Tuesday October 12th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

> What: Tuesday October 12th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting

Tonight's meeting was Short Topics.  Bob opened the meeting taking
agenda items for discussion.

Stephen spoke briefly about the Creator Hub and that he is now acting
as a new (again) board member.

James demo'd his newest laptop system.  Fresh installation.  Nice
machine.  Still has that new laptop smell.

Boogie gave a report on progress being made toward giving the NCLUG
web site a refresh.  We discussed some ideas for the web site.

Aaron is running a fresh Debian Testing Bookworm system on his home
Power PC server.  You read that correctly.  His HOME POWER PC server!
Definitely a beast of a machine.  Just to make it more over the top
the system requires 240VAC power to run!  He said that slowed up
getting things going on the project.  He powered it up remotely.
There was some running around getting the projector set up.  Instead
of waiting we decided to go around the table while it continued to
boot.

Alex demo'd Linux in your browser.  Totally crazy system!  You can try
it yourself.

    https://bellard.org/jslinux/

Spencer talked about a program set up in a Docker swarm stack running
Monica.  This is basically a modern day CRM for managing what some of
us might know as a "Farley File".  Personally I find these types of
tools very useful and have maintained a Farley File for a while.

    https://www.monicahq.com/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_file

Phil continued the topic of personal information management.
Described how he manages this information.  Had some wishlist items
for what would make this better.

Then we fell back into a discussion of file systems and how file
systems are structured using I-nodes and so forth.

Brian hasn't been at a meeting since I got my new laptop.  Good to see
him!  Brian talked a little bit about the fun stuff he has been doing
lately.  Machine learning, Kubernetes, documentation stuff, simulation
models, compute farm stuff.  Discussion of btrfs because Brian is
running it full time.  The btrfs users then talked about how the
snapshot rollback feature has saved them multiple times.  Being able
to reach into the snapshot directory and retrieve previous versions.
Sounds good!

Aaron's Power PC having booted we moved into the room with a
compatible projector so that we could see a demo of it.  IBM P550
Power 6 computer 8204 E8A.  It's "just a 4U" system.  8x dual core
CPUs.  Puts out some heat!

He logged into the hardware management system, the little computer on
the side of the big computer.  We toured through the "partitions" (aka
VMs).  Booted the system from the HMC and we watched it.  It's a Big
Endian machine.  Runs GRUB.  We watched the IBM firmware print out IBM
IBM IBM IBM IBM IBM IBM a godzillian number of times in a big grid.
Such a classic system!

Aaron has set it up with RAID 1 of course.  On top of encrypted
devices.  With separate passphrases for each device.  So of course we
all hassled him for it! :-)

Debian Sid Unstable was running.  The last version to support the
hardware was Jessie 8 some half decade ago.  Aaron then described the
process by which he needed to go through to get this system up and
running.  Wow!  Quite involved!

Bob gave a quick update of events this week.  OpenSSH 8.8 released and
has shown up in bleeding edge distros now.  It deprecates SHA-1.  This
causes problems with interoperability between new and old systems for
things such as git.  And the EFF Let's Encrypt's DST Root CA X3
certificate has expired as planned.  It's created some interesting
times this past week.

And with that we adjourned.  Some of us went to Slyce Pizza for
dinner and further continued conversation.