Tuesday February 11th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday February 11th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

Brian started our meeting off.  Demonstrating TUI interfaces.  There
is a cool dialog creation tool called Textual.  It's a really cool and
very featureful tool that builds text terminal interfaces.  Interfaces
with what looks to the eye like graphics.  Some of them looked like it
was rendering graphs and images but it is all terminal based.  Wow!

But wait!  There's more!  In addition to creating truly amazing text
terminal interfaces it can also generate HTML to create web pages from
the same source.  Can use it for terminal interfaces and also generate
matching web pages for it.  Cool stuff.  Check it out!

    https://textual.textualize.io/
    https://github.com/Textualize/rich
    https://github.com/ceccopierangiolieugenio/pyTermTk

Morey started with a charity site for the Memphis City Zoo.  If you
are mad at someone you can have them print out a floor sign with their
name on it and then they will take a video of an elephant pooping on
it.

Morey talked about AI.  N8N.  Node aware work flow automation.  Visual
Basic without the Visual Basic.  But on steroids.  Visual programming
language.  For AI things.  Connect up multiple OpenAI instances so
that multiple LLM ML engines are all talking to each other to create a
larger machine.  As a demo Morey spoke into the air and asked the
machine to send a message to his friend Andy with a message to meet
tomorrow at some time, and it listens and creates all of the needed
things and out goes the message.  Or it will go into their calendar.
Or other targets.

Bob talked about the 3 million strong botnet that is abusing the GNU
Savannah git CGIT cgit.cgi human web rendering of git version control.
It turns out that fail2ban with iptables just can't handle it.  Around
100,000 entries things really grind.  But enter "ipset" which is an
additional utility that can be installed.  Using ipset and it's
database one can include 3 million addresses into the firewall and
block them.  Which is pretty amazing.  But with 3 million bots strong
it can hit once a day and still overwhelm you.

To help to mitigate things I configured nginx to match the abuse
pattern and then instead of routing the request to cgit.cgi as normal
instead simply "return 400" immediately.  That by itself helps to shed
load from the system hugely.  Nginx FTW!

Morey talked about the new-ish downtown Fort Collins city co-working
space.  Related to us a meet he had there recently.  He was at the
co-working space and talked there about AI and gave us the demo he
gave there.  Use photos and images and AI to generate 3D models.  Some
very impressive 3D models created from images of houses, buildings,
trees, foliage.

Sy then got the project display hose.  Sy has a couple of proxmox
servers.  Sy was not happy with the default interface to observe and
configure new VMs.  But templates can be used to improve the
situation.  Demonstrated a template with Zabbix monitoring configured.
Can more easily set up VMs wth Zabbix montoring all ready to go.

Sy demonstrated Zabbix.  Can monitor all kinds of things.  Can send
alerts.  Can create tickets.  All fully FLOSS.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabbix

Dan introduced himself to the group.  He told us a sad (and funny)
story of his recent computer problems.  His machine was broken, fixed,
broken, then fixed.  Decided to replace MS-Windows with GNU/Linux.
Now is unable to unmute his microphone.  A classic problem!

The group think, primarily Stephen, worked on trying to make this work
with most of us kibitzing but unfortunately we couldn't debug it
immediately on the fly.