- WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

new/old toy soon? (yet another Gigabyte GA-NNN looming)
by Doug Mildram 13 Dec '18

13 Dec '18

Thanks for the support and keeping the list alive. Perhaps too alive (I can rant/ramble!) Are Gigabyte motherboards OK? I've only had one so far. Now dying perhaps. Looking ahead..... since I upgrade "combo style" (all ram and cpu attached/included) I'm gonna look at (days from now) a used motherboard+cpu+ram+beast video+beast fan, hope it fits under my hood, dude speaks well about his retired GIGABYTE GA-870A-UD3 SKT.AM3 AMD870+SB850 4XDDR3-1866, IEEE1394 USB3, SATA3, RAID, ATX plus cpu,ram, and even fan info on this BEAST of a fan, should i be scared? https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NH-U9B-SE2-CPU-Cooler/dp/B002VT1GZ6 doug> I find it cool that a machine/mb that old, is still way more than I need. I've only got one HD/disk for example. I'll try to buy her a tiny computer NEW someday if my new/old cheap-out fails. I want less power! Good brakes please! Ballpark of $100+ for the combo you CAN still find online if you dare and you get lucky that it really works for you. ...below, tangent about the seller i will meet this weekend. Sounds very smart/honest! I almost got him interested in our meeting. He said: (plus, he's a CS engr) Hello network engineer, me> Engineer too....I also a) use Linux only at home b) used Linux only on that machine, rock solid :) The cpu does not come with embedded gpu : I saved 10$ at the time, too bad now!

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desktop (wife=moved->linux Mint) MB/sata/grub fun
by Doug Mildram 12 Dec '18

12 Dec '18

Warning: there's a couple "fun" ( my definition for "new to me") errors/areas in this LONG email. Months ago i managed to move wife/maureen's desktop environment to Mint(ubuntu underneath). Usage: firefox,gmail (almost nothing else of note. This took some persuading, but desktops are such a fallback these days......another topic for another day) DESKTOP: 10?yr-old Gigabyte motherboard with sata2 ... 4 ports. I only use 1 sata port. I "gave" it a $90/bestbuy 256g SSD Samsung months ago for /dev/sda which ran well+fast of course, turns out the SSD is actually still fine internally. A FEW WEEKS AGO, the "hint" symptom (1 of 2 in this long story) for disk woes was.... (well, it started crashing occasionally, then) ON BOOT, it would sometimes STOP at this prompt initramfs> and with good eyes as the boot-attempt screen(s) would fly by and return to above prompt, I discovered I could fix it with ( actually i did not use the "-y" prompt, but it's the same fix either way) initramfs> fsck -y /dev/sda1 Which would fix a few things, nothing scary for an ex-unix-sysadmin, and initramfs> exit ######## would allow it to boot and be OK for days or so. I taped THAT magic (fsck...) onto a paper mini-sign on the PC for another rainy day. TODAY, the crash was followed by not booting (random results, kernel panics or bios/grub waiting). Worse (not that we care!) near the end of this story, the Patriots gave up cool kickoff return with a lead and 0:04 left. But timing-wise, I'm glad I had a few hours in the living room to debug all this. So I brought the SSD to my other living room desktop (not booting FROM it...) checked SSD with sudo smartcl -a /dev/sda #### AND ITS FINE. I moved the SSD "back" to wife's PC on another SATA port. It's fine! (motherboard deteriorating i guess....but might last another decade). I did run into.... ("created" by moving the disk i assume) .... a boot/warning error NEW TO ME: On initial boot a WARNING ERROR on the early/black screen (similar to where initramfs> shows up..just before that i think) "warning: environment block too small" was actually ignorable (after a few secs, boot marched on to kernel/logo). But I found "it's a thing" and the error appears solvable with first google hit suggesting linux user# sudo rm /boot/grub/grubenv # or "mv" it somewhere.old; 1024 byte file. ...............# sudo grub-editenv /boot/grub/grubenv create and reboot. Seems good now except (new i think; probably from the sata port move?) there's a ONE MINUTE wait on the initial boot with the Mint logo flashing. Final things-to-inspect: (no need to "fix" /etc/fstab which of course does find the disk parts ( just / and swap) by UUID and /var/log/syslog ( I have exported it all, i think the disk errors stopped. ) =========================WRAPUP Haven't solved this learn-all mission yet, but...hope to make it to WLUG THURS EVE and i just thought of a topic. Trick is knowing where to start such a story/tutorial; I'd try to skip over BIOS and sata/disk/etc basics, the fuzzy parts for me involve "initramfs" ... grub ..... and maybe that's it for me. Desired talk/take-home: linux BOOT steps you don't want to know. -doug

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Topic of Thursday meeting
by Keith Wright 10 Dec '18

10 Dec '18

> From: "Anderson, Charles R" <cra(a)wpi.edu> > Subject: [WLUG] WLUG meeting this week > > We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI > Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often). > > Subject: [WLUG] Re: December Meeting Reminder! > From: Chuck Anderson via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> > > Maybe we could talk about DMARC, DKIM, and SPF! ****pssst! Frank!*** Why does one message say From: cra(a)wpi.edu, and the other From: wlug(a)lists.wlug.org? (Nervermind, CRA explained that.) I don't want to try to prevent anyone from talking about anything, but I don't have much to say about that. I would have wrote you a letter, but I couldn't spell PHLTT!! If Frank does not have a presentation, I could commit by Thursday to make some slides and bring a laptop. I tested slide-showing a few months ago with the WPI cable in the Mid-century Room and it worked. Here's the catch: My usual ride is unavailable that day. I don't drive and I have not been walking well. I used to walk to WLUG; I fell on the hill. No problem; I got up and went on; it happens. I don't want to be carrying heavy and fragile equipment. I tried to go for a walk this morning, but fell and skinned my knee at the end of my own driveway. If someone could commit to pick me up at my house about 1/2 hour before the meeting I would make sure I was ready enough to fake it. I live about a mile from WPI. Send me mail. I will show you some of what I have been doing, and how I do it. The title of my talk: Love Programs work better than Love Poems Computatational Metaphysics Why and how to write soutce code that can be read Or something else if I thnk of it. Someone said recently that one of the best talks ever was Doug Waud showing TeX printing stuff nobody understood. I thought: "I could do that". I am not a pharmacist, so I will dazzle you with Scheme programs and Algebraic Geometry run through LaTeX. All in living black and white (or glowing green). -- Keith

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WLUG mailing list
by Keith Wright 10 Dec '18

10 Dec '18

> From: "Anderson, Charles R" <cra(a)wpi.edu> > To: "wlug(a)lists.wlug.org" <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> > Subject: [WLUG] WLUG meeting this week > > I haven't seen any messages to the list since November 8, > so I'm sending this message to see if the mailing list still works. > We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI > Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often). There might be something wrong, I saw: > From: "thinkbrown(a)gmail.com" <thinkbrown(a)gmail.com> > Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2018 18:27:19 -0500 > To: wlug(a)lists.wlug.org > Subject: [WLUG] Frantic last minute room change > Sorry for the last minute notice > Logan (pretending to be Tim) I missed that meeting, and I think the one before that, due to scheduling conflicts. You might find these two in the tl/dr filrer: > From: Dennis Payne <dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com> > Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2018 07:56:41 -0500 > Subject: [WLUG] OpenGameArt Movie Video Game > I spent the month working in my free time on a new computer game. > > From: Doug Mildram <dmildram(a)gmail.com> > Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2018 23:07:05 -0500 > To: wlug(a)lists.wlug.org > Subject: [WLUG] desktop (wife=moved->linux Mint) MB/sata/grub fun > > Warning: there's a couple "fun" ( my definition for "new to me") > errors/areas in this LONG email. If you want 140 character dim witticisms, you know where to look. This not that. The message that demands attention is this: > From: Tim Keller <turbofx(a)gmail.com> > Subject: [WLUG] December Meeting Reminder! > > We've got a meeting coming up next week! > > Date: Dec 13, 2018 @ 7PM. > > Location: WPI Campus Center (Mid Century Room 331) > > Topic: To Be Decided! If there's something you'd > > like to talk about drop me a line! Otherwise > C.R.A continues: > From: "Anderson, Charles R" <cra(a)wpi.edu> > Subject: [WLUG] WLUG meeting this week > > We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI > Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often). Yes. If you did not see Tim's announcement of the same, then something is wrong. Which leads me to my proposal, which I will put in another message so that it is not lost at the bottom. -- Keith PS: While I was writing this, two new messages came to me from wlug, one appears to be a copy of Doug Mildram's message dated 2018-12-09 the other a reply to that.

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mailing list issues
by Anderson, Charles R 10 Dec '18

10 Dec '18

Some people (including myself) have not been receiving emails sent to the list. I'm guessing that DMARC may be blocking messages from senders' domains that have DMARC set up, so I made a MailMan change to enable DMARC Mitigations. This works by replacing your "From: you(a)wherever.com" with "From: Your Full Name via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org>". Your original From: appears in the Reply-To: header. I'm also sending this message to test delivery to a few domains like yahoo.com and gmail.com.

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December Meeting Reminder!
by Tim Keller 10 Dec '18

10 Dec '18

Hey Gang, We've got a meeting coming up next week! Date: Dec 13, 2018 @ 7PM. Location: WPI Campus Center (Mid Century Room 331) Topic: To Be Decided! If there's something you'd like to talk about drop me a line! Otherwise As usual, refreshments and snacks will be provided and we'll head off for dinner afterwards. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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desktop (linux Mint/ubuntu) Motherboard/sata/grub fun
by Doug Mildram 10 Dec '18

10 Dec '18

Warning: there's a couple "fun" ( aka "new to me") things in this LONG email. SUMMARY 2-lines-below: 1) on reboot, an initramfs prompt, errors only seen briefly as boot screen overwrites it. Needed fsck. 2) later when things got worse, my solution followed by a different error message re: "environment block too small". the LONG story: Months ago i managed to move wife/maureen's desktop environment to Mint(ubuntu underneath). Usage: firefox,gmail (almost nothing else of note. This took some persuading, but desktops are such a fallback these days......another topic for another day) DESKTOP: 10?yr-old Gigabyte motherboard with sata2/sataII ... 4 ports. I only use 1 sata port. I "gave" it a $90/bestbuy 256g SSD Samsung months ago for /dev/sda which ran well+fast of course, turns out the SSD is actually still fine internally. A FEW WEEKS AGO, the "hint" symptom (1 of 2 in this long story) for disk woes was.... ( it started crashing occasionally, then) ON BOOT, it would sometimes STOP at this prompt initramfs> and with good eyes as the boot-attempt screen(s) would fly by and return to above prompt, I discovered I could fix it with ( actually i did not use the "-y" prompt, but it's the same fix either way) initramfs> fsck -y /dev/sda1 Which worked every time (a few times), nothing scary for an ex-unix-sysadmin, followed by initramfs> exit ######## would allow it to boot and be OK for days or so. I taped THAT magic (fsck...) onto a paper mini-sign on the PC for another rainy day. TODAY, the crash was followed by not booting (random results, kernel panics or bios/grub waiting). So I brought the SSD to my other living room desktop (not booting FROM it...) checked SSD with sudo smartcl -a /dev/sda #### AND ITS FINE. I moved the SSD "back" to wife's PC on another SATA port. It's fine! (motherboard deteriorating i guess....but might last another decade). I did run into.... ("created" by moving the disk i assume) .... a boot/warning error NEW TO ME: On initial boot a WARNING ERROR on the early/black screen (similar to where initramfs> shows up..just before that i think) "warning: environment block too small" was actually ignorable (after a few secs, boot marched on to kernel/logo). But I found "it's a thing" and the error appears solvable with first google hit suggesting linux user# sudo rm /boot/grub/grubenv # or "mv" it somewhere.old; 1024 byte file. ...............# sudo grub-editenv /boot/grub/grubenv create and reboot. Seems good now except (new i think; probably from the sata port move?) there's a ONE MINUTE wait on the initial boot with the Mint logo flashing. Final things-to-inspect: (no need to "fix" /etc/fstab which of course does find the disk parts ( just / and swap) by UUID and /var/log/syslog ( I have exportedthe old history to study, i think the disk errors stopped. ) =========================WRAPUP Haven't solved this learn-all mission yet, but...hope to make it to WLUG THURS EVE and i just thought of a (this) topic. Trick is knowing where to start such a story/tutorial; I'd try to skip over BIOS and sata/disk/etc basics, the fuzzy parts for me involve "initramfs" ... grub ..... and maybe that's it for me. Desired talk/take-home: linux BOOT steps you don't want to know. -doug

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WLUG meeting this week
by Anderson, Charles R 10 Dec '18

10 Dec '18

I haven't seen any messages to the list since November 8, so I'm sending this message to see if the mailing list still works. We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often).

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OpenGameArt Movie Video Game
by Dennis Payne 04 Dec '18

04 Dec '18

Normally I do National Novel Writing Month in November. This year I decided to try the Indie Game Making Contest 2018. I spent the month working in my free time on a new computer game. I had thought of this game a while ago (including doing a novelization of it for NaNoWriMo last year). The idea was to use lots of art from OpenGameArt.org. Since the styles of the artwork can be drastically different, that was integrated into the story. The villain is in the Liberated Pixel Cup style. (It was a contest opengameart.org did to create lot of artwork which could be used together.) He would be trying to wipe out all the other art styles. (It's a crazy mashup like the Lego Movie.) The game didn't get to the level of completion I had hoped. I posted a Postmortem on the project: http://identicalsoftware.com/games/opengameartmovie You download the Windows version of the game from: https://dulsi.itch.io/opengameart-movie-video-game Unfortunately there isn't a log of content in the game as much of the work was building the game engine. (Why isn't there a Linux download? I was rushing to post it before the contest end and didn't get around to posting a Linux build. We aren't allowed to put up new downloads while the judging is being done.) -- Dennis Payne <dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com>

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Frantic last minute room change
by thinkbrown＠gmail.com 08 Nov '18

08 Nov '18

Hey WLUG! Frantic last minute change of room. Due to the relative inaccessibility of Stratton after 5PM, we moved to Campus Center room 128 (the Taylor Room). This is on the first floor (down the stairs through the main entrance). Sorry for the last minute notice Logan (pretending to be Tim)

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Reminder! WLUG Meeting NEXT week! Nov. 8th, 2018! NOTE: LOCATION CHANGE!
by Tim Keller 02 Nov '18

02 Nov '18

Hey Gang! We've got a meeting next week! Date and Time: Nov. 8th, 2018 @ 7pm Location: *Stratton Hall Room 309* Topic: GNURadio / Software Defined Radio / GQRX Presenter: Ian Gelman Here's what Ian had to say about his presentation... I'd like to throw my hat in the ring and give an overview+demo of GNURadio, a FOSS package for graphically developing DSP applications and interfacing with Software-Defined Radios (SDR). I spent last summer at MITRE using this software heavily, and I'm also using it for my MQP work. For the demo, I'd like to bring down some hardware from my lab ( https://www.ettus.com/product/details/UN210-KIT) as well as the $20 RTL-SDR dongle ( http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-rtl2832-r820t.html) to show reception of broadcast FM, ADS-B telemetry from airplanes, as well as some real time views of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and streaming drone footage from a DJI Phantom 3 Pro. Here's the outline: What's SDR? Why should we care? Why do I care? Who uses GNURadio? GNURadio fundamentals Introducing the workflow/flowgraph interface Cloning/Building/Installing (this won't be specific, just mentioning the GitHub repo and where the quickstart guide is) How to contribute (also GR-hackfest!) GNURadio as a software development framework Ex: GQRX (http://gqrx.dk) For the demo, I'll show off some stuff I've made with GNURadio, as well as GQRX to interface with the RTL-SDR. I'm pretty confident that I can cram it inside of 2 hours, because I'll be basically recycling the slides I made for my MITRE presentation, minus the branding and project-specific content. As usual, drinks and snacks will be provided and we'll head out to dinner afterwards. NOTE: I will be unable to attend this meeting. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Too bad about redhat...
by Tim Keller 01 Nov '18

01 Nov '18

Sad trombone for redhat or do you think IBM won't screw it up? -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Eagle to KiCad conversion?
by John Stoffel 19 Oct '18

19 Oct '18

Guys, This is a total shot in the dark, but I'm wondering if anyone here has taken an Eagle project design, stripped out pretty much everything but the holes and outline of a board, and them imported it all into KiCad 5? I'm trying to build a cape for an AdaFruit Gemma M0 board (which I'll be happy to talk about at some point down the line at a meeting) where it auto-matically turns my sound bar on/off and the TV is turned on/off. Not more having to hunt for the sound bar remote! I've been vaguely beating my head against the wall here, esp since it's my first ever board design. Lots to learn! John

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Pocket Arcade and Tiny Arcade
by Dennis Payne 17 Oct '18

17 Oct '18

I received a Tiny Arcade from Tiny Circuits. It is an interesting toy. I've had a lot of fun playing with it. They recently released the Pocket Arcade. I purchased two. This is even better than the Tiny Arcade. I've been working on a new game for the system. It is a pokemon like game where you paint your monsters. It's still early in development. I've been writing about the development. http://identicalsoftware.com/games/colormonster http://identicalsoftware.com/games/colormonster2 -- Dennis Payne dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com Roon's Raccoon Sprintladder: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/126010

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Reminder! WLUG Meeting tonight! Rm RC61 Topic: Enterprise Wi-fi!
by Tim Keller 11 Oct '18

11 Oct '18

Hey Gang, We've got a meeting tonight in WPI Recreation Center Room 61 (RC61) This is the building in the Quad that's got all the exercise equipment. Date: Oct 11th, 2018 Time: 7pm Topic: Logan is going to do a quick talk on Enterprise WiFI. I can also talk quickly about the relatively incompleteness of 64bit linux on raspberry pi! Refreshments and snacks will be provided and we'll head off for dinner later. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Next Meeing Oct 11th, 2018! NOTE LOCATION: RC61! Topic: TBD
by Tim Keller 08 Oct '18

08 Oct '18

Hey Gang, We've got a meeting! Date: Oct 11th, 2018 Time: 7pm Location: WPI Recreation Center Room 61 (RC61) Topic: TBD If anybody has a topic burning a hole in their pocket let me know. I've already got next months lined up! One option was to possibly demo a raspberry pi running a true 64bit version of debian. As usual, snacks and refreshments will be provided and afterwards we'll head off for dinner to continue the conversation. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Charter Telephone reviews, boylston?
by John Stoffel 29 Sep '18

29 Sep '18

Hi, Anyone on here using Charter Telephone VOIP service? I've currently got Verizon, but the wife hates it because our phone lines get flaky all the time, esp when it rains. So I'm thinking to save money and combine all my stuff onto Charter. I've already got High Speed internet and regular old cable. Not wild about Digital Cable since I'm happy with Tivo and I don't want yet another set top box to have to deal with... So, any horror stories about Charter Phone VOIP quality and service? Thanks, John

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Reminder! Meeting Tomorrow! Sept. 13th, 2018 @7pm.
by Tim Keller 12 Sep '18

12 Sep '18

Hey Everybody, This is a reminder we've got a meeting on Thursday Sept. 13th, 2018. Time: 7pm Location: WPI Campus Center Mid Century Rm (rm 331) "The usual spot" Topic: git LFS (Large File Support) I thought I would give a quick talk using git as a backup solution for larger files. After that I figured the conversation would branch out. I'd also like to poll the group and see what people would be interested in for topics. As usual snacks and refreshments will be provided and we'll head off to dinner afterwards to continue the conversation. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Next Meeting Sept. 13th at 7pm Location: WPI Campus Center Mid Century Room (rm 331)
by Tim Keller 07 Sep '18

07 Sep '18

Hey Everybody! Our next meeting is going to be on September 13th at 7pm. Location: Campus Center Rm 331 (Mid Century Room) Topic: Right now I don't have a main topic, but if people would like I can do a quick talk on my current backup system that's using git / gitlab and offsite repo pushes. As usual, snacks and refreshments will be provided and we'll head off for dinner afterwards. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Software packaging/deployment
by Richard Klein 30 Aug '18

30 Aug '18

I've brought up Snaps before (https://snapcraft.io/) If those interest you, you may want to check out Flatpak (https://www.flatpak.org/) also. I haven't tried it out, yet, but it's on my to do list. -- Rich

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Re: Monitor Madness
by Aljerin Butler,Jr. 17 Aug '18

17 Aug '18

Try doing some research here. | | | | Howtos, tips, tutorials; IT ebooks Super User | | | On Wednesday, August 8, 2018, 9:53:12 PM EDT, Krichevsky, Nicholas Jacob <njkrichevsky(a)wpi.edu> wrote: Hey all - By an interesting turn of events, my fellow interns and I were given the opportunity to build a computer to theoretically drive 192 monitors. Yes, really. We're running into a bit of a brick wall, so I figured I'd reach out and see if anyone had any crazy ideas that just might work. This project started because of a certain obsession of our CEO to drive as many monitors off one PC as possible. We put together a build using8x Radeon 7870s with 6x Mini DisplayPort outputs (the price spiked after we bought these for some reason) with2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V4 , all tied together in a SuperMicro 4028GR-TR2. Limiting the cards to PCIE 8x, we should be able to drive all 8 with 16 PCIE lanes to spare. Because the Mini DisplayPorts follow the DisplayPort 2.1 spec, we were hoping to use MST with48 of these MST hubs from Monoprice (which we actually got on sale!). This would allow us to drive four displays @ 1080p off one Mini DisplayPort, allowing us to drive 24 monitors off one card, across 8 cards, totaling 192 monitors. With this all in mind, and the knowledge that we may have to write some funky Xorg configs, we pulled the trigger on all of it, and would attempt to drive as many monitors as we had on hand in the office. We decided to load Fedora on this machine, which should be able to drive MST with the included amdgpu driver, thanks to patches that were added to kernel 4.15, and some DC display code settings that were enabled in kernel 4.17. With all of this, we were able to successfully drive ... two displays off each MST hub, instead of the expected four. Not as fruitful as we may have hoped, but hey, 96 monitors would still be awesome. Out of sheer curiosity, we threw Windows on another SSD, and discovered that Windows could drive four displays off each MST hub, but we were getting hard limited to six monitors per card, no matter what we tried. We hypothesized that this might be due to theproprietary AMD driver setting an arbitrary limit, and thought we might be able to still pull off the 12 monitors per card in Linux. A couple of small scripts later, we were up and running with six monitors on one card. Upon adding the seventh and re-running our script, we were greeted with the following. [monitormadness@monitor-madness ~]$ python3 set-monitors.py Executing `xrandr -d :0 --output DisplayPort-3-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-0-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-1-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-0-1-2 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-3-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-1-1-2 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-4-1-1 --mode 1920x1080` xrandr: cannot find crtc for output DisplayPort-4-1-1 We ran xrandr --listproviders to see what we got. With two GPUs connected, we got the following. [monitormadness@monitor-madness ~]$ xrandr --listproviders -d :0Providers: number : 2Provider 0: id: 0x8d cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 6 outputs: 30 associated providers: 1 name:PITCAIRN @ pci:0000:04:00.0Provider 1: id: 0x4b cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 6 outputs: 6 associated providers: 1 name:PITCAIRN @ pci:0000:06:00.0 Looks like we can only get 6 CRTCs per card. This is where I reach out to you all. Does anyone know of some Xorg or kernel flag trickery we can use to get more outputs for our buck with the limited number of CRTCs? I don't quite know enough about how video cards work to make an informed decision about what's going on, but my hypothesis is that the card's firmware is what transmits how many outputs we can use, so we may be SOL in the department of getting more CRTCs, but perhaps there may be some way to trick Xorg into rendering the content of one CRTC across multiple monitors? Not sure. Would love to hear what you all think. Thanks for taking the time to read this! :) _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug(a)lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave(a)lists.wlug.org

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Reconnecting with my media drive
by Richard Klein 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

When I was running Debian, I had most of my media segregated on a Seagate SSHD. That's still in the system now that I'm running Mint. I'm trying to get Plex up and running again. The file manager shows the media drive mounted, but shows nothing on it. I don't see it listed in fstab. I don't remember how it was formatted, but I think it's an ext4 drive. What should my next step be? -- Rich

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Monitor Madness
by Krichevsky, Nicholas Jacob 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

Hey all - By an interesting turn of events, my fellow interns and I were given the opportunity to build a computer to theoretically drive 192 monitors. Yes, really. We're running into a bit of a brick wall, so I figured I'd reach out and see if anyone had any crazy ideas that just might work. This project started because of a certain obsession of our CEO to drive as many monitors off one PC as possible. We put together a build using 8x Radeon 7870s with 6x Mini DisplayPort outputs<https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ3BU1115&cm_re=Visio…> (the price spiked after we bought these for some reason) with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V4 <https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117630> , all tied together in a SuperMicro 4028GR-TR2<https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4u/4028/SYS-4028GR-TR2.cfm>. Limiting the cards to PCIE 8x, we should be able to drive all 8 with 16 PCIE lanes to spare. Because the Mini DisplayPorts follow the DisplayPort 2.1 spec, we were hoping to use MST with 48 of these MST hubs from Monoprice<https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=104&cp_id=10428&cs_id=1042802&p_id=2…> (which we actually got on sale!). This would allow us to drive four displays @ 1080p off one Mini DisplayPort, allowing us to drive 24 monitors off one card, across 8 cards, totaling 192 monitors. With this all in mind, and the knowledge that we may have to write some funky Xorg configs, we pulled the trigger on all of it, and would attempt to drive as many monitors as we had on hand in the office. We decided to load Fedora on this machine, which should be able to drive MST with the included amdgpu driver, thanks to patches that were added to kernel 4.15, and some DC display code settings that were enabled in kernel 4.17. With all of this, we were able to successfully drive ... two displays off each MST hub, instead of the expected four. Not as fruitful as we may have hoped, but hey, 96 monitors would still be awesome. Out of sheer curiosity, we threw Windows on another SSD, and discovered that Windows could drive four displays off each MST hub, but we were getting hard limited to six monitors per card, no matter what we tried. We hypothesized that this might be due to the proprietary AMD driver setting an arbitrary limit, and thought we might be able to still pull off the 12 monitors per card in Linux. A couple of small scripts later, we were up and running with six monitors on one card. Upon adding the seventh and re-running our script, we were greeted with the following. [monitormadness@monitor-madness ~]$ python3 set-monitors.py Executing `xrandr -d :0 --output DisplayPort-3-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-0-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-1-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-0-1-2 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-3-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-1-1-2 --mode 1920x1080 --output DisplayPort-4-1-1 --mode 1920x1080` xrandr: cannot find crtc for output DisplayPort-4-1-1 We ran xrandr --listproviders to see what we got. With two GPUs connected, we got the following. [monitormadness@monitor-madness ~]$ xrandr --listproviders -d :0 Providers: number : 2 Provider 0: id: 0x8d cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 6 outputs: 30 associated providers: 1 name:PITCAIRN @ pci:0000:04:00.0 Provider 1: id: 0x4b cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 6 outputs: 6 associated providers: 1 name:PITCAIRN @ pci:0000:06:00.0 Looks like we can only get 6 CRTCs per card. This is where I reach out to you all. Does anyone know of some Xorg or kernel flag trickery we can use to get more outputs for our buck with the limited number of CRTCs? I don't quite know enough about how video cards work to make an informed decision about what's going on, but my hypothesis is that the card's firmware is what transmits how many outputs we can use, so we may be SOL in the department of getting more CRTCs, but perhaps there may be some way to trick Xorg into rendering the content of one CRTC across multiple monitors? Not sure. Would love to hear what you all think. Thanks for taking the time to read this! :)

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Reminder: WLUG Meeting August 9th, 2018! Topic: Bro
by Tim Keller 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

Hey Gang, We've got a meeting on Thursday! Time @ Location: 7pm @ WPI Mid Century Room (Rm 331) aka, the usual spot Topic: Bro Network Security Monitor Presenter: Eric Martin Veteran WLUG member Eric Martin will be giving a talk about "Bro" What's Bro? Bro is a FOSS framework and event engine for analyzing network traffic. First developed at LBNL in 1995 it is used on public, private and personal networks provide robust indepth network usage and threat analysis. Check out http://www.bro.org for more details. Eric's talk will be focused around using Bro to understand the flow of traffic around devices on our home network. As we add an ever increasing set of devices that have the words "IoT" and/or Smart in their names, it matters that we know what these devices are doing and who they're talking to. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Desktop distro
by Richard Klein 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

I'm having trouble deciding which distro to install on my new SSD. It's the only desktop computer in the house, so it's used for web, email, etc, plus it's a Plex server. DistroWatch.com shows Manjaro being really popular right now, but I've never heard of it. It's based on Arch, which I've heard of, but never tried. I see that Arch uses Pacman for a package manager. I'm used to APT; I'm not sure if I'd like Pacman. So anyway, I thought I'd ask for suggestions. -- Rich

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