Tuesday September 10th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday September 10th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

I rode my bicycle tonight.  It's probably the one of the few good
weather nights for me and after this it will become too cold for me to
want to ride too many more NCLUG meetings.  Since I am out of shape I
arrived to the meeting with it already going at the end of
introductions.

Brian demo'd a new laptop.  Thin!  Fancy.  Dell XPS 13 9345
(SnapDragon Elite X1E80100).  12 cores.  8 performance and 4
efficiency.  32GB.  It's an ARM machine!  ARM!  WOW!  This is the
first real ARM laptop I have seen yet.

Brian then described why he is choosing to run this combination which
many will take exception to but he is running MS-Windows on it and
then running WSL2 under it.  The reason is that MS Windows has full
driver support for everything on it.  Fully supported.  Then he has
WSL2 in order to run his software on it.  This decision resulted from
frustration with the GNU/Linux environment with poor driver support
and other lack of support.  Then Brian demo'd running GIMP, Inkscape,
various programs that we typically see.  D-Bus is not started by
default but can be installed and then run if desired.

The question came could you run a Desktop Environment in WSL2 and have
it become the actual desktop handler for the entire display?  Not
completely.  It's possible in the WSL2 layer but it can't replace the
MS-Windows layer.

MS VS Code has a plugin layer to interface with WSL2.  This makes it
possible to run VS Code under the Windows layer and work in the WSL2
layer with it.  And there is an IPC layer to run Windows code such as
notepad.exe and then that runs natively.  Effectively merging the two
systems together.

I won't say my usual "check it out" because huge stack of non-free
software.  Shudder!  But it was an interesting demonstration.  Brian
has notes and I am hoping he will forward them as a follow-up message
in this thread.

Bob gave a demo of the ISC DHCP daemon running in failover mode.  I
had an actual system failure.  The DHCP server's Linux kernel panic'd
and crashed.  That would normally have caused problem on my network
but the redundant machine peer continued serving those DHCP addresses
for the network without interruption.  I also have redundant DNS
servers on the same systems and the redundant peer DNS server also
continued serving.  I eventualy read my email and got the notification
from the remaining redunant peer that it was running solo.  I then
booted the peer back up from it's crash and restored redundancy.

Stephen talked about NUT Network UPS Tools.  Many of us use APC UPS
devices and use apcupsd but that only works with APC devices.  NUT
supports a wide range of devices.  If you have one of the non-APC
units, or a mix with, then NUT is the sofware used to drive these
other UPS devices.

Stephen is configuring a CyberPower UPS and a TrippLite UPS.  NUT has
a distributed set of daemons that run which communicate with each
other to perform the function.  This way one UPS can serve several
systems and a system can control several.  It's extremely general
purpose and flexible and industrial strength.  Designed for use in
data centers.

Stephen complained about the bugs he found in the various UPS devices.
One of the UPSes will cycle the power but won't turn off and stay off
until the power returns.  That's really the functionality that is
wanted from a UPS and it is prevented from fully working due to the
bug in the device.  Those were some weird bugs!

I should mention that CyberPower is about 2/3rds the price of APC
systems.  It is similar with other vendors.  APC quality has been
going down in recent years.

Stephen mentions that the Creator Hub is selling some of their used
computers.  Dell T610 and a T320.  Do check out their equipment sale.

    https://fortcollins.craigslist.org/sys/d/fort-collins-dell-poweredge-t320-12th/7780695094.html
    https://fortcollins.craigslist.org/sys/d/fort-collins-dell-poweredge-t610-tower/7780694087.html

Kyle has talked about sfeed before but spiffed up sfeed a little more
and demonstrated some newer stuff about it.  We also got a lynx
demonstration along with it.  Two for one!  Using sfeed the demo was
using it to tidy up xml/html rss feeds and present it as TAB seperated
values text file.  Good for converting data formats.