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LLM's and graphical interfaces.
by Tim Keller 17 May '24

17 May '24

A couple meetings ago Jansen showed up a really cool graphical interface for LLM. Does anybody remember what it was? Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Reminder! Meeting TOMORROW!! May 8th, 2024
by Tim Keller 09 May '24

09 May '24

Hey Everybody, We've got a meeting tomorrow May 8th at 7PM. Physical Location: Technocopia 44 Portland St. Worcester Virtual location: https://jitsi.uvhash.org (The link won't be live until tomorrow, the instance is currently powered off) Topics: Latest version of KiCAD? Ondsel CAD: Ramifications of a company pumping money into FreeCAD.. IBM eats another cloud tool.. On a different note, I know in the past we had an IRC channel going. Discussions sometimes get clunky on the mailing list. In the vein of self hosting, would people be interested in me standing up something like a Zulip server? https://zulip.com/ As always, I'll bring snacks and refreshments and we'll head off to continue the conversation for dinner! 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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Reminder! Meeting Today (May 8th, 2024) 7PM!
by Tim Keller 08 May '24

08 May '24

Hey Everybody, We've got a meeting today! Date/Time May 8th, 2024, 7PM Location: Technocopia, 44 Portland St. Virtual Location: https://jitsi.uvhash.org/WlugMA (Instance is up and running!) Topic(s): Latest version of KiCAD? Ondsel CAD: Ramifications of a company pumping money into FreeCAD.. but they're fixing bugs? IBM eats another cloud tool.. Time to embrace the Tofu? Live I might log into Digital Ocean and spin up a zulip instance! As usual, the conversation is always lively, and we always end up talking about all manner of interesting stuff. Snacks and refreshments (Grape Fanta!) will be provided and we'll head off to dinner afterwards! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Next WLUG meeting proposal
by John Stoffel 06 May '24

06 May '24

Guys, Tim & I both have conflicts on alot of Thursdays in May for the regular WLUG meeting. We'd like to see how people feel about moving it to either May 8th or May 15th instead this month. We're still checking with Technocopia to make sure we will have access on either of those days, but we wanted to reach out and make sure the rest of you are ok with this change. Thanks, John (and sorta Tim)

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If you use putty or puttygen, update to the latest version..
by Tim Keller 19 Apr '24

19 Apr '24

Putty just announced that versions earlier than 0.80 were generating ecdsa-sha2-nistp521 that were flawed.. If you have any of these keys lying around, destroy them and regenerate keys. Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Great meeting last night!
by Tim Keller 17 Apr '24

17 Apr '24

Having our own Jitsi instance was fantastic! Jansen got into ollama AI stuff and it was really cool. He's expressed interest in doing a full end to end demo. We talked about the xz explot and it's entanglement with systemd and OpenSSH. It was a great conversation about the history and missteps of systemd and how we got to this place where so many pieces of critical software in the FOSS are supported by just a few people. Next month's meeting will need to be moved around as it conflicts with something, I'll give more details as I learn them. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Re: Great meeting last night! --- Sorry I couldn't stay
by Robert N. Evans 12 Apr '24

12 Apr '24

I connected twice at 7PM, but never seemed to hear anyone. So I also did not stay. Firefox 124.0.2 (Flatpak), on "Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS" (HW is System76 Gazelle laptop) -Bob Evans -----Original Message----- From: Worcester Linux Users' Group General Discussion <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> Sent: Apr 12, 2024 12:37 PM To: Worcester Linux Users' Group General Discussion <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> Cc: Keith Wright <kwright(a)keithdiane.us> Subject: [WLUG] Re: Great meeting last night! --- Sorry I couldn't stay Kevin Stratton via WLUG writes: > I was able to connect using https://jitsi.uvhash.org/WlugMA%20uvhash.org, but > I was the only person (as a moderator) in the lobby at 7:20. Does you meeting > start at 7:30? I assumed that the meeting starts at 7:00. I connected to https://jitsi.uvhash.org/WlugMA (no %20uvhash) at 7:00 and found people there. Does jitsi create rooms upon demand from anyone? My problem was that, while I could hear other people (at least while they were near the microphone and the gloppita-gloppita machine was off) they could not hear me, except intermittently. Worse, it seemed that my laptop was generating noise and feedback, so people had to mute me so that they could hear each other. The problem seemed to be in the software or configuration of my Thinpad with Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) and Firefox ESR 102.15.1 of Sept 12, 2023. I thought I had tested it the day before. I found a way to make a recording and recorded a short speech, which I could play back. It all seemed to work, but when I unplugged it and plugged it back in it required reconfiguration and I may have missed something and wound up using the built-in mike. The same USB headphone/mike seemed to work when attached to a Windows machine, but where's the fun in that? I checked out early in disgust. Suggestions on how to debug the mike might be helpful. -- Keith _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug(a)lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave(a)lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/OA5FC…

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Reminder: Meeting tonight!! NEW VIRTUAL LOCATION!! Topic: xz, hosting, security, etc.
by Tim Keller 11 Apr '24

11 Apr '24

Hey Gang, In an effort to actually eat our own cooking, I've stood up a Jitsi server for us to use. Physical location: Technocopia, 44 Portland st. Worcester MA The NEW VIRTUAL LOCATION: https://jitsi.uvhash.org/WlugMA Time: 7pm Date: Today! April 11th, 2024 Topic: We'll talk about the xz backdoor attempt, other linux related security stuff, How dead easy it was to self host jitsi, other hosting stuff likely, etc. As usual, I'm sure the conversation will wander, get really interesting and it'll be a blast. I'll have refreshments with me and we'll all head off to dinner afterwards. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Um..wow..
by Tim Keller 11 Apr '24

11 Apr '24

I'm busy spinning up an Jitsi instance in Digital Ocean for tonight.. the default Ubuntu 22.04 droplet.. needs 204 updates apply.. when it starts.. I was just a bit surprised.. Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Reminder! Next meeting April 11th, 2024 Topic: TBD, xz, net_filter, etc..
by Tim Keller 09 Apr '24

09 Apr '24

Hey Gang, We've got a meeting next week on the 11th! Location: Technocopia, 44 Portland St. Worcester MA Time: 7PM Virtual Location: TBD.. Topic: TBD, though there's a whole bunch of security stuff to talk about! Obviously, we'd all be remiss if we didn't talk about xz. We should also talk about kernel root bug as well: https://pwning.tech/nftables/ Beyond that, I'm sure we'll get off on a bunch of different topics. If there's something you want to talk about, by all means bring it up! As usual, we'll have snacks and refreshments available and we'll head off for dinner and continue the conversation! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Meeting next week! March 14th 2024!
by Tim Keller 16 Mar '24

16 Mar '24

Hey Everybody! We've got a meeting next week! I think it's really worth talking about Self hosting. It's come up a couple of times, I think it's worth talking about what the options are, what they might cost and what can be hosted both using on prem hardware and your own cloud instances, options for networking, etc. I'd like people's ideas, caveats, etc. What have people hosted? Plex, etc. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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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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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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Reminder!! Meeting January 11th at 7pm Topic: Pi5! Location: Technocopia
by Tim Keller 09 Jan '24

09 Jan '24

Hey Everybody! We've got a meeting at Technocopia on January 11th 2024 at 7PM! The topic is going to be the pi5! I've gotten my hands on one and I'm going to do a show and tell. I've also got an 8GB pi4 as well so it'll be good to do a bit of a side by side as well. Time: 7PM Date: January 11th 2024 Physical Location: 44 Portland St. 6th Floor Virtual Location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA As usual we'll grab some dinner after the meeting and keep up the conversation. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Thanks for an amazing 2023, more fun to be had in 2024!
by Tim Keller 06 Jan '24

06 Jan '24

Hey Everybody, Happy New Year! Thanks for sticking with WLUG! It's been a year of change and challenges. We found ourselves a new home at Technocopia and make some new friends along the way. This is going to be another amazing year of talks and demos, lively conversations and general geeking out on all things. I look forward to many more WLUG meetings to come. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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SMTP 25 license plate
by Michael Voorhis 03 Jan '24

03 Jan '24

About a week ago while commuting I was trapped in gridlock behind another vehicle with the license plate "SMTP 25." I think in the past I have seen also a license plate "RTFM" but that was a long time ago. It seemed to me at the time that the owner of the SMTP-vehicle would probably be on this mailing list. --MCV.

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Dec meeting.. not the 14th! 21st or 28th?
by Tim Keller 20 Dec '23

20 Dec '23

Hey wlug folk, I've got a conflict on the 14th. Does the 21st or the 28th work for people? Thanks, Tim.

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Reminder!!! WLUG Meeting Tomorrow at Technocopia!
by Tim Keller 20 Dec '23

20 Dec '23

Hey Everybody! We've got a WLUG Meeting tomorrow at Technocopia! Time: 7PM Location: Technocopia 44 Portland st. 6th floor Worcester MA. Virtual Location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Topic: Possibly free VPNs and other solutions! Hey everybody! I thought we'd talk about VPNs that are available for various linux distributions. I'd love to hear what people are using and what's available! I've been looking at Proton: https://protonvpn.com/support/official-ubuntu-vpn-setup/ It's been a great year for linux and WLUG. Thanks for everybody who's been showing up in person and virtually! I'll bring refreshments and snacks and we can talk about what we'd like to do for 2024! Afterwards we'll head out for some dinner! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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