April 2020 - WLUG - {{ block.super }

WLUG history
by Anderson, Charles R 13 Mar '21

13 Mar '21

Not sure we are the oldest, but we /might/ be the oldest still in operation. Is GNHLUG still in operation? If so, they are probably older. I was inspired to dig into my archives: An early email from our founder, Andy Stewart: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 22:22:18 -0400 From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com> To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu> Subject: [Fwd: Caldera Inc. IT Forum] OK, gang, tell the man what you think! Remember, he is the gentleman who graciously donated the tee shirts and CDROM discs from Caldera... Andy ---------------------- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 12:30:22 -0600 From: Paul La Fluer <paull(a)caldera.com> Organization: Caldera, Inc. To: astewart(a)world.std.com Subject: Caldera Inc. IT Forum Hello Andy, I hope everything is going good. I am in the process of organizing a conference while in New York. My goal is to rent out a large ballroom in a hotel and have all the usergroups in the area come and listen to Bryan Sparks our CEO and other talk about Linux and OpenLinux. There will be presentations plus a Q&A session. I would like to hear your feedback on the idea and if your group would attend. We would be giving away door prizes like OpenLinux Base and Standard and handing out t-shirts, papers and OpenLinux Lite and OpenDOS to all that attend. Please give me some feedback on this idea. I need to know soon to get things set up. Thanks, Paul La Fleur ---------------------------------------------------------------------- An email about our SECOND meeting (that refers to the first meeting): ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 04 Aug 1997 21:29:13 -0400 From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com> To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu> Subject: Next WLUG meeting The next scheduled meeting for the Worcester Linux Users' Group (WLUG) is August 21, 1997, at 7 PM in the Gordon Library on the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) campus in Worcester, MA. We had a great turnout of about 20 people at our very first meeting last month - I hope to see all of you come back, and I'd like to extend a welcome to anybody who would like to attend. I would suggest parking in the "lower library" parking lot and hiking up the 102 stairs to the library (not to mention the 12 or so more stairs in the library to get to the 2nd floor!). For more information, feel free to send me E-mail at: astewart(a)world.std.com Look for the penguin signs! Hope to see you there! Andy Stewart WLUG ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I'd guess our first meeting was about July 23 or 24, 1997, or perhaps the week before, July 16 or 17. But maddog from GNHLUG forwarded this, which says "as always, the meeting are free..." which implies that July 30th is NOT their first meeting. If they had monthly meetings, that would place their first meeting in June 1997 or before. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Jul 97 10:28:09 -0400 From: "Jon 'maddog' Hall, USG Senior Leader" <hall(a)zk3.dec.com> To: gnhlug(a)zk3.dec.com Subject: GNHLUG - Linux Cluster meeting July 30th at Martha's Exchange Hi, We now have a venue for the July 30th meeting of the GNHLUG, with Loki, a cluster of 16 Pentium PRO 200s, running Linux as the topic of the talk. We will be meeting on the *second* floor dining room of the Martha's Exchange Building in beautiful downtown Nashua. I will be picking up the speaker in Cambridge that day and transporting him to Martha's for dinner, arriving about 1730 hours. For those of you who wish to join us for dinner, please RSVP. The meeting itself will start at 1900 hours, with the speaker probably getting up steam about 1915 hours. As always, the meetings are free and open to everyone, and as a FINAL enticement I will be handling out *free* CD ROMS with the V1.2 Debian release for Intel on it. M. Patrick Goda, a principal of the Loki ( http://loki-www.lanl.gov/ ) project at the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Labs, a Beowulf ( http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux-web/beowulf/beowulf.html ) style computer will be our speaker. I have convinced him to present a talk on the Loki project, one of linking together 16 Intel Pentium Pro machines to create a system that has: o high reliability o high throughput and generally 16-node IBM SP2 performance (over 1.2 GigaFlops) at 1/20th the cost (about $60K)!! Pat is a friend of mine that I introduced to Red Hat Linux when he was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii (long story). Due to the fact that Patrick is a rare find, I will invite the Boston Linux User's Group and the Worcester Linux User's group to join us that night, so I have arranged for larger quarters. Some additional Beowulf pages are from my own alma mater: http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/Beowulf_concept.html including exerpts from the original Beowulf story: http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/original_beowulf.html Warmest regards, maddog ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nevermind, GNHLUG is definitely older by several years according to their web page: http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents 1996 When Where What Who How Many 31 Jan 1996 UNH Durham Linux Linus Torvalds 200+ 1994 When Where What Who How Many 19 Oct UNH (?) First meeting Members ??? On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 04:13:25PM -0500, Richard Klein via WLUG wrote: > What do we know about WLUG's history? If it really is one of the oldest > LUGs, it might merit a Wikipedia article. It would be great if we could > flesh that out, too. > > This article seems like it could use a list of LUGs: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_user_group > > On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 1:43 PM Dennis Payne via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> > wrote: > > > The NatickFOSS group uses gettogether.community instead of meetup.com. I > > don't know that it has gotten us any visibility but the software is open > > source. I've been tempted to join meetup to go to Boston Indie Game > > Developer meetings but have so far held off. > > > > The NatickFOSS group also gets a booth at the Science on State Street > > event at Framingham State. It is a free STEM activity fair for kids. My job > > at the event is to generally occupy the time of the kids so the other > > members talk to the parents. First year I had a playstation controller > > hooked up to my laptop and held it out to any kid that walked by. Last year > > I brought the arcade machine assembled by my son's cub scout den. Any idea > > if WPI does any thing similar? Even if it is something only for WPI > > students it might be useful to alert people to the group's existence.

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RDP into Win10 with Remmina
by Richard Klein 29 Apr '20

29 Apr '20

I'm getting tired of booting into Windows for work. I figured out how to connect to the VPN from Debian, but it would be very helpful to RDP into the workstation in my office. I know the URL for my workstation, the domain, the username, and the password, but I'm failing to get it to work. What should I try? Remmina says "Connecting to <server>..." for a minute, then fails with "Connection to RDP server <server> failed." -- Rich

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Fedora 32 release
by Joshua Stone 28 Apr '20

28 Apr '20

Hey everyone, Fedora 32 came out today and it looks very solid! Here's a post detailing many of the core improvements: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-32/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2020/04/28/fedora-workstation-swamp-draining… I'm quite happy to see so much work going into components that I use every day, including Gnome Shell, Toolbox, Wayland, and Pipewire. The Firefox improvements should be especially helpful for when we do our next Jitsi Meet call. -Josh

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Does LINUX still exist?
by Ken Jones 24 Apr '20

24 Apr '20

I am trying for figure out what, if anything, of FEDORA RED HAT LINUX is still available. I have downloaded a DVD that I plan to install on my DELL XPS desktop PC running WINDOWS 10. Will it find for me my old LINUX atmosphere? Ken Jones

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April WLUG meeting to be online
by Tim Keller 24 Apr '20

24 Apr '20

Hey Gang, I hope everybody is staying safe and healthy. While Linux doesn't need virus protection, we do. Wash your hands you filthy animals. As the subject reads, we're going to be doing the WLUG meeting online. I've been active in the wlug-ma irc channel as have others. What do people think about Jitsi for doing a video meetup? Refreshments will not be provided and we won't be going out for dinner!! Stay home, stay safe and I hope we'll all get to see each other soon. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Lenovo shipping Linux pre-installed
by Joshua Stone 24 Apr '20

24 Apr '20

Hey everyone, Apparently Lenovo is planning on shipping Fedora on their Thinkpad lines, and will use only packages from the official repos instead of custom packages. I think this is great news as somebody who shopped for Thinkpads before and had to contact support about refunding a Windows license (turns out that wasn't possible at the time). Having a distro pre-installed should mean improved hardware compatibility, and maybe even be able contact support for Linux-specific issues. More info here: https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/ -Josh

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audit root/sudo users for RHEL 6 server
by John Malloy 18 Apr '20

18 Apr '20

What is the best way to provide proof to an audit person who needs to know all the root/sudo users for a RHEL 6 server? (I am new at this company, and don't have access to all their resources) We can provide the /etc/passwd & /etc/sudoers file (the auditor may not know how to read these files) We also have the RedHat Identity Management running here, but I am not familiar with this tool. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks! John Malloy jomalloy(a)gmail.com

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April WLUG virtual meeting was a resounding success!
by Tim Keller 13 Apr '20

13 Apr '20

Hey Everybody, I just wanted to give a shout out to everybody who showed up to the virtual meeting last night. It was cool to see Maddog show up, I'm glad he's staying safe and healthy. Yeah, there were a couple of audio/video hiccups, but I thought overall it went great. I shared my screen a couple of times and that worked just fine as well. One cool thing that was brought up doing the meeting and I thought was worth talking about is "vscodium" which is a 100% open source recompile of the visual studio code editor. The big difference is that the vscode as shipped from microsoft contains telemetry tracking data that gets sent back to the mothership... https://vscodium.com/ solves that problem. We obviously jibber jabbed about COVID19 and folding@home and Logan showed off the facemasks he's been printing as well as the antennae he's building to contact a long lost satellite in geostationary orbit. While it wasn't the same as a physical meeting, when we do manage to get ourselves all back in the same room, I think it's something we'll definitely incorporate into the physical meetings. Stay safe, stay healthy and wash your hands! We'll see what May brings us and decide from there... Tim. WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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ansible layout thoughts
by John Stoffel 13 Apr '20

13 Apr '20

Guys, I'm starting to work on deplying ansible at $WORK to start managing a bunch of existing servers. The goal is to A) get them consistent, B) learn ansible, and C) automate deployments so if I get hit by a bus, they can have a hope of keeping things going. So my first thoughts are about organization. Ansible is a file/directory heavy setup. And I understand how a task has one or more roles. And then a playbook can have one or more tasks. But it's how to manage the overall site or bundles of playbooks that I want to understand. I've looked at: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_best_practices… and I think I can deal with the first layout suggestion, but I'd porbably put playbooks into a playbooks/ directory. But... how to keep them organized as my collection grows. Do I want a new directory structure for each group of playbooks? For example I want to do: - add ssh-keys for logins - make sure right repo(s) are configured - ntp client config - postfix config - NIS config - fstab config - nsswitch.conf config So ideally all of the above would be a playbook each, since for example ntp config, would/could include: - install ntp - install default client config - restart ntpd once configured - etc... Where it all comes down to is keeping all this organized nicely, especially as it grows ever more complicated. All the silly examples of setting up a LAMP stack completely gloss over the actual pushing of content, which is really what we want to do. So, thoughts? Real life experience? Suggestions for good training classes? Unfortunately it would have to be online now, not my preferred in-person training.... John

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Virtual meeting today! Starting at 7pm, via Jitsi!!
by Tim Keller 13 Apr '20

13 Apr '20

Hey Gang, We've got a virtual meeting today! We're all going to meet on Jitsi! Here's the location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA The big blue button stuff looks really awesome, but I haven't had a chance to dig into it, however for presenting it looks pretty awesome. I hope everybody is staying sane and staying safe. Later, Tim Keller WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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WLUG April 2020