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[GTALUG-Announce] Meeting Today
by hi＠gtalug.org 14 Jul '20

14 Jul '20

# Lightning talks and Round Table This is GTALUG's version of an un-conference, a loosely structured short talks emphasizing the informal exchange of information and ideas between participants, rather than following a conventionally structured GTALUG meetings. If you already have a topic in mind please send an email <a href="mailto:speakers@gtalug.org">speakers(a)gtalug.org</a> to be added to the list of scheduled talks. A Round Table Q&A Session is where we take questions from the audience, and the audience discusses and attempts to answer those questions from their own knowledge. It's a great way to meet fellow members of our community and discover the skill sets we each bring to the table. Due to global pandemic we are going to hold this session via video conferencing. We're going to use jitsi for this meeting: Meeting room url: https://jitsi.flamy.ca/GTALUG ## Location Jitsi meeting ## Schedule * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. # 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: https://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 at board(a)gtalug.org. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Bash does-directory-exist question
by Giles Orr 13 Jul '20

13 Jul '20

I have a strange Bash question for you. It's an edge case, but I've run into it just often enough that I'd like to know how to deal with it. How do you determine if the directory you're in has been deleted? I've done this to myself: 'cd' to a directory in one terminal, then 'rm -r' that same directory in another terminal. It becomes very confusing when you try to do something in the first terminal: 'touch test.txt' responds with "touch: cannot touch 'test.txt': No such file or directory". Which is exceptionally hard to decipher because of course it doesn't exist, I was trying to create it! The worst case I've seen is 'git', and this is what's brought me back to this puzzle. If you're in a directory and you 'git rm' the last file in the directory, 'git' will helpfully delete the directory as well. Never mind that you're still in the directory, and are now in the very confusing position of being in a non-existent directory. One of my hobbies is tinkering with Bash Prompts. It's fairly easy to use 'test/[' to determine if a directory is writable with 'if [ -w .] ...' and then change the colour of the prompt based on the response. This gives immediate visual feedback on the write-status of the current directory. But test's '-w' and '-d' both claim that you're still in a valid directory under the above circumstances. Does anyone know of a simple way to find out if the directory you're currently in actually exists? I may have found my own answer: 'stat .' returns (in part) "Links: 0" which would seem to indicate a non-existent node. Is that a definitive answer? (I don't use 'stat' much.) I'm also interested to see if anyone else has a simpler or more "Bash" answer. Thanks. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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sale today on ThnkPad T490 and tiny ThinkCentre PCs
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 13 Jul '20

13 Jul '20

Lenovo list prices always seem high to me. But unpredictably they have significant discounts. Sometimes the resulting prices seem reasonable. ThinkPads are generally the standard best bet for UNIX. Starting at noon today, Lenovo has a modestly spec'ed T490 for $1000. I think that that's a good price. Bad news: it appears that T490 notebooks have one soldered-in 8GiB RAM and one RAM socket. Here's the current line-up. Scroll right ("NEXT" button on page) to see the model I'm talking about. <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-series/T490/p/22TP…> There are other potentially interesting items on sale today "Black Friday in July". If you like tiny PCs, look at the ThinkCentre M75 Tiny or the ThinkCentre M90n ("n" stands for "nano").

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Interesting CI tool: Laminar
by Christopher Browne 12 Jul '20

12 Jul '20

I have been doing some amount of Continuous Integration work lately; that's certainly one of the popular things these days. It has been changing; once upon a time, our folks at work adopted QuickBuild, which still periodically helps us to run out of disk space ;-) More recently, Jenkins and and Travis CI grew popular particularly in Linux-based environments. The latest and greatest is that GitHub and GitLab have "CI" offerings allowing you to write voluminous amounts of YAML that tend to deploy Docker and/or Kubernetes components to set up test environments. Then came today's Link of Interest... (Sourced from Leah Kirchen's blog; see https://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/2020-07-12 ) https://laminar.ohwg.net/docs.html Laminar tries to do CI somewhat simpler, and in more of a "Unix flavour", rather than filling up on XML and YAML remappings of stuff. Unlike a lot of these CI tools, it tries NOT to keep infinite gobs of artifacts around, which probably makes it less popular with disk manufacturers ;-) -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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OpenWRT Upgrade
by Christopher Browne 10 Jul '20

10 Jul '20

There is a new version of OpenWRT, version 19.07; apparently this was released almost 2 months ago. If you're running OpenWRT on your router, the new version has security fixes and such, so it's worth considering an upgrade. https://openwrt.org/releases/19.07/notes-19.07.3 I did so; it led to about a 2 minute Internet outage since my OpenWRT router manages my DSL connection. It came back fine, I have seen very few visible changes. When I logged in, and looked at my wireless networks, it indicated a need to make a change or two to configuration, which all seemed to work fine. I added an AC wireless network, which I think is the new, keen thing, which probably I didn't have in use before? Apparently it now supports WPA3, that'll need more configuration to activate, and I'm not sure I care to do so. (That's perhaps a good question for next Q&A?) -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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recent Fedora releases refused to see an old NAS
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Jul '20

10 Jul '20

We have an old IOmega Home Media Server, Cloud Edition NAS. It's just a single external 3.5" HDD with a little ARM board to turn it into a NAS. This is so old that the company has changed a few times: EMC bought IOmega Dell bought EMC Lenovo bought (parts of?) EMC from Dell Perhaps I've missed some steps. Since I updated our desktops Fedora 31, Nautilus (AKA "Files") on the Gnome desktop could not see it. To fix this took a bit of discovery. Eventually I added a line to /etc/samba/smb.conf. In the [global] section: client min protocol = NT1 This isn't a great thing from a security standpoint but it's no worse than before the Fedora update. This is surely obvious to any experienced Samba user, but I'm not one. My only use of Samba is to access our NASes throuh Nautilus.

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finding out the shared object (dynamically linked libraries) use by a program
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Jul '20

10 Jul '20

Sometime you want to know what .so libraries are used by a program. Let's say that the program's binary is in /bin/prog. $ ldd /bin/prog will do the trick. Except it doesn't capture everything. Sometimes you need to examine the running program. Let's say you wish to find out what process 123 has loaded at this time. $ pmap 123 -p or $ lsof -p 123 (The -p in each command means something different.) In each case, look for lines with the string ".so".

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Editing Browser Text boxes in external editors.
by Scott Sullivan 02 Jul '20

02 Jul '20

Just sharing my experience post. So, my father used to do this with an extension call It's All Text. It didn't make the jump to web extensions and security model now requires an external helper application. Drew and I have come to very different conclusions about the solutions. Style #1 - Update on Write This style is where the text is sent out to the editor of choice, and isn't written back into the text box until you save/write out the file. * Works with any editor generically through tempfiles * Allows multiple text boxes to be worked in independently Example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/external-editor/ Style #2 - Live Sync This style actively updates the editor window and the browser textbox with the current working text. * Requires more setup with per editor plugins. * No tempfiles, everything is in the browser context. * Switching browser tabs updates the editor to the current text box your working on. Friendly if have a single VIM session open in A single terminal Example: https://github.com/GhostText/GhostText I've tested this one with the following plugin, installed via the vundle plugin system, https://github.com/pandysong/ghost-text.vim https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim#quick-start I'm curious: Have you used this before? Do you still use this? What Styles have you used? What were your personal pros and cons for each style? -- Scott Sullivan

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btrfs weirdity.
by Alvin Starr 02 Jul '20

02 Jul '20

Yesterday I had a power failure and when things came back a btrfs volume came back missing the last month few months of data. The most current date I can see on a file is Mar 29. It almost seems like the result of rolling back a snapshot but I having never used the snapshot features of btrfs it has me baffled. I guess its time to move my data to XFS. -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin(a)netvel.net ||

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Wireless Bridge - Asus RP-N12 N300 Repeater
by William Park 25 Jun '20

25 Jun '20

FYI... For work-from-home, I got stuffs spread over two tables in my basement. Most devices don't support or have wireless capability. Problem is my router is upstair. To run an ethernet cable, it has go across hallway, living room, through kitchen, down the stair, then across basement to the opposite corner. I don't want that. So, I got - ASUS RP-N12 N300 Repeater https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=27_1056_1058&item_id… $29.88 It's repeater, access point, and media bridge. "Media Bridge" (ie. wireless bridge) is what I needed. It has one ethernet port, and that's connected to switch. So, you connect devices to the switch and it gets IP from the router. A coworker recommended - TP-LINK (TL-WA850RE) N300 300Mbps Universal WiFi Range Extender - TP-LINK (TL-WR802N) N300 Wireless N Router Nano but I went with Asus, instead. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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