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Meeting Tonight, March 14th 2024. Topic: "self hosting"
by Tim Keller 14 Mar '24

14 Mar '24

Time: 7pm. Date: March 14th 2024 Location: Technocopia 44 Portland St. Worcester MA. Virtual Location: hopefully hosted independently, but at https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA For now.. We are increasingly living in a world where our data isn't ours anymore. Everything is a service being hosted by some entity, subjected to the whims of that entity. Come to love some service? They're discontinuing it. Your data? They're using it to train some AI that you don't control. Functionality? Ever changing.. Costs? To change without warning and your data is now hostage. To that end.. What are people doing? What would people like to do? What options are out there? What's worked in the past and now doesn't? There's also SOAF "significant other acceptance factor" to consider.. If you own the data but it's so horrific to manage that it sends everybody around you fleeing back to some service, that's no good either. I expect this to be a pretty lively debate. As usual, we'll head out for dinner and continue the conversation. I'll have snacks and refreshments available. Thanks, Tim.

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fun crashing and burning in Google Earth Pro's Flight Simulator
by Doug Mildram 13 Mar '24

13 Mar '24

Hey all (from doug in the boonies, retired = too much time on my hands) Brief my-nonexistent-skills-history: I've avoided fun/gaming on computers/screens forever. Well, ~ 1997 I bought a joystick and a couple windows games. Lost the joystick, but probably wouldn't help me in flight...? I did better with the 1990's era MS Excel97? magic escape to flight simulator that easily flew me on the moon, to a monolith. Fast forward to now. While looking for my town's GIS tax maps, (which I never found, just PDF's w/ lot lines, no owner names, no tax $info. Every town is different.) Then, under clueless town "Tax Maps" webpage, I found this note: *Please note*: Parcel boundaries are intended to be used for the purpose of property assessment and should not be considered survey accurate. You will need to have Google Earth <http://earth.google.com/> installed to view this data. For help using Google Earth go to the Help Center..... and forget all about tax maps ( I added that here-doug) doug> I got Earth help, yes! I have no joystick, so keyboard and mouse. Pardon doublespacing below. Some copy/paste's do odd things for my gmail edits (now I'm in tiny font in a battle to un-do the big effect of the above paste :) Stumbled into install cmds for google EARTH PRO (free), worked on Linux Mint20. 1) wget https://dl.google.com/dl/earth/client/current/google-earth-pro-stable_curre… (result: GOT a 58mb file named google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb) 2) sudo dpkg -i google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb (output: Preparing to unpack google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb ... Unpacking google-earth-pro-stable (7.3.6.9796-r0) ... Setting up google-earth-pro-stable (7.3.6.9796-r0) ... Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ... Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.24+linuxmint1) ... Processing triggers for mime-support (3.64ubuntu1) ... (DONE). LAUNCH TO OUTER SPACE: 3) $ google-earth-pro If you see a few continents from space, good but here's the fun: ========First zoom to somewhere you know, use upper LH Search, enter your address or fun place. Adjust eyes, or ignore briefly, fuzzy view of map,streets,trees,whatever. The fuzziness disappears or changes, if you enter Flight Simulator from here. ==== PULL DOWN MENU for "Tools" has "Enter Flight Simulator". Choose the slower plane, not the F-16 jet if you suck like I do. The mouse now flies the plane. I want to skim over my hood. I use my four arrow keys , mouse-moves work too but I flip out. I know I'm missing some kind of flight/plane control, should RTFM. I thought Flaps controlled pitch/up/down, but my Flaps stay at 40% and I crash in hilarious various mistakes every minute or so. What fun! Resume Flight brings all control back so off you go to die again.... I'll try to shut up now and find out if any of you already mastered? this. Lots cheaper than a drone! Fast, Cheap, Good.... all 3? --doug

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(old?) Dell power-edge rackserver power supplies
by Michael Voorhis 26 Feb '24

26 Feb '24

Hello all, I have a number of spare power supplies for old Dell power-edge rackservers. If anyone has an old rack server and they're looking for spare parts to extend its lifespan, I've got the following dell power supplies. Listed are # I have, the server they supposedly work with, and the power-supply model number: 6x pe-1950 PS, mod d670p 4x pe-r415 PS, mod d500e 2x pe-r710 PS, mod a870p 2x pe-???? PS, mod d750p. 2x pe-r200 PS, mod ?ps5341? 1x pe-r210-ii PS, mod. L250e Take them if you're going to use them. Please don't take them just re-sell 'em... --MCV.

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Zoom Safety-Privacy-Security Question on Ubuntu
by THE HAMMER 23 Feb '24

23 Feb '24

Hey Gang, Is the Zoom meeting client a relatively safe thing to download unto a machine running Ubuntu? I thought I should ask here, as googling will gives me different responses. Thanks Ron

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Reminder: WLUG Meeting tonight: Topic ProxMox / Turning Pi 2
by Tim Keller 16 Feb '24

16 Feb '24

Hey Everybody! We've got a meeting tonight! Time: 7pm Date: February 8th, 2024 Location: Technocopia, 44 Portland St. Worcester MA Virtual Location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA For a topics, We've got two. Topic #1: Turing Pi 2 hardware Wlug member Zori Babroudi recently bought a Turning Pi 2 and a bunch of Pi and Rocks compute modules. Currently, it's a work in progress, but eventually once things are totally working on it, I'd like to show it off in its full glory. But in the meantime, we can marvel at the hardware. Ultimately, the plan is to run k8s on it and do some LLM based AI stuff as well. Topic #2: ProxMox With BroadCom's purchase and destruction of VMware, many of us are scrambling to look for alternatives to VMware Esxi. One great contender is ProxMox. It's a debian based distro that's focused on providing a great interface to manage vms running on kvm. It also has great support for video card pass through (something I know Brandon is *very* interested in). I've got a 3 node proxmox cluster that I will show off. John Stoffel has also been experimenting with it as well so both of us can talk about the good/bad/ugly of it. As usual, the conversation will be lively and focused around linux, FOSS, fair use and who knows what! Afterwards we'll head off for some dinner and keep the conversation going! I hope to see you there! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Hey Everybody! WLUG Meeting this week!
by Tim Keller 08 Feb '24

08 Feb '24

Hey Everybody! We've got a WLUG meeting on the 8th! I know weirdly early in the month because the 1st landed on a Thursday! If things go well, I *might* have a Pi cluster using compute cards in it! I'll keep you all posted! As for the meeting details: Time: 7pm Date: 2/8/2024 Location: Techncopia Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Firewalld/iptables/nftables question
by Patrick McEvilly 08 Feb '24

08 Feb '24

All First off, I’m in way over my head. $dayjob we have a redhat 8 box. We are looking to take in syslog messages and sent them out to one/two different IP addresses. We tried using https://github.com/sleinen/samplicator and while it works perfectly and a one banana job to setup, we seem to be dropping a significant amount of traffic on the box. At least 10% of the logs are missing and we have not loaded up the system yet. We tuned out the network buffers and added 25MB of memory without any improvement. https://github.com/sleinen/samplicator/issues/72 Seems at a high rate of logs (which I think we would fall under) there seems to be some issues. We looked at this option - https://zapier.com/engineering/iptables-replication/ Redhat 8 seems to be using firewalld and backended with nfttables so we can’t directly use this method so we tried this. firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 mangle PREROUTING 0 -i ens192 -p udp --dport 514 -j TEE --gateway 127.0.0.1 firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 nat PREROUTING 1 -i ens192 -p udp --dport 514 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.137.241.79:514 firewall-cmd –reload With no luck, packets are not getting sent to 10.137.241.79. When it works with samplicator this is what we get. 11:53:04.382233 IP 10.240.136.4.24277 > 10.240.1.1.syslog: SYSLOG local7.notice, length: 670 11:53:04.382408 IP 10.240.136.4.24277 > 10.137.241.79.syslog: SYSLOG local7.notice, length: 697 sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 IP Forwarding is enabled. I’m not at all familiar with any of this and cutting and pasting from the internet and chatgpt has come up empty. Anyone have any suggestions on what we are doing wrong? Patrick

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3 million smart toothbrushes were just used in a DDoS attack. Really
by Tim Keller 07 Feb '24

07 Feb '24

My favorite part of the story.. "While the details are scarce, we know that the compromised toothbrushes were running Java." We are officially living in the dumbest time line. My only hope is that the servers at the far end of that DDOS attack at least had a minty smell to them.. Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Proxmox!
by Tim Keller 26 Jan '24

26 Jan '24

Hey Gang, As many of us have been watching the news, BroadCom has been gleefully destroying vmware at scale. I've been exploring FOSS replacements for esxi and one of those is Proxmox. It looks pretty cool and has a pretty awesome set of features. Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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I just bought a Pi5.. we'll see if I actually get it.
by Tim Keller 18 Jan '24

18 Jan '24

They say estimated delivery of Jan 9th - Jan 11th.. So, who knows.. I bought the 4GB model, so it should be functional as a desktop, my plan is to experiment with it as a daily drivers. Beyond that, what do people think would be a good benchmark to experiment with? Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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