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GTALUG August 11th Notes

Table of Contents

  • 1.1. Keybase Alternatives
  • 1.2. Neat Monitoring observation
  • 1.3. Have you changed your ssh keys lately?
  • 1.4. Have you labelled the disk drives in your desktop?
  • 1.5. Raspberry Pi 4
  • 1.6. IPv6 versus IPv4
  • 1.7. Latest grep reimplementation
  • 1.8. Pinephone now available
  • 1.9. LibreOffice 7.0 released recently
  • 1.10. Perl 7 almost out
  • 1.11. MathML?

    • 1.1 Keybase Alternatives

    • Keybase has offered secured accesses to various sorts of data
      Key directory
      Associates social media identities to encryption keys
      • Twitter
      • Github
      • Reddit
      • Hacker News
      • Mastodon
      • Cryptocurrency wallet addresses
        • Bitcoin
        • Zcash
        • Stellar
      (no term)
      End-to-end encrypted chat
      • Quite a lot of us are using Telegram and Signal
      • Essentially amounts to encrypted chat; many parts are open source
      • Encrypted instant messaging and VOIP
        • Client is free software
        • Server is proprietary
      KBFS
      Encrypted filesystem
      • Public files
      • Private files
      • An end-to-end encrypted, peer-to-peer file storage, sharing and communication network
      • We used this for GTALUG a bit for exchanging server data across the executive
      Teams
      Encrypted chat, fileshare
      • For just key validation keyoxide, I’ve heard of it, have no experience yet. keyoxide.org
        • decentralized
        • MIT licensed

    1.1.1 Element

    1.1.2 The moderation problem

    1.2 Neat Monitoring observation

    Should put obvious information into monitoring alerts

    • The temperature alert that points to calling building managers should include contact information
    • When you create an alert, think through what those reading the alert will immediately want or need, and note that what is obvious today, when we’re reacting to the outage that caused us to set up the alert, may be less obvious in 18 months when a new sysadmin looks at it
    • Put those needed/wanted things in the alert, possibly as a link, tho in case your Wiki might go down, probably the phone number ought to actually be in the alert.
    • Make sure there aren’t any credentials in the alert text!
    • Motion-sensitive camera that gets activated when the sun comes up through the trees in the morning
      • what is the difference between burglars and squirrels and sunrise
      • hurray, flying burglars!
    • Useful to have some alerts suppress other ones

    1.3 Have you changed your ssh keys lately?

    SSH Keytypes Usage

    • There are new algorithms that are theoretically more secure than the old ones
    • Are you using your keys for too many services?
    • ssh config lets you specify per-host keys

    1.4 Have you labelled the disk drives in your desktop?

    Label Your Desktop Drives

    • Using a Dymo label maker or similar
    • Brother apparently makes much nicer label printers
    • Scott Sullivan was literally just preparing a label to attach to a recently scrubbed hard drive
      • need to know the serial number from the drive in a cheap RAID array
    • Howard pulled out a typewriter!
    • Drew generates a 4 digit number for each drive and keeps those as the “key”, sharpie is good enough
      • For personal use, this supports 9999 drives, which is enough; perhaps 3 digits (999) would suffice
      • For organizational use, a bigger serial number would be needful
    • Business cards attached with packing tape

    1.5 Raspberry Pi 4

    • There have been ongoing discussions about building a “Pi Desktop”
    • Evan suggested a notably better case (but that Scott had already posted!) but that was somewhat expensive
    • Budget was not especially clear
    • Initially, Pi4 was running extremely hot, but with modern software releases, way better/cooler

    1.6 IPv6 versus IPv4

    Interesting essay showing some of the inherent conflicts

    • Once you configure prefixes on the router, often Linux, Windows, MacOS often “just work” these days
    • Mozilla Addon ipvfoo-pmarks shows off IPv6 usage

    1.7 Latest grep reimplementation

    ugrep
    written in C++ 2011
    • can search inside compressed archives (numerous sorts, .jar, .zip, tar, .cpio, and compression such as .gz, .bzip2, .xz, …)
    • can search inside documents (.pdf, .xls, .docx, …)
    (no term)
    sift, written in go, parallelizing: https://sift-tool.org/
    (no term)
    ack, written in Perl, extended to do version control, graphics metadata https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/ack/ack
    (no term)
    rg, written in Rust
    (no term)
    Full text search on Gnome desktop, locate was an olden days standard service
    • `mlocate` is a more user-friendly version of locate
    (no term)
    Tracker seems neat
    (no term)
    Find is still pretty useful
    (no term)
    FSELECT is a Rust-based command line tool that’s loosely find with SQL-like syntax

    1.8 Pinephone now available

    1.9 LibreOffice 7.0 released recently

    1.10 Perl 7 almost out

    1.11 MathML?

    I am using Octave and LaTeX to do calculations and write reports. Conceivably, I could output to HTML instead, but MathML does not seem to work on all browsers. Is this interesting to anyone?