Tuesday March 11th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

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

I just had a routine eye exam, which due to my retina tear (all good
now), requires dilation.  I can almost see something.  Somewhat.
Almost.  So notes are going to be touch typed without much review for
syntax, gramar, spelling, or sanity.

We had a good turnout of people at tonight's meet.  Which for us means
that we filled both of the workbench tables in the creator hub meeting
area.  Pretty good for us was just short of 20 people.  Awesome!

Aaron was first in time with a talk announcement putting him first in
line to talk at the meeting!  The topic was an open WiFi
demonstration.  Aaron brought a handful of Aruba Networks IAP Instant
Access Point.  They are now very available on the used market from
eBay.  They now run OpenWRT making them very desirable devices.

Stacked with that was a 48-port high performance enterprise network
switch.  Loud!  Dual power supplies.  40Gbps interconnect.  POE ports.
Loud!  Much quieter after it boots up fully.  The only purpose of this
switch over a small consumer switch is that Aaron pretty much only has
full size enterprise equipment and this was his spare equipment.

The plan was to live demo show loading OpenWRT onto a factory firmware
Aruba WiFi device.  We lost focus a little bit because it takes so
long to boot the network switch and then to boot the Aruba IAP WiFi
device.  We also had multiple comments about Aaron using the perfectly
valid Kermit utility for serial interfacing.  Kermit is perfectly
valid!

Stephen demonstrated a new Android thing.  The latest Android has a
built in GNU/Linux container feature.  The first time it runs it will
download about 500MB of system to create the container.  And then on
the phone you have what appears to be a full featured GNU/Linux system
in minimal install.  Which then will want to download maybe a Gig more
in order to install enough for it to be useful to do something serious
with it.

Set up the container.  Install sshd.  Then ssh *into the phone* and
there is a full GNU/Linux system running as a virtual machine on the
phone.  The phone's file system is not fully available but the phone's
Download directory is shared allowing a drop area.  Stephen
demonstrated compiling GNU bash as an example of being able to do
pretty much anything on this virtual machine.

This is similar to Termux but whereas that is an Android app and
interacts like an Android app this is either a container or a virtual
machine and is not limited by the Android API.  It is limited by
running in the virtual machine environment and can't access most of
the phone's file system it can do everything else in a perfectly
normal system way.  It loads up Debian 12 Bookworm which is current.

James brought in three nice Python books that were donated by Sean.
Those were given away to people who were interested in them.  I didn't
catch the three titles but they were three nice Python books from
Sean.  From No Starch Press.  Autographed by the author.  Thanks Sean!