Tuesday October 8th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

Wed Oct 9 13:25:55 UTC 2024

WRT cameras: Last week I replaced all my cameras with newer ReoLink
devices and the ReoLink NVR and have been pretty happy with it.
They have quite the camera selection now, I went with their PoE wired
cameras with low-light sensitivity, and their app is acceptable.

My switch is an older Aruba 2530, with PoE+ for around $100 on ebay.
It's a good gig switch with 2x 10gig SPF slots, runs fairly quiet unless
it gets hot.

I previously ran Montavue (Hikvision VAR) cameras, they were ok, good
low light sensitivity but viewing on phones was kind of a pain.  I had both
their NVR and was running BlueIris.  Prior to that I had Ubiquiti which
had a really great app but the whole system ended up bricking itself
during a firmware upgrade 3-4 years in with no way to fix it.

If I get any cycles, I'd like to play with HomeAssistant integration, the
AI detection on the cameras triggering events might be interesting.  But
let's be honest, 90% of what I use the cameras for is saving videos of the
kids or pets doing silly things.

On Tue, Oct 8, 2024 at 7:34 PM Bob Proulx <bob at proulx.com> wrote:

> 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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