday October 8th, 2019, 6pm
> Where: Fort Collins Creator Hub,
>   1304 Duff Dr Unit 15, Fort Collins, CO; map:

Initially no one had anything organized to say but there was a lot of
interesting stuff happening.  We were in a disorganized mesh of
discussion about DIY video doorbells, Linux memory footprints, Iris
recognition, test hardware, and so on.

After a while Evelyn opened the organized part of the meeting talking
about Open Source Hardware focusing upon the licensing problems unique
to open source hardware that makes it different from open source
software.  October is open source hardare month and last week was a
kickoff at Sparkfun which attracted people in the ecosystem.  Among
other things there is now a certification available for OSHWA.  Evelyn
also tied this in to a meetup two weeks ago about cube sats.  She
talked about the number of people and companies in Colorado doing
space based activities using cube sats.

  https://www.oshwa.org/
  https://certification.oshwa.org/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware
  https://www.sparkfun.com/

Stephen then gave a demonstration of USB-IP which is USB over
IP networking.  Alex had talked and demo'd usbip in a previous meeting
but this is cool enough for multiple demonstrations and everyone has a
different spin on it.  Stephen walked us through unbinding the local
device and exporting and importing the device.  He found the need to
do this somewhat annoying and had scripted a hack to loop and repeat
it as needed to facilitate.  Then list the USB devices on the remote
system.  Then bind it to the local system.  And transported over the
network the remote USB device is now attached to the local system.

Fun stuff!  But wait!  There's more!  For reasons unfathomable some
other developers like working in Windows.  They need to be supported.
But the best tools are in Linux.  There is the WSL2, Windows Subsystem
for Linux 2.  Stephen gave a humorous description of getting WSL2
going and how many days of updates and how many reboots and so forth.
But eventually one can get WSL2 running on the newest version of
Windows.  Once that is installed then one can type "ubuntu" and it
will magically produce a subsystem running Ubuntu in a VM.  However
USBIP is not enabled in the MS compilation of the Linux kernel.  One
must compile their own kernel with USBIP enabled.  After pulling the
Linux source, compiling, rebooting to it, then, *then*, one can run
usbip in the WSL2 Ubuntu VM.

The goal was to allow to run Linux based tools on a Windows system for
those developers that use Windows rather than Linux.  Whew! :-)
Well...  Almost...  It turns out that there were some other problems
preventing this end goal.  But Stephen had fun working throughthe
problem to this point!  And sharing it with us.

And then we talked about DoH, DNS over HTTP.  Pretty fun.  There are
problems related to VPNs with it.  But it's a thing.  Firefox supports
it right now.  It is not the default yet but it can be enabled.

Then we adjourned to Coopersmith's.