No, he's there. He muted. Now he's unmuted.
Okay. Yes, by all means, kick it off. This meeting is being recorded.
Good evening. This is the monthly general meeting of SLUG, the St. Louis Linux Unix Users Group.
Today's date is January the 8th. Ace? No. Got the right date?
Yes.
And we're in.
Yes, it is January the 8th. 2025. And our speaker for the tutorial tonight is Lee Lamert. He's going to talk to us about the network cell information tool And then our main presentation tonight will be upgrading our own server, Bach, from Debbie and 10 to Debbie and 11.
A project we've been working on for a while. We're going to try and do it live here tonight. So first, I'm going to turn it over to Lee and we're going to learn about the network cell information tool.
All right, Gary, thank you. Well, the first thing we're going to do is I'm getting ready to shut down Bach.
So I can clone it. If anybody has an open session they want to preserve, let me know now or forever hold your peace.
Going once. Going twice?
Bach is currently being shut down. As soon as it is shut down, I'll stop again and we'll start it we'll start the clone operation.
So if you want to follow along on the wiki tonight.
The wiki, I did back up the wiki to Bach 2.
So if you want to watch the wiki, add a host entry on your machine, thus So that if you put wiki.slug.org in the browser on your machine you get the IP of the ip Bach 2 here.
You would copy and paste that to the chat. So it's available.
I just remember. I can do that.
And card where's chat.
I hate it when the toolbar changes.
A freight.
How the heck do you get to chat when you're presenting?
Fragle.
There it is. I got it.
So where'd the window go? Oh, God of pain.
Would somebody else posted in chat, please? Because I can't get a chat window when my screen's open.
Yeah, I'll do it.
Somebody's sanity check it, please.
And no objections. Call it good. Move on.
That is freaky. Sometimes Zoom is the biggest piece of doo-doo.
Okay, so I have to share again. You see the screen?
No, we see you.
Yes.
I don't see it.
Oh, Jesus.
We've got wiki slug org 205197251-211 highlighted.
So you see the new window from Virtual Machine Manager?
Barely, it's off to the side. Maybe it's the size window I have.
Okay. So I'm going to make a slug bach clone 2.
I am…
200 gig, I am not going to clone the other two partitions that we're not using right now. Media, we don't need to copy.
And home is just an extra one out there. So I'm going to start the clone.
It looks like there's a window that's off to the right hand side that maybe could be dragged over if that's what you're working on.
Like that one? That was the old window to Bach.
We see a web browser window open to the wiki and file and verb.
Of a window to the immediate right of it.
Amazing.
It says reboot and check services up at the top. That's all. And a bunch of other stuff.
Amazing.
Since I came on, it's the only screen that I've been able to see. I haven't been able to see anything else.
This is Stan. On one machine, I'm viewing a blank Lee screen and on the other machine, I see nothing.
So, did it. Other than the meetings being recorded and it's not showing that that Lee is sharing his screen. Try it again, Lee.
Now I see a giant stand.
That's because Stan is talking.
Zoom sucks.
Hey, that makes more sense, Lee.
All right, you came up muted. All right, the clone is in progress here.
Yep, 6%.
So I will slide that off.
Yes.
Nice work.
And get back to the base topic.
I won't ask to raise your hand, but I'm sure that everybody has seen problems with
All kinds of different cell issues. And let's see.
Just get rid of that. The whole point of the discussion.
Is to show you guys how to use a tool like this.
This is actually a live screen on my cell phone here in the office.
I just did a speed test. With the app I've got, which I'll show you can see the name right here, network cell info This tells you it's a standard speed test just like anything else.
It gives you a ping time. It gives you a jitter three milliseconds getting a little less than a hundred megabits per second.
But the interesting part is there are 20 or 30 different tabs you can use here One of them is a basic gauge.
It tells me my signal strength right now is minus 113.
And minus 90 is when it switches to my hotspot here in the office, which is a repeater.
And I'm going to talk about how I configured that repeater when I set it up last year.
The speed we saw the If you were out in the wild and you went to the map here.
It would actually show a blue line to some different two different cell towers in the in the area Here's an example of one.
You know that we can talk about This is one from the app itself out in California.
It will show all the shuttle towers and wherever you are it will draw a line pointed to the cell tower that you're connected with.
And when I first started this project last year
I saw a cell tower.
I saw the line from here. To the southwest.
Again, this is a live signal. A live picture rather there there's my location here in the back cave.
And it showed the location here over at Mercy Hospital, southwest of here.
So I knew that i knew the strongest signal I could get here was from the southwest And it was about four miles away.
And at the time. It would show the band here.
In the status. And that band was 13. So since I'm on Verizon.
I can look up Verizon Band 13, see what the frequency range is And I went out on Amazon and bought a repeater.
And… Here's that picture.
Sorry, I should have had this queued up quicker.
Because I couldn't get a sales signal down here in the Batcave.
And why did you buy a repeater?
Oh, okay. Made sense.
And so basically using network cell info I could determine what the frequency was, channel 13 And the direction, southwest.
And I'm sorry. Should have looked it up. I can't find it.
And so I put an antenna on the outside of the house, an amplifier here in the server room.
And an antenna inside the office. And the reason I'm getting this minus 90 dB is because that particular signal is jumping on Channel 13.
But there's five or six other towers within a lower signal range.
And… it'll switch to them you know a cell phone is constantly switching.
Now, the other thing being you know this is the icon for it.
If Network cell info is running.
This does a heck of a lot better job of maintaining a sell signal because it's constantly dinging the towers.
And it will keep that cell signal hot at like minus, you know, down here in the red, less than minus 120.
Which is the only way I got a signal before, but it kept dropping out because the app itself Well, the phone will switch and then like now you don't have enough signal et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So…
I got a question for you has anybody put a shelf Yes.
Pardon me, Lee. Lee. Maybe you can restate that. That was a lot of etc. So maybe restate that and clarify how that clarify how that works as a problem.
Okay, so… I use the map.
To see the direction and the channel. Again, if I wasn't using a repeater.
I showed a southwest direction with a channel 13 here on the screen And I used that.
Information to go out and find a cell repeater
Give me one second i can actually
Go ahead. Gary, go ahead.
Gary, you're muted.
Dang it. I keep wind up getting knocked back to mute. I don't know why. Sorry. So that was one of the things that was confusing me earlier.
Is… For those of you looking at the map.
You're only seeing Lee's block. The up and down line is his street name there. And basically the circle they're showing is just a little bit bigger than Lee's house.
So he's talking about being going to a cell phone tower half a mile away, but he's already installed this repeater so all the little connection lines there are within his own house.
So that's why you're not seeing what looks like going multiple blocks to the cell phone tower there.
So a repeater.
And… Oh, crap.
This is a repeater right here. You get an antenna.
The cell phone booster, if you look at the details here It said it was channel 13 with that appropriate frequency But apparently it is not available. This particular one isn't available anymore because I bought it like four years ago.
August 2020.
20.
So what you have to do is you put this antenna on the outside of the house We're on a fixed mount you point it in the direction of the tower that you connect to, which would be southwest down here for me.
You run the cable inside the amplifier you run another cable from the amplifier to local antenna like this dipole here.
You turn it on and it'll connect. Of course, there's a lot of issues in the meantime.
But the point I'm making…
Is that repeater like on your just like your own personal repeater or somebody driving by can hit that?
Get a signal from that repeater.
Technically, they could, but the signal's not strong enough for that.
You know you're lucky to get a 50 or 60 foot range out of it.
All right. Just curious.
Yeah, it's not strong enough to be strong enough You know, it's signal strength.
I get minus 90 dB when I'm 20 feet away from it.
If that was a full strength cell signal, it would be like plus db 20 feet away.
You know, it's a fraction of the power of a regular diet.
Okay. I'm curious, Lee, why you didn't just go with like a Wi-Fi calling on your phone
Because it doesn't work.
How so? Is it your provider doesn't support it or
I don't know. It's not an option on Verizon.
Okay.
It'd be nice if it was
And the most the phone company could tell me was if you Let's see.
I can't get there from here. I don't want to take time. Anyway, it wasn't possible with a phone. It works on AT&T and T-Mobile.
For some reason, it does not like to work on Verizon.
And I was not going to switch to T-Mobile or AT&T because I go out in the country too much and there's Verizon Signal is the only one you can get.
Especially when you're out and when we're out in fields doing work with drones and that.
Okay. Okay, so I have the antenna.
Mountain on the south side of the house. Pointed to the southwest.
And the amplifier is in the back room. And then I have actually a flat plate antenna.
Here in the office that directs the signal toward the office as opposed to omnidirectional.
Improves the signal.
All right, back to the other question. How do I put this the cell screen on my workstation.
That's how you do it. There is a package called screen copy SGR-C-P-Y?
That lets me… Link.
This window here on my workstation. To an Android phone that's plugged in android USB.
Notice the first time I did it, it couldn't find it.
I had to go to the phone and tweak it a little bit.
And then it connected. And here's the result.
It's not that complicated to install. This is how I did it.
I just did a… quick search on chat GPT.
Asks it how to install it, and this is what he came back with.
Sushi has a repo. A hardware repo?
From which you can install screen copy.
The tricky part is enabling USB debugging on your phone. Here's how to do it. If anybody wants it, let me know and I'll be happy to share it.
In settings about phone, you go to build number
Developer options, USB debugging.
Yeah, okay. Here's the tricky part to enable it, you click the build number seven times And I'll give you a countdown when you do it to enable developer options.
And then you can see developer options and turn on USB debugging.
Connect a phone and run SCR copy.
You can also do it over Wi-Fi. Although I personally don't want to enable that as too much of a security risk.
And notice that having a screen here.
Means that it works. Just like I'm on the phone.
I can do any gestures that I would on the phone.
For example, there is our Nagios app that I have.
To monitor everything everything on our network and our clients networks.
And the rest of the apps, calendar.
Okay, so we talked about network cell info light to gather information.
We talked about the signal amplifier.
To rebroadcast it inside the Batcave here? And we talked about screen copy.
That enables me to put my screen on a Linux workstation.
Anybody have a question feel free to Chat away.
And by the way, the clone is 66% completed. So with that, Gary, I'll turn the floor over to you for our gooey middle.
Thank you, Lee. I was going to ask a question, though.
So besides the seeing the tower.
And seeing the strength. Any other useful neat tools uses you found for the network cell light?
Or the network info. The tool. One of the things you found that's been fun to play with there?
Signal strength, speed. Raw data is a whole bunch of stuff that I don't know anything about.
But if you were, wait a minute. Okay, this thing actually shows you where your neighbors are.
I didn't realize that. Yeah, here's 13.
Band 13, which is the one here in the office.
And here's another one here neighbor two
You got three third you got two 13s that are strongest Three, and then you got a five, a two.
And those are all the neighbors that are close. And the map I showed, again, if we weren't on a repeater, it would show you who you're connected to.
There you go.
If you unenlarge that map. Will it show the towers even though you're not connected to the tower?
Instead of zooming in, zoom out. And do any of the other towers show?
Yeah, I don't think you can see him beyond the repeater.
Or is it just so intent on your repeater that it doesn't uh
Okay.
I was going to try to do some screen caps outside, but I got… sidetracked by the snow monday and I haven't left the house.
Question for you. What happens if you unplug the repeater for a few minutes?
Shoot.
Um… That's a good question. Stand by.
All of a sudden you hear these alarm buzzers going off.
Well, it sounds like Lee's away from the desk for a second. I'll point out that I believe what Lee's running there is network cell info light There's also just network cell info without the word light on the end. And there's network cell info
And if you go out to their website, they do have a little chart that shows what the additional features are.
The Lite version is free. And the other two versions have an associated cost.
So for the added features but uh
He's all available on the Google store. Okay.
Yes.
There's also a iOS version if you want to put it on your iPad or your iPhone.
And I haven't checked that out. I'm just presuming that it works pretty much the same
I would not be surprised if there are fewer features. Apple is notorious for blocking access to blocking access some technical data.
Okay. Okay.
I saw 66 come up here, but you'll notice that the only connection is down here in the red minus 121 without the repeater.
Will the map update and show anything?
Yeah. Although…
If you've got the repeater turned off, the map should be showing something else.
Let me just try.
Well, it didn't update. For some reason.
Oh, okay. Okay.
It's in the basement too, right? Yeah.
Yes.
But yeah, even in the basement stand, I'd expected to know which direction the tower is, but oh well.
Well, because it actually doesn't know the direction. It reads the coordinates of the tower.
Well, this…
And then translates the GPS coordinates to the map. It has no way to sense direction.
Uh-huh.
I didn't.
When it draws a line, it's comparing the GPS coordinates of you of the phone with your kids off the phone and the tower which is transmitted by the tower and the header information.
Yeah, I don't know why it's not displaying here.
Okay, anybody else? Oh, before I leave. There are… tons of options on this.
That I have never even fooled with because the only thing I was interested in was the location direction of the strongest tower.
And if somebody, you know, if somebody
What do those options do that When you go back to the map, there's an X.
And a check mark
Okay. Oh, what do the symbols mean?
Yeah. Go back to the map. Yeah, down the left-hand side there's a Locke and the equal and a check mark and an X and an x to the little balloon.
Okay. That unlocks the center because when it's locked it'll always keep your position in the center of the map.
Updates are off. Updates are on.
Save measurements. Cancel that.
Clear map.
Markers you're clear.
There's probably an option here somewhere to turn on show all towers But I'm not exactly, I'm not sure how to find it, unfortunately.
And see, this is the only tower I've seen now for some reason.
Does that give your GPS coordinates of that tower or is it doing a lookup?
Because I wasn't seeing what I thought I would for cords there.
I'm not sure, Grant.
If you could flip back to the… provided map example league that was showing los angeles
Was that in help somewhere? Or seven.
No, no, I grabbed that off the the page.
Here it is.
There you go. So that's… without using repeater, that's more the type of map that I'm used to seeing here in St. Louis.
Where, you know, yes, it's centered on where I am, but then it will show me multiple towers You know, in whatever area of town I happen to be.
And again, it'll draw a line to whichever one you're connected to to tell you which one's active on the map.
Normally.
I was using this tool about the time What was that, a year and a half ago?
That the mandate went out that thou shalt have 5g I know T-Mobile was a provider who said if you don't have a 5G phone, they don't want to support you anymore.
But it was then interesting. I could use this tool And there's also a history record that you can use with this tool And it will show you for the last whatever period of dates you want there for each day, how many times you were in a 5G cell, how many times
There was no 5G cell and it dropped down to 4G um and it would tell you what your signal strengths were. Were you in particular areas?
So it was kind of interesting just to get a historical perspective of, you know.
Where you live your life and what you can expect on your cell phone.
Okay, anything else?
Row seven. Dead air.
Okay, we're going to move. We'll move on to the gooey middle.
All right. Gooey middle, Gary.
Well, thank you very much, Lee. That's an interesting tool. Like I say, I've used it. Lee introduced me to it.
So it was kind of interesting to play with it and learn some things.
If I was a better so frequency engineer, there was more things and numbers in there than I was understanding. And I've got a little bit of a background in RF, so… So even the Wi-Fi light tool or even though even the cell info light tool the
Pre-one has lots of good technical information in it. Okay, on to other things. Let's see if I can… pull up for myself.
The calendar. Give me a moment, please.
And I'll try and share it.
Okay.
Or Lee, if you don't mind, Lee or Stan, one of you guys might be able to pull up the calendar and share it.
I'm just going to continue to talk and not confuse myself. Just pulling a couple of things off the historic part of the calendar. December the 31st.
It was if you crazy enough to look at your actual timer on your box. And that I mean the actual location where it stores the updating time.
Time and Unix time is judged by December the 31st to January the 1st, 50 years ago exactly this year And of course, that was uh universal time or greenwich Mean Time back then uh but so we were six hours off of it. So basically 6 p.m
On December 31st, if you looked at your bit pattern in your clock.
That was 50 years of bits. So trivia, but it was something.
The next day, January the 1st, was 140 years ago that the time zones, the idea that there was central time, East Coast time.
Wasn't appointed in the United States at that point, but just worldwide.
I believe it was some guy in some London or England came up with the concept of let's divide the world into time zones and that way we can tell what's going on where.
And it eventually took hold everywhere. Let's see, 100 years ago, again on January the 1st, Bell Labs came into existence. Of course, now it's called Nokia Bell Labs since it was sold to Nokia.
And when it was created, it was in New Jersey, Manhattan.
For the longest time it was in New Jersey. And right now, as we speak this year, they're in the process of moving it out of the United States and moving it to, I believe, New Brunswick in Canada.
So they're going to their new happy home. Today, uh.
Is the anniversary of Herman Hollerith getting a patent on his statistical counting device which we can more easily state is punched cards. The idea that you can put data on punch cards and he was building machines that would read punch cards and
His company eventually became IBM. And the rest is history. But today is the anniversary of that patent coming into existence.
Yeah. So anyway, enough odds and ends history um Are there any important dates for our organization?
Any meetings are not going to be held on regular time or Stan or Lee?
Do I need to be pointing out anything like that?
Or just start.
The new Linux meeting will be 12 days after the St. Louis Linux users group meeting which is Next Thursday.
Not tomorrow, but the week following. And then 12 days after that will be the new new Linux users group meeting.
Okay.
I believe we're not seeing the calendar. Were you seeing the calendar, Gary? I think it was because… The DNS switch for the Or the Bach 2 switch over.
Ah, okay. Okay.
Not finished yet. I think.
No, it's up now. You just have to up reload whatever you were on.
We're… All right, Gary, tell me, go ahead. It's up. I'm on it.
Here's it.
Okay, I'm showing that the new Linux user group is on Tuesday the 28th of January this month.
426. As usual. Yes.
Fourth Tuesday. Yep.
It's just because the way the calendar is laid out, it's an extra length of days in between the two meetings.
Okay. Alrighty.
There's a couple of questions in the meetup or the chat room.
The latest question is, where can I find this tool? And it's in.
Your favorite Play Store.
Okay.
It's on both Google and Apple.
Okay.
I'm sorry, say it again, Lee. It broke up. Okay. Okay.
It's on both Google and Apple.
All right. Also coming up next week, eight days from now on Thursday of next week is our monthly Linux user group meeting, St. Louis Linux user group.
The topic next week is Wi-Fi packet capture with pawn gacha. I always mispronounced that word but pongacha uh And Lee, if you can correct my pronunciation, please do.
I call it Pongotchi.
Okay. This is something that back last June, I saw a presentation by Kamikaze Joe down at the 2600 user group. For those of you who aren't aware or don't recall.
2600 is the name of a worldwide white hat hackers group.
It meets worldwide, always on the first Friday of the month.
We've had a chapter here in St. Louis for I don't know how far back it goes. I know at least 20, 25 years because that's how many years I've gone to it.
But not consistently. But the… This is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Basically, you put the software on a Raspberry Pi and it will sit there and it watches people make handshakes and connect to a Wi-Fi router. And then it tries to figure out how the handshake worked and what the
Necessary element. The key to do any packet capture and uh Well, if it can't figure it out right away, it keeps listening and getting more handshakes and it will even you can set it up to disrupt and break people's connection to force their machine, their laptop, if you will.
To do a new handshake, to do it again. And do it again. And it keeps giving more data to the potential hacker. And yes, it will eventually figure out You know, how to duplicate your handshake. And so great you've got
Somebody else who can now see everything you're typing and sending out on Wi-Fi.
Which, of course, if you're living in the Batcave like Lee, it's enough trouble trying to get a signal down there But if you're going to Bredco or some other coffee shop and figuring, oh yeah, I'm just gonna Flip open my laptop, get on their Wi-Fi, and I'll just do my banking from here
Well, that may not be the safest thing to do. So our speaker next week is Crocodile. I'm sorry, Kamikaze joe And he will show how this little box goes out and manages to get into Wi-Fi conversations that you didn't think people were getting into.
And I'll leave it up to him to explain what the good side of the tool is.
And how to defend against it. But that'll be our topic for next Thursday night.
Yeah, let's see.
See the name of it. I generally see PWN pronounced as Pwn.
As in pwned on something, you managed to compromise it so i would guess this is playing on Pone gotcha type thing.
Good. All right.
Let's see. Any other… announcements that need to be made.
Or if there are no other announcements, we traditionally do after the main presentation, just hang around and do more just open to discussion and Q&A.
For anyone who figures they may have to leave early, if you'd like to ask any just general Q&A question, you could do that at this time just in case you have to leave.
You want it to catch everybody while they were here and we can do a quick uh
Call for help.
As we sometimes term it.
Okay. Let's see.
A week and a half from now on the 20th. Martin Luther King Day, a lot of offices are closed for a federal holiday on that day.
My cousin told me that… They're going to post offices will be closed tomorrow. Is that true?
Okay.
Yes, they're closing because it's a… It's Jimmy Carter's funeral and it was declared a day of mourning.
Somebody pointed out to me it's been 15 years since we've had a former president die. I don't know if that's true or not, but… Gee, I don't remember all of the protocols go with that, but apparently making it a federal day of mourning is
Normal protocol.
That doesn't sound quite right. Didn't George H.W. Not that long ago.
I didn't see you go for years. Time does fly.
Yeah, it didn't seem like I was 15 years ago to me, but…
But that does seem a little bit long ago.
Yeah, it does.
Okay. Nobody has any good technical questions to throw out, huh? Okay.
And I guess we're out of announcement material. Lee, how is uh How are we set? Are we ready to move on to the… To the main topic?
Yeah, we're up on the clone.
Okay. All righty. Well, I'm going to turn it back over to Lee. He's going to be joined by… Grant, I believe, right?
So I've been told.
Okay. All righty. I'm going to turn it back over to you guys and uh go ahead and tell us where things stand.
Okay, at this point, Bach has been cloned.
Windigushion right here is… Clone 2.
The original Bach. Which I backed up is still there off If after this upgrade.
We feel that we are ready to go into production. We'll leave this guy running. He will become back and this will be the backup.
And then we have another one out here. Which is Bach 2 that we've been playing with for about six months.
So anyway, this is a clone of Bach. It is our play machine for tonight.
And if we, let's see, where's my There is a, oh, I'm sorry this is the general Debian 10 to 11.
Hey, Lee, if you're live on the clone and we may throw it away.
Yeah.
Please shut the email server down so any inbound messages don't come into Fair enough.
Are already done.
Thank you. In case others are wondering, the state idea is we don't want email to come into a machine we may potentially throw away.
All right, so… upgrading Debian 10, damn it.
Look, this isn't Twiggle your nose and it's done
I was looking at Mike's notes here on the wiki and all he did was reference the Debian list. He didn't uh
I can't. Oh, shit.
Have you been looking at the wikimike or Grant?
No, I have not. I'm on a machine that I don't have access to modify the host file.
Sorry.
First, we want to do, there's no updates here, I'm pretty sure.
Yep, nothing.
We need to install
10 to 11.
We don't have any upgrade.
What a… Change Buster to bullseye, right?
I'm sorry we don't want to do that.
We have to python.
If I have that right? No.
Anybody know what that is? Package that we need to install that is let's Python 3 operate as Python 2?
Let me look at emails.
I'm multi-failing. Sorry, bad co-presenter.
Pt.
Python is python.
Python is Python 2. Thank you, sir.
Correct. Maybe not.
It probably is. Should we do the…
I bet we have two bullseye do the
Reading.
Edit app sources list. After you do that, do apt-get update.
Then apt-get install PythonIs Python 2
Chuck, we got a repo here that's a problem security update and then upgrade.
No, apt-get update. Apt-get install Python is Python 2.
I presume that package is in the new version.
Yep, there it is.
Okay, how's Stan writing on the screen?
Dig in.
I don't know. I don't know why I'm doing that.
Fair enough.
Oh, I was trying to move the narrative. From the space to text.
Up out of a way so I could, and then somehow I turned on the annotate the screen thing.
Somehow turn it off.
Preferably not with a hammer. Your monitor won't like that.
Although it'd be better to do that to an LCD than a CRT.
Good distinction, yes.
I think I have it.
Yes.
I think I've got it turned off now, I think.
All right. What's next, Brent?
Then do apt get. Upgrade space dash dash without dash new dash packages.
I'm sorry, PKGS.
Hit control C and run your command again. I just want to double check.
Ooh.
Apt. He did app get not app big deal upgrade without new packages sure Yep.
And then he says, see the wiki for responses to prompt.
We…
You might catch the original number?
If only we were recording and could go back.
Oh. Let's see.
I don't see anything interesting here. Anybody catch it? Anybody got an extra set of eyes?
Dfsg and locate.
I don't recall anything super interesting other than Python stuff, which we know and we're dealing with.
You can send mail.
All right, 424.
All right, about a quarter of the way there. Anybody else have a sidebar or anything we can yak about for the next 10 minutes?
Or so? For those of you that are joined before we started, we were having a big discussion about Fediverse.
As well as Discord. And other services like Twitter.
Anybody else? Has an opinion.
And mastodon and so forth.
Well, that's all Fediverse, Dan. You know, Mastodon, my council
Well, for, you know, it just… I recognize Macedon. I don't recognize, I don't remember what Fediverse is
It's just an instant.
Mastodon is an implementation I think it's… activity hub or pub But that ecosystem is referred to as the Fediverse, Federation universe.
I was… Yeah.
You know, the main reason for that, Stan, is there are bunches of hosts that you can log into.
And once you log into a host, you can go anywhere to any other server you want because they all share the same logins. Your logins are related to a host.
You know, like you can have a login of mastodon My logins on Fostodon which is free and open source software.
That was the one that Ed turned me on to. But when you follow somebody.
On whatever server you're on. That person can be on any other server. All you have to do is know enough information to follow them or maybe spot them spot them on a thread on a hashtag.
What kind of address do they have? It's what they call a yugglethorpe pound sign and then the name and then ask something.
Usually it's at username at instance. So like I'm at dr script at old bites dot whatever the domain name is.
And I can look that up.
Yeah, but that can be confusing because that can be confusing that handle.
Grant's talking about. You can use from anywhere in the Fediverse.
On your home server.
For example… minds LVL at omnitech.net.
Yes.
Here's my username. And on that server, I have a handle defined.
And then whenever I log in somewhere else. I log in as handle at fastidon.org.
Dot org.
What is the foster what is a mastodon? Brandon, do you know her offhand?
No, I know old bites. I think it's oldbytes.space. I don't know which daemon they're running.
Not social. Okay.
So there's different packages you can run.
And there's a whole bunch of different servers And different servers run different packages, like different servers run different web servers or different email servers, it's pick your package. They will interoperate with each other and that collective cloud is the Fediverse.
Yeah. Notice that when I try to log into Mastodon, it told me where my handle is registered.
Which is lv lambert.pastodon.org
So let's see if I go back here and log in as
Okay, Smartypans, how do I log in on Mastodon with my… Pastodon login.
Well, it thinks you're logged in. You've got logout on the lower left.
Oh, okay.
And that page looks like you're logged out. Since you have login on the upper right. Normally, if I go to instance that is not my own and I try to log in it's like, hey, you want to log in on this other one
And that points you a link to it.
You don't have to create a login everywhere just just one in the Fediverse.
No, you just create the one you just create the And then… you actually interact directly with the instance you log into.
Right?
And then acts interacts with other instances on your behalf.
Kind of like you have your email account with your email server And then it does things to other servers for you.
Then you open you're able to open a window on that other server or does it just kind of bounce everything to you or what?
It tends to proxy things through for you?
In essence, in essence. Any… Fetaverse server you log into actually is a proxy to your proxy original server where that has your login.
Does that make sense, Dan? Okay.
Yes, that does. Are you looking at… passed it on now?
No. Okay. I was setting up for the next one. In other words, that's how Mastodon works. I've actually got once i once i I'm not sure where it picks up the email. I guess I put in the email okay
And then it tells me that, oh, I'm actually out of fastidon.org.
Right.
And there's a redirect already in place for that login. So I don't log in here.
But I am not that i am not.
Up on how to handle a situation like this.
I'm and maybe it's the client I'm using. I'm used to logging in to my home instance.
And then when I ask for something on another site, it goes and gets it.
Yeah. This is my home instance fosterDon.org. And these are the ones that I follow.
For me.
Yeah.
But you could do click the magnifying glass and you can give it somebody to find and it will go and find it get this stuff from wherever they're at.
Like do at Dr. Script at oldbytes dot space
I think it's dot S P A C E or SPACES.
Try plural.
Now let me get a window open up.
It actually don't make any difference because I'm already following you.
Yeah.
Dr. Minori posts from you.
Yeah, there's things.
Did you just post something?
No, I did not. I just saw you scrolled and something was showing.
I can if you would like me to.
Well, not unless you're ready.
Dr. Scripp, here you go.
Yep.
See, this is Grant. Who I follow on my feed So when he posts, it automatically gets copied to my feed.
Or it's automatically visible in my feed, I should say. I don't know that it actually copies it.
Yeah, I believe server you're on is actually kind of subscribing and pulling my feed in so it has a local cache of it.
Or my posts. So it has a local cache and can show them to you.
Right.
A cache of your posts because he's following you, correct?
Correct.
Yes. Yeah, it pulls it onto your login server or your login instance And your login instance will cache it for a period of time defined by that server admin.
So if there's some… if there's something that's way back.
Your local instance may not have a cache of that. But it's possible for you to jump over to that other server directly.
Okay.
And to anonymously access that identity and look back through the entire history.
Side question, the avatar there, can you make your own or do you have to Get them from somewhere.
You provide it. That is something I have been dragging with me for like 25 years.
Okay.
By the way, the voice before Stan and Grant just now was Stephen Baker.
So you…
Giving us the description of how that was put together. Thank you, Stephen.
You need to make the hair grayer. You need to make the hair grayer?
Hair grayer and beard grayer and the hairline needs to go further back.
And let's see. No, I don't want to do work.
Only. You're saying in and I think, okay, never mind. You're correct. I was misinterpreting.
Yeah, I always get in the habit of specifically or explicitly specifying Instead of using a default white knelt.
Yep.
All right. I noticed that uh granted just that posted something and it immediately turned up in my feed.
And we're almost done with the update, but at some point it'd be
He could reply, go away, I'm busy doing an upgrade. Talk to me later.
Mike.
We tried the trial run of this update before, right? And we didn't notice any… weird um interdependency things or anything like uh Because you're going to have you're going to have components from both 10 and 11, right?
For more.
Because anything that 11 didn't have anything It's still going to be there from 10.
And…
Right. The biggest issue that i remember was it defaulted to Python 3.
And that's why this time around we did the Python is Python 2.
Go ahead, Lee.
It's actually not a case of default. It's a case of without Python 2 installed when we did the upgrade before, it removed mailman because mailman was dependent on Python 2.
Thank you. Yep.
Well, that's why we ran the test and we found a problem.
Ouch.
And you don't think there's going to be like any like cross dependencies where 11 is going to be looking for a library would have been installed if it was a base install and upgrades.
I think it's a perfectly valid question. We're following a Debian supported upgrade process.
We're just way behind doing it. So we are leveraging that the Debian maintainers know how to gracefully do these upgrades.
Including dealing with the dependency potential gotchas that you're talking about.
As long as we stay within the package repo this should be fairly safe.
Right. Right.
Barring the bye by Python 2 and anything that uses it which we found last time around last time And we have… address that.
Okay, so this is a… an over the beard discussion topic but Where did the world change? In the old days.
Fortran, which is one of the oldest standardized languages of what was it?
Broadly developed on everything. And I think also probably COBOL, which was more the business oriented original form of language.
They were always, always backwardly compatible. If you had something that had been written 15 years earlier in Fortran you know it it didn't make any difference that he had a newer Fortran on your system. It always was backwardly compatible.
Where did we go wrong that you have to make sure that Python 2 is being replaced by Python 3. Oh my god
We got old, Gary. That's what happened.
It's not just getting old. Why can't languages be backwardly compatible?
I'm not a fan of the way…
Oh, they could be, but that's a lot of work.
It's more work to make them not compatible But things change.
Quickly in technology. I mean, surely we've all seen this and Sometimes, you know.
There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. So you come up with something and It gets widely implemented across domains you never could have imagined. Sometimes it's like oh well Actually, we should have done that a little differently.
So, you know, anybody that's built anything complex is probably not even finished it yet before they've said, you know, I wish I would have done this differently or I wish I would have done that differently.
And that's exactly why I've said when I built something, I want to build it three times.
Something of that scale.
The first is to actually make it work. And part way through, I'm going to go, oh crap, I know what I need to do differently.
Start the second version almost immediately I think you're going to learn a few things that's like, okay, let's completely redo it again, incorporate in everything from the second.
Mm-hmm.
Version. I've had a very similar concern with Python, Go, and Rust.
I'm seeing them have… less than 10 year shelf life.
Really?
Whereas, yes. Whereas things like C, I observe.
Mm-hmm.
A 20 to 30 year shelf life on code. The thing that happens with C is as compilers move forward they start warning about things that are potentially unsafe and eventually it's a hard error if you still do it.
Mm-hmm.
So you might need to tweak the code for oh We don't want to just read standard in and exec something in the middle of the program.
Security posture changes so it evolves a little bit But it does seem like Python, Go, and Rust.
If you want to do something more than five years old.
You're potentially looking at severe problems. Now, something that might not be fair to python Apparently, Python started or was around in Pearl's heyday of the 90s. So Python 2, and I presume Python 1 was compatible with it or largely
Kind of had a 20-year run. And it's… We've learned some things. We need to redo some things we're going to create Python three it's going to create three quite similar to Python 2, but it is really a different version
Like IPv4 and IPv6 are really different things. Almost to the point I wish they weren't IP.
The same name, but Python is different. There are things different programmatically convert and cover most use cases.
I don't begrudge languages evolving. But I do begrudge. Okay, Python 3 is out. That's what we're going with and everything. Python 2, we're just dumbing.
Well, there's this whole 20 years worth of Python 2 that you just threw the baby out with the bathwater And I think maybe what you're speaking more to gary is why are developers either ignorant of that or worse okay with throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes. Yeah. I think You've hit it, yeah.
Let me say something. Python 2 And Python 3 can be coexist on the same device at the same time.
You just can't have this they can't have the same name, but they can exist together.
I agree and i blame
So any programs that you still have from Python 2 We'll continue to work for Many, many years yet.
They're not throwing Python 2 away. They're just not updating it.
Python, the language organization, is not throwing it away You have distributions like Debian throwing Python 2.
They're not throwing it away as much as they're just not putting it in their distributions.
Away.
It's still available.
Yeah, it's been end of life now for more than five years, so… don't want to be running that on an internet facing box.
This is Stan. I'd like to point out to anybody new here that this session is being recorded and will be posted up on our archives.
Web pages in a day or two.
Say again, Stan.
This meeting is being recorded. We're going to post it up on our archives if you want to come back and look at it.
Okay.
I think that was a softball of let's be nice and not say something we'll regret.
Yes, I absolutely agree you can have Python 2, Python 3.
Multiple versions of Perl, multiple versions of Go, pick your program.
You can usually have multiple versions installed side by side if you're careful and if you know how to do it and how to deal with it.
Distributions make a choice to not do that.
For various reasons.
So
I disagree with some things some distros are choosing
All right, Graham, what's your next step?
Open a beer.
Okay, apt get. Space full upgrade or apt
Hyphen between like that.
Yes.
And you said app get.
Apt-git and apt cache. Have been rolled into apt for 99% of the same use cases.
Okay. Okay.
And basically, for 40 years, I have been a Unix fan where the minimum number of characters is the best way to approach it.
All right, we're good to go?
I believe so.
What were the key things you were looking for to be good to go at that point?
What's the 41 that's going to be removed? It said like 200 to be installed, 41 to be removed.
Okay.
Upgraded. New package removed.
Oh.
The old headers.
Old versions of things.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Use, oh, no.
Yeah, we got a bunch of stuff automatically installed. We can do an auto remove eventually.
That's just, yeah, that's, yeah, you're right. It's no longer required. Okay, never mind.
Although we've got a bunch of lib python stuff here that uh I'm not sure we want to remove until we want to we can verify that those aren't
Is mailman
I didn't see that part. Well, that would get that would get… axed after if you did auto remove.
Right. I don't see a mailman up there.
So it's saying there's nothing depending on it then. It thinks the app doesn't think there's anything depending on those packages.
Are there…
Correct.
Right. I don't see mailman there.
What is the latest version of Python? In the two family.
For some reason, I thought it was 2.9.
Okay, so it's removing Python 2.7 and then it's going to upgrade Python 2.7.
I think I saw Python 27. Above and it's on the left side of the bottom. Well, what's the bottom line
Well, at least that means it's keeping the Python 2 stuff.
Yep.
You're working on 121? All right, continuing our discussion of continuing our discussion Social media for techies.
I think a few of you have seen it, but I wanted to go back. I know people have seen, a few people have seen this.
The whole idea of discord is to create discussion threads.
As an example, here's a major one that I've been in on like 10 years.
And there are probably a hundred different threads in this particular one, in this particular discord instance And the way I have it configured If there's a new post in any of them.
It'll throw out a highlight And you can go in here and read the post.
Or you can go up to any other one. There's only one that's been here since I did.
Since I checked this afternoon. And I usually leave space status up there, the one I leave my focus on And then everything below it will be collapsed.
This happens to be a switch on the wall down there.
And if somebody walks in and opens a space so other people can head down there.
It shows here. Like it opened at noon on the 4th.
And then closed at midnight on the 4th. And that's the last time that somebody's been there where other people could stop by and work on stuff.
So, uh.
I don't understand. What do you mean by space status?
Arch Reactor is a building down behind the ups
Building at Jefferson and 64. And if a full member goes in and flips the switch.
That means it's going to be open for a few hours. And if you're not a full member, you can head down there and do something.
Because a full…
Oh, that means the physical space is open. Okay. Yeah.
Physical space. And this is just an example of an old and you know, fairly sophisticated sophisticated
Structure. Yeah. Topics. Topic structure.
System or a Discord. Structure i'll pull out that this particular thread here A friend of mine
Dang it. How do I get to the top of it?
It's been going on for over almost a year. This is an example.
This particular lathe this particular lathe was something a friend of mine had So I posted this a picture of it on arch reactor and one of the guys says But that's neat. I'll take it.
So he paid a few hundred bucks for it. That's what it was.
When was this? I don't remember the date on here was like uh january 2024 over a year ago.
That's what it looked like over a year ago. And he posted his progress.
Of doing everything to it. Actually restored it.
You do better than new.
And it's just fascinating. I mean, to… Watch some of his stuff as he does it.
Report you know replaced all the bearings rebuilt everything that he could stripped it, painted it.
You don't check.
Yeah. My dad was tool and die maker for Or McDonnell Douglas and he had a lathe just like that.
In the back room, our house.
What happened to it? Still got it?
No, my brothers. Okay.
Hey, that was january here's march At this point he's painting it.
Picked a nice color of blue. If I remember correctly, it was epoxy paint
Then he started putting it together.
Anyway, there it is done. Yeah, let's see. Built a base fart, refurbed the motor rewired a switch.
Looking more complete.
Oh, and he started 3D printing parts for it. Printed a little wrench to turn the spindle.
And for those of you that know lays, you know that there are some change gears down here.
On the motor or you change the speed of the threaded threading rod here And he actually built 3d printed change gears So that if he blew up one of them.
Yeah, here they are. You built a set of change gears for it so he could use plastic ones down there.
And so if he broke one of them. You could just print another one instead of using the original metal ones that came with them.
Delayed. Put a bench together for it.
What kind of infill did he use on that?
Also looks like we're…
I don't know. Normally, you don't want solid because that makes them at a higher risk of thermal deformation.
And, you know, when you print it, you can specify you want anything from zero to 100% and so forth.
Something like that, I would probably say something 75%, something like that would give you plenty of strength to survive.
And let's see, you had some finished pictures. Well, there's a quick change to a post.
And I guess that was the last one that was, there we go.
That's just finished.
All right. Back to our progress here.
The next steps I have are check logs and reboot.
No, he's still humping.
Somehow the way you said that just reminds me of an episode of MASH that I always liked. He said, yeah, the next step here is to just set the thing and then reboot. And the episode of MASH, they were trying to defuse a bomb which had fallen in the mash camp and and they're going through the
They defuse the bomb right up and And the Hawkeye is… cutting the wires and uh trapper john is reading him the instructions and he goes so Now take the snip and cut the red wire.
You hear click, all guy goes, okay, next. He turns the page and he goes.
But first, make sure it's not connected to…
Whoa.
Yeah. Yeah, those type of directions, you have to be very careful how you write them because people are going to read them.
Literally. And that could quite literally cost multiple people their lives.
Pretty low percentage there.
6% lower left corner. So.
7%.
All right. Anybody have any questions on Fediverse? Which is Mastodon, Faustodon.
I don't know how thousands of different hosts out there i'm assuming
I'd say somewhere in the three figures.
Okay. So question for you, how would i find chains You know, hashtags.
That is one thing that is… problematic in the Fediverse as searching for hashtags tend to be instance specific.
And I usually find them by either I type them And then I can see what else is using them or my client will say use so many times in the last time period But I'll see somebody who has tagged something I'm interested in and then I will follow that.
I very seldom actually go looking for things. And that was true.
Over on Exeter as well.
Just searching for… hashtag IPv6.
See what you find.
So it's profiles that have it in it and then it's it bottom of your scroll was hashtags.
And you could click on those it'll do a search like click on the IPv6 itself the yep.
It possible to increase the memory on our virtual machine here?
Yeah, I think he's got four gig, though.
I mean, that's usually enough for anything that isn't.
Well, I'm thinking, wouldn't it run faster if you had more RAM?
Gui.
No, at this point, you're bandwidth limited. You only got 50 meg going out.
Ah. Okay.
And disk bound as well.
And there's also the case of you might not be able to increase memory without shutting down and restarting, which we want to not do at this point.
Okay, understood. Because you're not far enough along to Be happy.
Right.
We'll show some options here. If we have… Success.
We can always go back on the next reboot we can always add CPUs or memory In fact, we only got four gig. We can probably bump that up.
Without any kind of major issue.
Is everybody familiar with… Virtual Machine Manager, which is One of the core utilities in the Linux world.
I've been using it for 10 years.
When you have a machine You can open the machine.
And then these are the settings for it.
The main difference is you're actually running it on a minimal host.
All the host has is a kernel and basic network services.
And a hypervisor. This particular hardware is running Zen.
Kvm is the other major one out there. Plus you have all kinds of different application environments like virtual box and there's all kinds of VMware that you can run on a local host like this.
As opposed Nope.
Would this work with VirtualBox? Didn't think so.
Two different things.
That's what I thought.
I think I'll have to turn my chair around and look, but I think virtual machine manager, newer versions can actually manage VirtualBox.
Virtual Machine Manager can also manage LXC, LXD. Vmware, add connection, click the hypervisor dropdown
Let me check mine. Version or what's installed.
Yeah, I don't. I don't even remember what word.
We've got here.
Mine will do… QEMU, KBM.
Zen, Livert, LXC. Beehive and virtuoso. I don't have the right things installed.
But another system I have. It can actually talk to VMware start and stop.
Guests. You don't have as complete control But it can be a consistent interface.
Yeah, except in that part In that instance, all you're doing is connecting the UI to the virtual box back in.
Yeah.
Right. Well, arguably virtual machine manager is connecting to the KBM or libvert.
Back end. It's literally under the hood doing stuff.
Right. Yeah, but live bird under the hood runs on a bare host.
Virtualbox requires a full machine with GUI and everything.
Yeah.
All that turns into what is a type 1 versus what is a type two and You can actually run VirtualBox on a darn near bare minimum system that is almost exactly the same thing needed for Libford.
It's just headless and you do across the network.
Gui management.
Yeah. There are some weird things about virtual Box show.
20 years ago, I was using it on a server in the back room and I accidentally deleted a user and it turns out that user was the owner of all the VirtualBox files and it killed everything until I figured out the problem.
And my… Since VirtualBox is a user space or user land application To me, that makes it different than that KVM or Zen which actually runs on the base hardware.
Once hardware assisted virtualization became a thing. That differentiation got really, really, really gray.
Because… even with kvm the processor and memory is virtualized that the hypervisor layer But the virtual disks and other virtual hardware is generated by QEMU, which is a user space process.
It gets very, very, very nebulous. And for what most people need to do it probably doesn't matter anymore.
It did 15 to 20 years ago
Now largely it doesn't.
All right, we got 53%.
Somebody else throw out a fire.
Linux virtual server IP virtual server admin.
Recently and i actually recently posted.
What was the one you were the one you posted about?
Lvs. Ipvs, ADM is the admin utility for it.
No. Lvs space. Ipvs ADM.
Adm is an administrator. Adam, David, Michael.
Much more accurate.
Component, IPVS ADM. Is the user space administrative?
Component for it. It is a network load balancer. That is an optional component inside the Linux kernel.
Okay.
I am using it in combination with Keep Alive D. I can go into more in a few minutes.
I would keep…
There's probably going to be multiple prompts.
Well, we're running PHP 7.4 on this thing.
Probably.
Bush all going by. Of course, we're not using it for any of the cert anything really.
Oh.
Because the sites are all static. And what Sean's doing in the uh in the cloud has their own resources.
This is going to keep our configurations or our aliases.
Yes.
We hope, right?
It has to ask you if it wants to replace a config file.
And as long as you're careful about answering no or keep the current version.
Ah.
And we should be okay.
Okay.
Because except for the change we talked about earlier, PostFix is Where Python is Python 3.
Right.
Or Python 2, rather. That eventually when we do the dist upgrade since that satisfies the dependency of mailman, mailman won't get removed.
And that was the biggest hole. That was the big hole we had last time.
Is that end of life or what?
Um…
That gets into is Python 2 dead? No. Is Python 2 supported by contemporary distros?
No. Mailman 2 is very long in the tooth.
Mailman 3. Is a beast.
Not a direct one-for-one replacement.
It still works. It's fine but it's fine the writing is on the wall for it.
Much of that writing came about because Python.
Dead. Effectively.
Well, Stan, the biggest difference is Mailman 2 is a file-based history archive Mailman 3 is a database archive.
Right.
I've used Mailman 3 for some applications. Max King is the one we used a couple of years ago.
Right.
And the setup is just totally different. And as far as I haven't done any deep searches, but as far as I've seen There is no… direct way to move your archives from mailman two to mailman three.
Ouch.
Yeah.
I consider Mailman 3 to be a collection of not quite microservices, but it is a collection of various things working in concert with each other.
And they're all kind of independent and strung together. Whereas Mailman 2 other than writing out the archive.
Everything was under. One monolithic thing.
Yeah. In fact, the mailman three instances I've looked at are actually Docker.
You're saying they're actually Docker? Okay.
Which is the and there's like Yeah, they're Docker containers six or seven of them used to run Mailman 3.
For the max king which was the one I found a couple of years ago in use.
Yeah, there's six or seven Docker containers for Mailman 3. When Mailman.
You could add to a shell account on a box. And it was you could make it all live in one directory in your home directory
Okay.
And it just the fact Mailman 3 is multiple Docker containers speaks to how complex It is.
Wow.
And my opinion is it does not really deliver significantly more features than Mailman 2.
I have seen multiple people go Mailman 3 is way more complicated than what we want for just a simple mailing list.
We're going to leave mailman and go to something else.
I don't know.
What have they chosen instead of mailman? I think most places I see just switch to instant messaging. Everybody just gets onto Discord or Telegram or something like that. My biggest problem with Mailman 3 besides it seemingly seeming… intensely.
Complicated is the fact that you'll probably find 15 Python interpreters running at once.
Good luck running that on a system with like a one gig of byte of RAM VPS or something it'll run, but you won't get much else going on there whereas mailman to you can have… mailman to plus a bunch of other stuff running and it'll take up
300 or 400 megabytes of ram Fire Up Mailman 3 and you're now using one point four or five, maybe gigabytes of ram It's crazy.
And you have the disparity in resource consumption And at a very high level.
What additional features is it offering? To make it worth it.
Oh, one feature it has that's great is the ability to search messages through a web interface.
So if you join a mailing list, you can go back and find a topic that has already been discussed and you can even Add to that you can… You can reply to a message within the web interface, which I think is a great feature.
But I don't know that having fifth Python processes loaded is worth it.
Yeah, and you could, I've seen web interfaces for searching mailman to archive.
All right, one test successful. Oh, no, wait a minute.
Ada sloop.org, that's not redirect. That's interesting. I have to figure that out.
Figure one out.
Why is a.sloop.org responding? When we've…
You shut down postfix. Everything else auto starts, correct?
No, we haven't rebooted yet. No.
No, but you booted up this clone before we started. The only thing we shut down was post-facing.
I made the… Yeah, I booted the clone.
Before we started, it had the same IP as the old one.
Right.
So we're verifying that Postfix admin works.
On the upgraded version of Bach.
And that was the first thing that I wanted to test.
Right.
Postfix itself is still down.
Right. Mailman would be interesting to check.
Does she run a demon?
Yeah.
Was it MM?
Male, I thought.
Yeah, there you go.
It'll be interesting to make sure that that is still there.
Post reboot.
You might want to do a system control disable Postfix.
Or whatever the syntax is. That way Postfix won't start on reboot.
But I see Postfix services are running.
Why are they running?
Did any of the depackage config restart it?
I know.
Rerun your stop again.
Could you repeat that question? Did any of the packages
Part of Debian when you do installs or updates. May end up running the package configuration piece.
Right.
May have… seen that it's supposed to be running on startup and restart.
The service, not realizing you had purposely shut it down
Okay, so it's now been disabled. Mailman is running.
Okay.
What? No, I see it as enabled.
Is that a demon?
It's… Yes.
Now, where it says inactive dead means that it's not running.
Well, it's not running, but it's still marked as enabled. So it'll restart when you boot the system.
It's…
The vendor preset is enabled but the
The vendor had preset it as enabled, but it is currently disabled.
Oh, oh, oh. Oh, okay. I understand.
And there's two unit files for mailman3. So it would be like mailman and mailman dash web. So you probably want to check the status on both.
Well, we don't have Mailman 3 on here. It's strictly mailman.
Oh, right. Okay. Never mind. Sorry.
It's okay. Boy, wouldn't it be helpful if an init system was easy to understand?
Ooh. Where do you get these crazy ideas?
Shots fired, shots fired.
I cut my teeth on a spot. 25 years ago.
I mean, none of the stuff that we're looking at is easy to understand. What's that list of stuff? I mean, none of this is easy to understand.
I've been around Linux too long. Jfsio. Colonel has JFS in it?
Well, remember, this kernel is WN10. We haven't rebooted yet.
Okay.
Okay, so what else do we need to check?
Have you paid Stan to not put you on the election ballot?
You check your sanity logs? Have you checked your taxes? The next thing after all those avoided steps is to reboot.
Good idea. Reading your tale.
Just don't chase it.
Yep.
That looks like something we don't have to worry about.
Yeah, libraries and things have changed and
Hey, we're at W11. We don't need to reboot, do we?
I have run kernels for years without rebooting. Everything else gets updated outside the kernel.
But…
I've gotten to the point I like reap boxes to reboot around once a year.
Yeah. So he still run the 4.19 kernel And we're supposed to be like the 5.04.
Debbie 11 all right we ready to reboot?
In a hole. Fire in a hole.
What's that, Stan? Well, fire in the hole. Yep.
I don't know. Pin's been pulled.
Run.
Remove pin, throw it. Why are you still holding the grenade? You told me to throw the pin.
Oh.
For…
Well, it really is in our industry at a major corporation, which maybe I shouldn't name but uh We're about to reboot the machine, good Unix machine that had been up for a long, long time, years.
And just out of curiosity before they, you know. Typed it in, they thought about the power switch and they were considering, well, should they actually power cycle it?
That's when they realized They didn't know where it was.
No.
They literally just forgot where this machine was in their computer room and it became a major search effort to figure out which box this was they were talking about.
It turned out it wasn't even in that machine room. It was in the old machine room down the hall. And it was like, oh, okay.
Ouch.
Nobody ever makes that complaint about their Microsoft box. You notice?
Yeah.
Oh. We had a problem once with the… cleaning lady came in and unplugged the server to plug in her vacuum cleaner.
It actually happened to us.
I've heard that. I've also heard she didn't unplug it, but she plugged her vacuum in and when she turned the vacuum on, tripped the breaker.
Which is almost worse. Because at least when she's done vacuuming, she could plug the server back in.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
All right. Oh, what are we all looking for?
Check and see if Postfix is running. Then check mailman, check postfix admin.
Where was my A? Where? Browser window.
No man looks dead.
Well, so far so good.
I think mailman was not. Running.
Right.
And you start mailing.
That's currently disabled.
You enabled Postfix.
Well, we need both, don't we?
I wouldn't enable Postfix yet because that could allow email to come in
Well, mailman's running. Try pulling up the admin interface.
Where's the list?
There are no publicly advertised mailman mailing lists.
You're… take admin off the end of the URL.
Right.
Oh, Mailman's running. So it may be a refinement.
Yeah, but list info should show the list it used to.
I got logged in. Open a terminal and do a net stat.
A n or netstat NTP, please. Nancy, Paul.
And okay, things that are hitting 443-71-245 is me.
So, yeah. I'm hitting the web interface.
Mailman seems to be… Happy.
Let me go to the overview of mailing lists I'm going uh where you had admin, put list info. Take the slash off the end of it.
I wouldn't think that. Me.
I'm getting list info. Announce, discuss, steercome.
Are you…
It's weird.
That's what I just fixed. Except it's probably not going to refresh.
Shift control refresh.
Are you hitting Bach 2 or the new bock or the
That's what I was looking at.
I took it out of my
Posts. Tricorum.
I just said Bach 2 in the address bar.
But we're not interested in BOC2. Live Bach.
Hang on, let me try on Google.
That's interesting.
It's… It's so screwed up. Yeah, there we go.
Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing.
I carry on Google Chrome around just for when firefox can't be used.
Is it serving DNS like it's supposed to? I know NS records point to buddy dns But Buddy DNS does secondary transfers off of Bach.
Doesn't it? Okay.
No, they're coming back to 10 Is that the only slug window I've had open? No.
And I still need to use the wiki on tulo. And so I'll put that back
I feel like… we may be at a… Test it.
In theory, I should be able to turn around and see if I can pull email off of it.
Ooh. It's a radical thought.
There we go.
That uh
Where do you come up with these ideas?
Way too many years administering servers doing live migrations.
Oh, Alpine.
We're here.
Would somebody send me, oh, you're good. Okay. Somebody send me a test message, gtaylor at Slug.
Preferably from outside of slug And it's G, not D.
I'm a doofus sometimes, but not in an email address.
I'll send you something from Gmail.
Okay.
Heading your way.
Okay.
And said to me also.
Hasn't arrived in my mailbox yet.
There it is.
Working. Cool.
I'm going to close and reopen my email, Clint.
Is enabled.
Man is enabled.
Pastor Eric. Postfix is running.
So we haven't left anything. And running, have we?
I don't believe so.
All right. Yeah, it just took a while for it to show up in IMAP.
But it is there.
Dare we do the auto remove?
I think we haven't done it yet. I would not.
Did you do assimilate an auto remove?
I would have to check the man page. That's what I was wondering about.
There was a question in chat. What was the name of that tool that runs Python 2 in Python 3.
It all. Retype it in the chat. It's actually a package, not a tool.
I believe we are further along than we have ever been in this upgrade process.
Oh, apparently I sent that as a direct message to Gary, not to everyone. Sorry, Gary.
No problem.
I thought I was replying to Ron. I fail. I'm sorry.
I got you.
Thank you.
Alrighty.
Yeah.
Well, I think we're at a good stopping point, Gary. We've got things to check going forward, like if it's safe to do the auto remove And…
I agree.
All right. Should I pass an Amber Bach around to everybody?
Alrighty.
Yeah.
Consider it takes a four by four to get into the driveway, it might be hard to do.
Take a rain check on it when it's a little safer for everybody to do it.
Yeah, really?
This does seem like tonight would have been one of the things, you know, one of the type of meetings that Yeah, it might have been, you know, if we were more cowardly like I am, maybe it is something we should have done in person. It's pretty risky just doing an online upgrade like this but
Pretty cool, guys. Pretty cool.
And I did send an email off to both G. Taylor and to LVL.
A lot of…
Do you guys get my email?
Yes, I did. It just took a few minutes for my IMAP client to see it.
Yep, test three, four.
We owe a lot of thanks to Mike Knight for a lot of the work that he researched.
Alrighty.
Very true. Oh, by the way, Gary?
Check the email. I have another donation from Steve.
Yes, sir.
Oh. Thank you, Steve.
Thank you, Steve.
Wow.
Call for volunteers. Gary.
Okay. I haven't… Lee, I haven't got that email, but thank you for pointing it out.
Oh, on the screen, Gary. It was on the screen.
I'm sorry? It was on the screen. Okay.
Yeah.
Sitting here looking at my email. Foolish me.
Yeah, no worries.
Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Steve.
All right, not to cut this party short but i need to drop myself so
Who is that speaking of? I didn't notice. Oh, great. Alrighty.
It's Grant.
I think, yeah.
Okay. Well, Grant, thank you very, very much for all the effort and work and thought that's been put into it. Really appreciate it.
To me, Lee and mike get lots and lots more kudos than I do.
And Lee drove. So.
Spur of the moments thoughts really are important. So.
Definitely.
Yeah, yeah. And definitely thank you all for kind of thinking how to put this into a presentation that would drag the rest of us kicking and screaming into into this transition. So much appreciated.
And a good opportunity for us to all learn a few things about what needs to be considered and how it gets done.
Traditional 10-minute warning
All right. Have a good evening, gentlemen.
Good night.
Thank you, Grant. Good night.
Really appreciate it.
Bye.
Wow. I'm happy how well this went.
Yeah.
Of course, Lee's going to get up tomorrow morning. Walk into the Batcave and wonder what that smell of smoke is in the room.
Wow.
What could possibly go wrong?
Do we want to shut it down or does anybody have anything to talk about?
Let me divide that into two questions. Anything to talk about with respect to
With respect to the upgrade tonight, the actual presentation. Or Lee's earlier presentation on the network cell tool And then secondary question any secondary question Any just general Q&A that we didn't get a chance to ask in the middle part of the meeting.
We'll entertain questions of any kind.
Remember we shoot it down.
All right. Okay, Gary.
Wow. Okay. All right. This has been the monthly meeting of SLUG, the St. Louis Linux Unix users group it was our general meeting tonight. This was Wednesday.
January the 8th, 2025. Our presentations tonight, the basic tutorial with Lee Lamert presenting on the network cell info tool It's made by a commercial company.
But there is a free version and we looked at the Android version tonight. There's also an iOS version.
And then our main presentation tonight is we did a live upgrade And we all survived. Grant Taylor and Lee took the box server.
Which was currently then running Debbie and 10 Which is beyond its shelf life.
And upgraded it to devian 11. And got it all up and running again.
So we'll see how this works out. Thank you. Thank you both. And thanks, Mike Knight and anyone else who's contributed on the team to making this upgrade happen.
And we really appreciate it. Thank you all for coming tonight to the meeting.
And with that, I guess… We'll call this the end of the meeting.
We'll see you all next Thursday.
Thanks, guys.
Oh, good point. Next Thursday. Thursday is the St. Louis Linux user group meeting.
Pawn got you.
Same idea online and topic is lee what was the name of that It's basically a Raspberry Pi which figures out how the handshake works when you get onto a Wi-Fi network and it can be used for black hat hacking
And so we'll learn next week about the possible dangers and the possible protections and the possible good things you can do with it.
So