Tuesday October 8th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

Bob Proulx bob at proulx.com
Wed Oct 9 01:33:52 UTC 2024


j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday October 8th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

I began the meeting with the continuing saga of my dealing with WiFi
on my laptop.  Because it took me a little finagling to get connected
to WiFi at the FCCH.  The short summary is that I am test driving
wpa-gui (wpa_gui/wpagui) as an alternative to connman.  It works.  But
for some reason wpa_cli launched by wpa_gui will detect an AP
disconnect glitch and then will start a fresh dhclient in the
reconnect cycle.  That's fine.  But it forgets to stop the previous
dhclient first!  Which ends up with two dhclients running each
fighting with the other.

Then we talked a little bit about small machines for use with
firewalls.  The cool kids are using 2.5Gbps multi-gig adaptors now.  I
am still languishing with plain 1 GigE network.

Alex talked a little bit about Arch.  Arch is a rolling release OS.
Has been updating his Linode VM regularly but hasn't been rebooting
it.  Realized hasn't rebooted in a long time.  So behind on kernel
upgrades.  Need to reboot more often.

David has a managed switch that had a PoE port.  Thought it was a PoE
out to power a camera but instead that port was PoE in to power the
switch.  Had to shop for a PoE injector for the camera.  Has a couple
of cameras working.  Setting up a camera security system at his house.
Currently looking in the garage at the car.  (I joked it was on mouse
patrol.)  Running "motion" on each camera to trigger on any motion
events.

Phil is working on software to do plots and take data for testing.
QCustomPlot is some software he is demo'ing which uses Qt.  It
produced Smith Charts and other very nice charting.

    https://www.qcustomplot.com/

Mark is working on a project to consolidate some of his system.  Put
all of the eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.  And
humorously at different times two of us recommended against using the
firewall for NAS storage too.  But anyway it's a pfsense firewall plus
NAS plus everything.  Kirk counter-recommended a cheap bare metal
purchase of something cheap and using it for a dedicated firewall.
There was some, enthusiasm shall we say, about the issue of combining
the firewall with other services.

Stephen is still FCCH president for another 48 hours and then he can
return to do fun stuff again.  Stephen as been working with ESP32
devices for use with RFID readers.  He is working on creating a more
kit-like DIY RFID reader system that people could just build and use
for this purpose.  Mentions that MDNS now works on Android and uses
it.

Bob has been grinding through tedious tasks.  Been debugging cgit the
git web server browser.  This is totally crazy because this cgit
software is used by everyone everywhere for git server browsing.  But
on GNU Savannah's software forge it totally mangles the index links.
Why?  Figuring that out has been the task.  I have been stepping
through the C code in the gdb debugger.  Have isolated the problem
down to the caching management code.  (It's always a cache problem!)
Disabling the cache avoids the problem so that's the initial
workaround.  Performance has been very good even without the cache.

I have been continuing pushing through system upgrades.  The FSF is
all about Trisquel so mostly this has been upgrading from Trisquel 9
to Trisquel 11.

cgit bugs
git Trisquel upgrade
munin
11 glitch, btrfs

Morey has recently assembled a prototype Machine Learning software to
listen to voice and translate it to text.  Speech to text.  The goal
being to be able to talk to the machine, talk to someone else in the
room, return to talking to the machine, and it will know the
difference between the two conversations.  It can read text back in a
variety of voices.  This allows a true voice interface in and out of
the computer.  This is all work being done for a friend of Morey's.
It's all being done with Free Software and off the shelf hardware and
software.  I feel that I am not summarizing Morey's information very
well.  Which probably proves I am not just a LLM ML model and actually
listening and typing in these notes extemporaneously.

Kirk has been moving his Internet servers.  Kirk says that his hosting
site shutdown networking suddenly and notified him that they were now
closed from business.  Now.  What?!  Mad scramble to get a static IP
at his house.  Then relocate all of the servers and services to his
basement, ahem, his underground facility.  The goal now is to find a
different location but with the immediacy of this it all went into his
basement in order to get everything back online.  Home power pricing
then became a topic.


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