Tuesday October 11th, 2022 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday October 11th, 2022 NCLUG Meeting

Tonight's meeting starts off like every other meeting.  Chaos!  But
good chaos.  I had not connected my laptop to the network and so had
to get that connected.  I am now using a new to my laptop but
otherwise very old method of using the wpa_supplicant tool to manage
my WiFi connections.  Now that I have connected to the WiFi there now
it will automatically connect to it again in the future.

Stephen got the meeting moving with a demonstration of OBS Studio
(Open Broadcaster Software) on his Ubuntu system.  It's a cool system
for managing the camera, or multiple to create videos.  These might be
like presentation and training videos with your desktop as the main
part of the screen and your face camera as a picture in picture in the
corner of the screen.  Can combine multiple cameras.  Can switch
between cameras.  Looks pretty professional with a HUGE number of
controls available for whatever you would want it to do.  OBS Studio
is distributed under the GPLv2+ license.

    https://obsproject.com/

Stephen had previously used kdenlive.  That's a different free
software video editing package.  He brought that online for a
demonstration.  It has many useful features such as being able to post
edit videos to add annotations such as arrows and text to highlight
parts of the video.  Stephen used kdenlive to create a video his
wedding from the previous video.  A feature of which was to
automatically align the audio stream of two different cameras in order
to allow fading from one camera to the other smoothly.

    https://kdenlive.org/

So pehraps the right combination is to use OBS Studio to capture the
video and get things into the first pass.  And then use kdenlive in a
post processing step to put the final editing on it.

Completing the ensemble Stephen used audacity to do a final process
pass on the audio stream.  There were some distressing noises in the
raw audio that he could edit away so as to improve the experience.

    https://www.audacityteam.org/

We started switching the projector over to Aaron's machine and then
degraded once again into chaos and anarchy.  IP KVM switches.  Dual
monitors going to sleep and not being able to wake them.  nVidia
drivers.  TCL.  Rust.  Random stuff.

Aaron set up to demonstrate with a show-n-tell ZFS on Linux.  He is
upgrading his systems to newer stuff.  SSDs instead of spinning.
Newer CPUs.  More RAM.  (128GB!)  The entire stack.  And thought...
Let's also figure out ZFS on Linux and see if what all of the
advocates say about it is true.  Installing this upon his Debian based
host.  The upstream documentation describes how to do this.

Note that in previous meetings Aarong has been demonstrating booting
Unix v6 and Unix v7 in emulators.  So the from-scratch type of
installation he demonstrated through to us is right up his alley!

At the bottom of the stack are two luks encrypted file systems.  On
top of that is an md raid.  On top is LVM with the PV being the md.
With LVM LVs for use.  With ext4 on the LVs.  The downside of this is
that the luks encrypted volumes each need to be unlocked at boot time
individually.

Aaron had drives available and if anything is worth doing it is worth
doing to excess.  So he created a 4-way mirror of SSDs for the boot
array.  WOW!  In addition to redundancy that should also provide 4x
the speed of a single SSD too.

Then he created an additional zfs zpool holding the rest of the disks
in a raidz2 (raid6) pool.  That looked to be in a fairly standard
configuration by my eye.  So then we talked about the various
advantages and disadvantages of the system this way.  One advantage is
that instead of creating hard partitions or LVs all of the storage is
shared in a pool so you don't need to decide on limits ahead of time.
Can set quotas if needed and as needed later.  But another
disadvantage is that ZFS consumes more cpu and ram resources in order
to do its internal integrity checks.

    https://openzfs.org/

A good time was had by all.  And then we adjourned to Slyce Pizza.