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Any good analog phone?
by William Park 29 Aug '18

29 Aug '18

Hi all, Do you know where I can buy a good quality analog phone, with - corded (no battery) - caller id - voicemail not required CanadaComputers has only VTech brand, which is what I have now and what I want to replace. I'm not too keen on Panasonic brand, from past experience. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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Home Partitions
by Howard Gibson 27 Aug '18

27 Aug '18

I have some time on my hands. :( I am doing some website updates, including some Linux install instructions I have posted. I have an old 32_bit laptop here which is now a playtoy upon which I can install anything I want. I have just installed Ubuntu, minus all the customization I normally do. Ubuntu's default install is to place root and /home all on the same partition. My default behaviour is to separate them. I want to be able to blow away the operating system and install something else, without disturbing /home. I want to post notes to non-technical new users, and make things as simple as possible. What do all of you out there think of separate /home partions. Necessary? Not necessary? Installing a new OS on a Ubuntu box means backing up and recovering /home. How reliably upgradable is Ubuntu? -- Howard Gibson hgibson(a)eol.ca jhowardgibson(a)gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson

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knotty problem
by o1bigtenor 26 Aug '18

26 Aug '18

Greetings Had some issues with my system and although I didn't need to, in retrospect, re-install - - - well I did. Running, as previously, on Debian testing (10 or buster) with a pile of ram and and and , with what may be more unusual is 2 graphics cards and 4 monitors set up as 2 x-screens. (Would love to condense that into 1 screen if someone has the know how and can describe it but 2 works well enough even if 1 would be very slick (and quite 'interesting').) So on this new install I have been working to install the interesting (?) programs that I have had previously. This morning in reading emails I noticed that I was unable to copy and past using ctrl-c and ctrl-v. Have been looking at key bindings and the clipboard. Have reinstalled x11-apps and lxsession as both are liked to clipboard use. Still no joy. Have been also looking at key bindings and keyboard shortcuts but I don't know how, and can't find real information, as to what controls such and if those are possible culprits for the missing keyboard shortcuts. Any ideas or suggestions as to the culprit (or the recalcitrant directories/files whatever) would be gratefully accepted. Regards Dee

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Re: [GTALUG] Which Distro is Best for Running a ZFS-on-Linux Fileserver.
by Jose A. Dias 25 Aug '18

25 Aug '18

Something like this: https://www.canadacomputers.com/search/product.php?cPath=14_679 <https://www.canadacomputers.com/search/product.php?cPath=14_679&item_id=069…> &item_id=069771 External USB, preferable 3.0 over 2, or eSata if you have the port. If you doint' need two drive capacity then pick a single. Add the current the drive you need and let it copy. I tend to use ext4 for externals so to minimize complexity on attaching to other systems, but YMMV. [Jose A. Dias] -----Original Message----- From: talk [mailto:talk-bounces@gtalug.org]On Behalf Of David Mason via talk Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2018 10:21 AM To: GTALUG Talk Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Which Distro is Best for Running a ZFS-on-Linux Fileserver. On Aug 25, 2018, 6:21 AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org>, wrote: | From: David Mason via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> | I am interested in this question too. I currently am running on Debian | 7.7 but I’m not sure I can upgrade to a more current version, which is | frustrating because I want to install Java (to run a Minecraft server) | and (when I tried, so while back) I couldn’t get it to install because I | had such an old version of Debian. Back in 2017 March 12 you mentioned a problem "Updating Wheezy to Jessie". Did you try Stewart's and Lennart's suggestions? I put a little time into it, but didn’t get to success. Unfortunately, life intervened. It’s still important, but as you say, as you fall behind, it becomes more difficult to leap-frog into the present. This is exactly the kind of problem that a debian local users group might address. Recently I suggested that GTALUG could function as a debian LUG. I guess that here we have a test of this idea. I think it already does. What did you have in mind beyond the mailing list? Even for the debian upgrade attempt it might be good to have a backup. Yes, I know. :-) After enough time, the old hardware becomes obsolete too and it makes total system rebuild more sensible than update. In my most recent example, I jumped about 15 years ahead in hardware. This system is <5 years old, and at the time was kind-of leading edge. so I’m not worried about that. It’s a 4.4Tb raidz2 at 64% and has performed flawlessly. Unfortunately I don’t really have the time to do any serious digging right now, either. How do others backup their ZFS systems? Getting a 4T external drive doesn’t seem like the best plan, but maybe there isn’t any other choice. ../Dave

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System Monitor / sysmon
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 22 Aug '18

22 Aug '18

I have sysmon on my Linux systems. It is a nice graphical tool to show CPU, memory, and network loads. It produces strip charts. (It also does other things, but that's not my current concern.) When I want to figure out what's taking so long, sysmon is a handy tool. But I think that my system's bottleneck is often disk I/O. sysmon has no strip chart for that. I don't even know how it should be done: - each device should probably have a different trace, just like each processor core does - percentage would be ideal but I don't know what that would mean. Do you count I/O ops? Queue length? Processes waiting? + sequential I/O is much faster than random I/O (at least on a real disk). + Large operations are somewhat slower than small ones (generally speaking). + output is generally non-blocking (roughly: the write goes into the kernel's memory, queued for writing to the device, and the process proceeds without waiting to the write to actually complete) + input usually blocks: the process issues a read and waits until the read finishes before it proceeds + Perhaps the simplest metric might be the number of processes waiting for disk I/O completion. But that leaves writes unaccounted for. Do you have any suggestions for a simple (possibly simplistic) tool to show disk bottlenecks in real time? PS: On the system I'm looking at, in the sysmon pane for "Processes", there is a column for "Disk read total" and another for "Disk write total". After a day of running the Libreswan test suite, gnome-terminal server wins with 3.4GiB of read and 3.9GiB of write. I wonder what that's all about. I would not expect Gnome Terminal to do disk I/O. As it happens, essentially all the output to the terminal is being captured by a script(1) command (run within the gnome terminal session). It shows 11.4MiB of disk output for one complete run, which should be half or a third of all that has gone to Gnome Terminal because I've run the suite two or three times since logging in. But it is more like a 11.4/3400 or roughly 1/300. Guess: gnome terminal reads and writes to X count as disk I/O. That's pretty messed up.

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August talk is available on youtube
by Alex Volkov 21 Aug '18

21 Aug '18

Hello everyone, The talk Beyond and Behind Maker Festival with Eric Boyd is available on youtube. It's in two parts: Main talk and Q&A and can be found here -- https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLUgE6dqIXiEsDT3DzqwXMtqndPT… I've also had a chance to visit Toronto Makerfest this year and I've made a few short videos talking to several people at the booths there, including one with Stewart Russell. Here's the playlist with the videos -- https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLUgE6dqIXiEunBfXKRNLhPj7bFd… Alex.

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Re: [GTALUG] Peter Hiscocks
by Kevin Cozens 19 Aug '18

19 Aug '18

On 2018-08-15 11:12 PM, David Mason via talk wrote: > I regret to say that Peter died a week or so ago. He was always curious > and willing to experiment with all sorts of things. Thank you for the sad news. I met Peter on several occasions while I was a student in an electronics program at Ryerson. -- Cheers! Kevin. http://www.ve3syb.ca/ | "Nerds make the shiny things that https://www.patreon.com/KevinCozens | distract the mouth-breathers, and | that's why we're powerful" Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick

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Dan Kaminsky Bugs aren't random ...
by Russell Reiter 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

Nice talk on the physics of power management in the most recent shared cache exploits. Defcon 26 was held in China this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3cyCg7itOI Dan says; It can take looking at a few thousand bugs, but eventually hacking feels like getting really good at telling the same joke, over and over again. It's OK, the computer still laughs, but why isn't software engineering delivering the reliability and predictability of other engineering disciplines? That's a question with an answer. It's not an easy answer, like "devs are lazy" or "tools are bad". Who are hackers to complain about either? But it's an answer I intend to explore, in true hacker fashion, by seeing traditional boundaries as mostly false, but useful for identifying what to fuzz. Why should we separate the humans that write bugs, from the tools the tools they use? Humans write tools. Why these tools in particular? Why would we separate forward and reverse engineering, dev from test? Wait, are those the same thing? Does any other field isolate the creator from the consequences of their creation? Is this going to be just some fluffy exploratory keynote? No, this is way too long a flight for that. We're going to talk about where I think software and hardware architecture is going to go, with actual code you're welcome to try to break. I'll tell you exactly where to look.

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GTATLUG talk about Atmel AVR
by Kevin Cozens 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

Greetings, Peter Hiscocks. I tried sending the following to your Ryerson email address but the message bounced so I am trying to get it to you this time via the GTALUG mailing list. I saw a video of your talk about Atmel AVR parts. Interesting talk. There are a few points you didn't make about the AVR microcontrollers. First, the instruction set is optimized for C. This is one of the reasons I chose to use AVR parts instead of PIC. That and no bank switching of memory with AVR. Second, you can use the AVR part without the need for an external crystal in many cases unless you are doing something requiring very precise timing. If you don't need precise timing you can use the built-in oscillator but it can also be calibrated to improve its timing accuracy. The real "Hello, World" program for hardware (such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, CPLDs, and FPGA's) is the blinking light. The question from the audience "Is the Atmel only on the Arduino?" was interesting. A lot of people associate the ATMEL AVR processors with Arduino when Arduino is more about the form factor and pinouts on a PCB and the software libraries, and programming method than about a given processor. You could have an Arduino board that doesn't use an ATMEL part. -- Cheers! Kevin. http://www.ve3syb.ca/ | "Nerds make the shiny things that https://www.patreon.html/KevinCozens | distract the mouth-breathers, and | that's why we're powerful" Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick

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[GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG Meeting on Tuesday 14 August at 7:30pm
by hi＠gtalug.org 14 Aug '18

14 Aug '18

<http://gtalug.org/meeting/2018-08/> # Behind and Beyond Maker Festival with Eric Boyd I'm Eric Boyd, founder of maker festival, and serial entrepreneur. I grew up on a small farm in Ontario, and I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley. I co-founded StumbleUpon.com with friends in 2000, and in Toronto I've been president of Hacklab.TO, organizer of lots of different meetups (including Toronto Quantified Self). My interests span everything from technology to economics to leadership to gardening to cooking to travel. I'll talk about Maker Festival, why we do it, how we do, and what the impacts have been. Maker Festival brings together Toronto’s most creative people and projects, in order to inspire openness to possibilities, a sense of active participation in shaping our world, and a yearning for a more wonder-filled tomorrow. Makers of all types (electronics, robotics, sewing, paper crafting, glowy things, etc.etc) exhibit their DIY work and share their enthusiasm with the public. I'm happy to talk more broadly about technology and people. ## Location George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street, Room 203 Ryerson University <http://goo.gl/maps/16oJ2> <http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23447525> ## Schedule * 6:00 pm - Please discuss on the general mailing list (i.e. <talk(a)gtalug.org>) where you want to go for dinner. * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. * 9:00 pm - After each meeting, a group of GTALUGers move to The Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East) for refreshments and more socialising. # Code of Conduct We want a productive happy community that can welcome new ideas, improve every process every year, and foster collaboration between individuals with differing needs, interests and skills. We gain strength from diversity, and actively seek participation from those who enhance it. This code of conduct exists to ensure that diverse groups collaborate to mutual advantage and enjoyment. We will challenge prejudice that could jeopardise the participation of any person in the community. The Code of Conduct governs how we behave in public or in private whenever the Linux community will be judged by our actions. We expect it to be honoured by everyone who represents the community officially or informally, claims affiliation or participates directly. It applies to activities online or offline. We invite anybody to participate. Our community is open. Please read more about the GTALUG Code of Conduct here: <http://gtalug.org/about/code-of-conduct/>. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the GTALUG Code of Conduct please contact the GTALUG Board @ <board(a)gtalug.org>. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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