MUUG Monthly Meetings for 2023-24
Please note our current meeting location:
Fortress Software Inc., 350 Keewatin St -- Unit #2
The meeting room will be open by 7:00 pm,
with the actual meeting starting at 7:30 pm.
If driving, enter the lot using the most north east entrance
and drive around to the south west corner of the building.
You can use any of the free, ample, and safe parking spots that say
"reserved" in front of units #1 through #4 before entering unit #2.
Bus stops #30814 and #30880 (route 77) are only 150 meters away.
The last bus leaves for Polo Park at 10:15 pm and for Garden City at 10:31 pm.
Logan Ave. bus routes #19, #26, and #27 are a 600 meter (8 minute)
walk to the south.
MUUG meetings also take place online (typically using BigBlueButton)
for those who can't be there in person.
Meeting link will be provided on the home page,
prior to meeting start time.
Alberto Abrao presented NetBox.
According to their
website,
"NetBox is the leading solution for modeling and documenting modern networks.
By combining the traditional disciplines of IP address management (IPAM)
and datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM)
with powerful APIs and extensions,
NetBox provides the ideal 'source of truth' to power network automation.
...
Discover why thousands of organizations worldwide put
NetBox at the heart of their infrastructure."
Wyatt Zacharias provided a brief overview of the "new"
high efficiency image file format (HEIF)
using some of the native tools provided by the libheif library
as well as third party applications to work with this new format.
Additionally Wyatt demonstrated how to build the latest version of
the library to add support for HEVC encoded images created by newer devices.
For his
50th MUUG talk,
Gilbert Detillieux presented
dpkg-buildpackage(1),
which is used to build .deb packages from source.
Gilbert's presentation also gave a tour of the source directory structure,
and how to use quilt to manage patches.
Somewhere between a brief RTFM and a deep-dive presentation,
the one-hour talk attempted to provide the audience with a minimum working set
of tips and techniques to navigate the Debian package build environment.
(The title is a nod to the book Maximum RPM as well as Gilbert's
March 2000 presentation on that topic.)
Gilbert has made his presentation slides, in
PDF and
PPTX format,
available online.
Many of the slides contain links in the footnotes to various
tutorials, man pages, and other reference material,
that Gilbert found useful in learning about Debian builds,
and in preparing for this presentation.
AGM
Plus, this month's meeting was the MUUG annual general meeting,
which included the election of the MUUG board of directors for the 2023-2024
year (by acclamation, again this year).
December 5, 2023: Round-Table, Show & Tell, and Pot Luck
As 2023 drew to a close, MUUG continued the tradition of turning the
December meeting into more of an informal, social event.
Just like last December, Mark Jenkins has graciously let us use
Skullspace, at 374 Donald St.
We had the usual (brief) round-table session,
some time for mingling, eating, and drinking,
followed by a couple short presentations,
and then more time for mingling, eating, and drinking.
Brian Lowe remotely presented his "thought experiment" programming language,
called Terbium
(so named because it's atomic number is 65, representing the 65 allowed
characters in the language, consisting of only alpha-numeric characters and
the space character).
Then Wyatt Zacharias presented
OpenStreetMap,
a crowd-sourced database of global map data, available under an open license.
Wyatt talked about some of the advantages of OpenStreetMap over other
(mostly closed or proprietary) map data sources,
including an extensive collection of trail map data.
Wyatt also showed the process of adding your own GPS log data
in the map editor, and how to submit that for inclusion in OpenStreetMap.
January 2, 2024: Working around LibreNMS dashboard limitations using Nagios, APIs, and ImageMagick
We've looked at LibreNMS and its features in a past meeting.
In this presentation, Chris Audet dug a bit deeper,
and showed ways to overcome limitations in LibreNMS,
using its (Nagios-compatible) Service API and open source tools,
such as ImageMagick.
Slide deck: PDF
Scripts: check_locations.sh check_zammadhelpdeskqueue.sh
Want to add an extra layer of protection when using complex or untrusted
programs, like browsers or Steam?
Short on time and fed up with overbearing, whole-system solutions like SELinux,
or resource-hogging virtualization?
Well, protect yourself the easy and painless way with
Firejail!
In this month's presentation,
Trevor Cordes outlined why you might want to use Linux
Firejail,
how you use it,
and why it may be better for your use case than other protection solutions.
Cool demos ensued.
Trevor has made his presentation slides, in
PDF and
ODP format,
available online.
He has also made his
demo notes available.
Trevor's slides included references to a couple
Linux Pro Magazine articles:
Running your Programs in a Jail with Firejail, and
Sandboxing with Firejail.
Alberto Abrao presented and demoed
fluentd.
According to their website,
"Fluentd is an open source data collector for unified logging layer."
Fluentd is lightweight enough that you can host it on a Raspberry Pi
or similar low-end device.
The presentation walked us through the configuration of a machine
that served as a "log aggregator,"
and a couple of others that sent their logs to it (using rsyslogd).
All logs were configured to stay in plain text,
as the "Gods of UNIX" intended.
April 2, 2024: AllStarLink - Ham Radio over IP
AllStarLink
is a Radio over IP (RoIP) application based on the popular
Asterisk VoIP solution. AllStarLink is designed to connect licensed ham
radio transceivers using VoIP protocols to allow extended coverage areas
by connecting multiple transceivers at different locations together.
Wyatt Zacharias presented on the history of amateur radio repeaters
in Manitoba, and how they are being modernized with AllStarLink to use
IP networks as the backbone for a connected system.
Wyatt has made his presentation slides, in
PDF format,
available online.
May 7, 2024: DMARC/SPF/DKIM (with one-click unsubscribe and alignment)
Do you have anything at all to do with email daemons,
managing email hosted by a third party provider, or manage DNS?
Google just made your life a lot more complicated.
(And heaven help you if you have anything to do with "mass" email sending.)
This month, Trevor Cordes talked about all the technologies
you must now implement to stay borg-compliant and ensure your emails
don't get dumped into the Spam box or worse!
We're talking DMARC, DKIM, SPF...
And what's with this new "alignment" thing?
There was even a bit of time to go into one-click unsubscribe!
Trevor has made his presentation slides, in
PDF and
ODP format,
available online.
June 4, 2024: Proxmox Virtual Environment
With the recent acquisition of VMWare by Broadcom,
many are looking for an alternative to closed source hypervisors.
Wyatt has previously presented on Linux KVM virtualization,
but without a management layer it can be clunky to use.
Proxmox
offers a fully featured web based administration suite for KVM.
It includes support for multi-host clusters, live migration,
clustered filesystems, and more.
Wyatt gave a tour of the Proxmox interface
ending with a brief demo of migrating a VMWare disk image to Proxmox.
July 9, 2024 (tentative): MUUG 2024 BBQ
MUUG had another summer BBQ and everyone was invited to Assiniboine Park.
Spouses, significant others, and children were also welcome to attend.
The evening started out looking a bit rainy, but the skies cleared,
and an enjoyable time was had by all who attended.
August 2024: No meeting this month
Please note our current meeting location:
Fortress Software Inc., 350 Keewatin St -- Unit #2
The meeting room will be open by 7:00 pm,
with the actual meeting starting at 7:30 pm.
If driving, enter the lot using the most north east entrance
and drive around to the south west corner of the building.
You can use any of the free, ample, and safe parking spots that say
"reserved" in front of units #1 through #4 before entering unit #2.
Bus stops #30814 and #30880 (route 77) are only 150 meters away.
The last bus leaves for Polo Park at 10:15 pm and for Garden City at 10:31 pm.
Logan Ave. bus routes #19, #26, and #27 are a 600 meter (8 minute)
walk to the south.
MUUG meetings also take place online (typically using BigBlueButton)
for those who can't be there in person.
Meeting link will be provided on the home page,
prior to meeting start time.
