Tuesday November 14th, 2023, NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday November 14th, 2023 NCLUG Meeting

I (Bob) gave a demonstration and tutorial on Restic backup.  I wrote
up HOWTO and tutorial and have posted this at this URL.  Didn't see my
demo?  Read all about it at your leisure here.

    https://www.proulx.com/~bob/doc/restic-backup/restic-backup.html

Stephen talked about the Creator Hub signage system.  The old sign
system was a unsupported and unsupportable in practical terms.  It was
a program without source.  It used Docker to run a bunch of services
in docker containers.  It ran on a small Raspberry Pi.  This all might
be too much for such a small machine.  It did not seem like an
overwhelming task.  Stephen decided to write something simple that
would drive it.  Which he did in about 500 lines of python code.

My view from the seats, which will miss details but hopefully get the
main concept, is that there is a python simple http web server that
has been configured to rotate through various URLs that is provided to
it and the result is thrown onto the various displays around the FCCH.
The new tool is written in python and is portable across systems.  The
application uses flask and gunicorn.

There is a monitoring system that is looking for problems.  It will
automate some heuristics for repairs.  Since these are small Raspberry
Pi systems some things are just easier to just reboot so that is the
big fix for many things.

There was a diversion into upgrading and rescuing some failed upgrades
using qemu for arm.  Could mount the SD card onto the laptop and then
run qemu to emulate arm and then log in to continue the upgrade and do
repairs and then put the SD card back into the pi.  Alternatively one
could use another pi to mount an SD card and then chroot into it and
do the same without using qemu.