bookend.
Okay, this is the bookend for the recording. This is Wednesday the 13th of May, 2026. This is the monthly general meeting of SLUB, the St. Louis Unix users group our speak.
main talk tonight is done by Lee Lamert, and he's going to talk to us about Pi-hole and how that's going to take care of those annoying ants. Our base presentation or tutorial presentation, Grant was going to be doing that for us.
Uh, sounded like an interesting topic, but Grant has been detained at work on an emergency at work, and so he won't be here for the tutorial.
So, at this point, we'll just be wigging it for a while.
Who are we?
About us, uh, we're the St. Louis Unix Us group. We're actually incorporated. We did that a few years ago, because the previous 2, 2 and a half.
versions of the Unix user group went away, as so many user groups do because they didn't have any permanent structure, so… Uh, you can read the details there on the slides. By the way, you can also find this entire slide deck online. It's at slug.org slash.
I don't know. There's a link on the page. That's all I remember.
The meeting agenda?
Link on the home page. So alrighty. The meeting order is here in this agenda, and what we usually do is open the meeting at 6, electronically open it, as they say.
the base tutorial usually starts at 6.30, as I say, our speaker tonight has been unavoidably detained by work. Around 7 o'clock. We usually break to do announcements, introductions, that kind of thing. And then about 715.
We get into our main topic.
base topic. I'm sorry. Go ahead, stay ahead.
Just show you. to show you remember what it is. A base topic is going to be…
Uh, it's going to be of something. Simple that we can talk about in like a 15, maybe 30 minute time frame. Probably like a tutorial level, um.
But just focus on one little thing that we can get out that fast.
The middle, that's where we're going to do the, as I say, the introductions. If we have time, kind of a brief start Q&A. Um, and uh… And that's the gooey center of our meeting.
Next. introductions already. Okay, introductions. Did we skip the slide?
Why? Nobody knows who you are. If they're new.
You say, I am, and you state your name.
Okay, good. Okay. Yeah, I am Gary Meyer, and I'm MCing the meeting, also the president of the organization. I thought we skipped over slide 7, but I could be wrong. The other voice you hear there is Dan Reichert. He's our vice president, and he's also the man who gets.
So much of the production work done amazingly at times. So a big thanks to Stan. Our treasurer is Lee Lamert. He'll also be our main speaker tonight. And he's also the one who's hosting the GIPSE meeting.
I'm sorry, the Zooming. Uh, chat monitor. We usually ask for somebody to volunteer, just to keep an eye and read the chat things as they come up. And if somebody volunteers to do that, then, you know, if there's something important in chat that should be addressed right away.
You know, you can get us to pause and answer something that's in chat. So anybody want to volunteer?
And…
or it's possible just to… point out something. It depends on what the speaker wants us to do. If there's something really significant in the chat, somebody, anybody is welcome to.
Yeah.
talk and… and… interrupt what's going on.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
and that's…
We always need volunteers to speak, so… Topic Wrangler is something anybody can find other speakers and topics and.
you know, we got a lot of suggested topics, but hardly anybody to volunteer to do the actual presentation.
That's the old story of, you know, many, many hands make the work light. So if a few more people want to volunteer to help find some speakers, suggest some topics, it would be very much welcome. Also, public relations. Pr sending out the announcements. It it's.
It's something you can almost do by rote, but it's something that, yeah, it takes a little bit of time. So it'd be nice if somebody wanted to volunteer to help out doing that and relieve some of the people who are.
Jerry, it's Jonathan.
doing the finding of the speakers. So. Yeah, Jonathan.
And for all the other members, I can renew my contracts from…
The, um, semi-bug and see if I can…
scar up some people.
So, would you want to hear from, um…
Oh, that'd be fantastic. Good. Thank you.
A guy who did, um…
Risk.
Yeah.
Risk hardware architecture. Sure. Yeah. For sure.
Yes.
Hmm, hmm.
Cross-platform stuff is always interesting, especially if it's down the line, it can… Can talk to Unix-based or BSD or Linux or similar things. Cross-platform is good.
Because we look at it from the angle of, uh, does it work with Unix?
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Um, Stan and others, and Lee, and uh…
or a Unix system?
Alright, sure.
I'm speak… I'm asking the leadership, and Gary,
What do you think of me getting hold of, um, Deb Goodkin of the FreeBSD Foundation on FreeBSD progress?
Also good. Yeah. She was a lady we had speak about, what, a year and a half ago?
Oh, man, it's 2 years ago.
2 years. Okay. But yeah, she she was a good speaker then, and I'm sure she could give us the latest and greatest information. Yeah.
I'll get in touch with Stan about the available dates.
And do you mind if I subscribe to SteerCom?
Great.
Next.
Okay.
Nope, please do. Although, be advised, we're in the middle of moving everything to mailman 3. So the web web interface may or may not be usable.
Okay. If you have problems, Jonathan, just drop me a text message or an email and I'll I'll get it straightened out to get you on.
Okay, let me raise the volume on this thing.
It's a lot of making sausage, Jonathan. It really is.
Well, I can find speakers. I mean…
I still have content.
Yeah. I mean, I mean the steer com mailing list is a lot of sausage at this point, as Lee mentioned, we're in the middle of transitioning.
Okay.
Gary, do you have any…
Henry, do you have anything?
Announcements. Let's see. Our next SLUE meeting. Well, that's today, June the 13th. But the next one will be a month from now on June, I'm sorry, May the 13th today. June the 10th will be the next one. And then in July the 8th will be the one after that.
Does that generally work out to be the second Wednesday of the month?
That's our general monthly meeting.
Okay.
It does amazingly. Imagine that. We generally only move it if there's a major holiday or something like that, so… The next St. Louis Linux user group. It's usually 8 days after the general meeting that usually makes it the third Thursday of the month. Sometimes 8 days will push off to the 4th, but as you can.
Look at the calendar, you'll understand how that happens. But anyway, so May the 21st, that will be next week. In other words, 8 days from now, and uh.
We don't have the topic. finalized for that yet, so stay tuned and keep an eye out. We'll let you know as soon as we get the topic finalized.
new Linux. Oh, we've talked about possibly having a talk on Susa Linux leap 16. So that that's a possible topic. So stay tuned.
The new Linux meeting is the 4th Tuesday of the month. Next one of those will be May the 26th. You can see the other dates there. The net Slack meeting is the first Thursday of each month.
And important dates. Go ahead.
Oh, yes. I'm sorry. I was I was present for part of the Slack meeting last week, and… I thought… I thought, uh, Slug and Slack were the same thing for a little bit. Sorry.
Now, uh…
So the the the slack and the new Linux meeting. Both of those.
hardly ever have any sort of a… topic set out in advance. It's basically whoever comes to the meeting, the people there, ask questions, propose conversations, and that's the way that goes together. The first two meetings there, the Sloop general meeting, the St. Louis Linux.
user group. Those 2 are usually have a set topic with a prepared speaker and it's just a difference in organization.
But you're certainly welcome. Come to any of them.
Thank you.
Those dates in bold. The first one October the 14th. That was the end of life for Windows 10, Microsoft Windows 10.
The next date on there, October the 13th of this year is the end of the extended end of life for Windows 10. Basically, you have to pay money to Microsoft if you want them to keep it running.
So… The, uh…
Go.
That… let me talk about the Missouri Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The reason we've got that posted on here is when we… had face-to-face meetings, a lot of people in the area had come, and some of them moved away or whatever. There's not a lot of publicity that's been done about it, but people have lived in certain areas of St. Louis County and certain areas of St. Charles County.
Where in areas that were affected by the Manhattan Project from World War II, anybody that lived in certain areas since 1949.
Uh, if they lived in a certain area for 24 months, they may be able to apply for compensation for advanced.
And there's a list, you know, if you go to that website, you can go a Google search for Missouri Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, and it's got all kinds of material on that.
Uh, we wanted to let people that attended a lot of our meetings in the past, and they may have moved away, need to know about that.
Next.
Okay. Let's see. We haven't got it up and going yet. But, as we said, this is a volunteer organization. There's no single corporate backer, you know, not any big company backing it like Susa or.
or Red Hat. Actually, Lee here, his company, Omnitech, where he's the lead scientist, he, his company is providing the hardware that we keep our web server, our mail systems.
And so a lot of donation of both time and computer services there. Ken Johnson is picking up the tab for our meetup account, and a number of other people have just made.
you know, ongoing contributions into the kettle of money. So we are going to put a place on our website where if somebody does feel like they'd like to make a financial contribution.
It would be welcome, but it's not up and running yet, but you can probably expect to see it in a few months. And no, this is not a backwards way of saying, we expect you people to pay. No, we expect you people to come. And hopefully there'll be a few people who can provide.
provide a little financial help. Call for any other announcements.
anything, as I said, unfortunately, our our main speaker tonight, or not our main, but our basic tutorial speaker tonight was called away at work. And so that's why we're not doing the tutorial right now.
Bye bye Windows 10. I imagine most of you have already heard Windows 10 is officially no longer with us. I mean, obviously, it still runs if you got it on your machine. But it's not being updated by Microsoft, and.
There are ways of having that done. If you pay Microsoft Corporation for additional support, but it's no longer.
Move along, move along, move along.
Okay. There's other. There's places on that slide that tell you where you can look up stuff about that. There's another thing end of life workshop.
So it's there on that slide.
There's an organization called EndOf10.org. They they are. Their goal is to… provide… introductions to other Linux sites to transition to away from Microsoft Windows.
Any other announcements? Besides the fact that this meeting is being recorded, because we only record the Slug and the St. Louis Linux meetings for their presentations and put them in our archives.
Uh, anybody here can be recording. So that slide right there gives you an introduction to a number of things that in October of 22 I did a.
a presentation on simple screen recorder, and there's a… You know, there's it's upon our archives.
As I said, we have archived stuff. I don't know, you can get to it from our website.
Carol.
Uh, we have a calendar. www.sloob. Yeah. And that goes to… Where is this magic thing?
Can you say what this is about in 10 seconds or less, Gary?
Yeah, we started this originally just to show where our meetings were what date and time. And you'll notice there's 4 or 5 of them that are red. Well, those are the meetings that are basically hosted by this organization. So those are our meetings.
And we figured, well, as long as we've got a calendar, the techy people are looking at. We started figuring, okay, we'll start posting other meetings in the St. Louis area that might be of interest as well as other.
dates and history, possibly, or things. So, we started putting the other stuff on there. Uh, then when COVID hit, uh, so many meetings went to, uh, online. There were a lot of good technical meetings that were online, and so we.
We added those as well. There's a way in that calendar where you can separate them out if you want to see one, but not the other. But that's left to the, uh, left to the reader to figure that out for himself.
We've got mailing lists also.
mailing lists of the announce mailing list. Very limited traffic. It's it's moderated and probably maybe 2, 3, sometimes 4.
announce things come out a month. But it's that limited. It's usually announcements of our meetings. Discuss is a general discussion. It's open to anybody who wants to sign up for it, and anybody who signs up for it can submit.
Questions, comments? So a lot more activity there. And as you guessed, sometimes you may get a response in 30 minutes. Sometimes you may get a response in 10 days.
Or longer. Steering Committee. If you like sausage, seeing sausage being made, that's where you want to be, is on our steering committee. But that's where we plan how these meetings put together, who the speakers are going to be, how the organization is kept together. We promise to disinfect first.
There we go.
Yeah, it's catch the pigs, skin the pig or kill a pig, skin the pig, and uh… boil the meat, and then make sausage.
That's it, that's it. The sysadmin list is basically a a kind of a closed list. We're not saying you don't don't join it, but it's specifically for the sysadmins who are keeping our computers running.
Goodbye.
And so, yeah, we don't necessarily want everybody to, in case we accidentally reveal a password or something. So.
Since the administration questions can be asked on discuss. Not a problem there, you know.
Yeah.
But the sysadmin list is for those people that are actually doing the work behind the scenes. No.
Okay, next slide. And those are sponsored meetings, as the gentleman is asking about was slack meeting. As I said, the difference is, is the first two there, the Linux meeting and the general meeting, we, uh.
We have planned topics. The the slack meeting and the new Linux meeting. We don't. It's just whatever people want to talk about. So.
Well, new Linux is for a beginner workshop, and the Slack meeting is a configuration workshop. People have problems with their hardware or software, and.
We try to help fix problems. We had the last Slack meeting, the young lady came in and she was having trouble with her sound, and we actually.
shoulder, uh, the two tools that could help her configuration, and it just wasn't that the thing was broken, it just wasn't configured completely. Some distros automatically pick up certain hardware, and when they drop in, the configuration just works.
You know, but you don't have to always switch to a different distro to get something to work. You can do the, you know, a little bit of exploring, you can configure it to make it work.
Okay, before we go on, Gary, what's the call for help?
All for help. After our main presentation tonight, there'll be time to.
You know, ask questions about anything, but here in the middle of the meeting, we also provide a little time to ask questions. That's for people who don't feel they can stay around that late.
Or they're afraid maybe the people with the answers won't be around that late. Um, so, uh, we'll just set aside a little time right now before we start our main presentation. And, uh, anybody who wants to ask a question, uh, now would be a good time, or if you want to make a comment about, hey, I tried this this week.
It didn't work, or I had to do this to get it to work. Now would be a time we can at least start those conversations. We may finish them after the presentation, but yeah, anybody want to talk about anything now?
We'll be open for another 5 seconds to allow people to unmute themselves.
5… 4… 3… 2… 1.
Okay, the main presentation, of course, that's what everybody came for. So it usually is on a Unix topic, or at least some open standards product. So.
Open source operating system, open source code. They say mostly just open standards of some kind. So that comes down to.
Linux, BSD, Unix, any other form of Unix. Okay. The main presentation obviously goes longer than the tutorial, and it's going to get deeper and dirtier into how things work.
And often focused on enterprise computing. But we try and keep it so the hobbyist can come in and and.
Lucia.
you can get the information or. poke us to provide better information for the hobbyists. Okay, the presenter usually sends notes, Pdfs, and we try and put those things in the archive. So go back and look at our old list of talks, and you might find videos.
Sound recordings, slide decks, a lot of good stuff.
And the presenter can ask, can decide. Would you like the comments as he talks, or does he want to wait specific times when he asks for questions? Anytime Lee just said anytime. So feel free to ask any questions as it happens.
And with that. I guess it's time to start our main presentation. As I said, Lee Lamert has been a long time member of this organization. He's on the board of directors, and he's the treasurer of the organization, and he has been very gracious in.
setting up his computers at work to have virtual systems on them, virtual machines which are used for our mail services, our records, our website, etc. So a big thanks to Lee, as always, and I'm going to turn it over to Lee.
All right, Gary, thank you very much. The question was arose.
Okay, you should. I see your slide. I just, you know, we can see it.
Somebody had a question.
Okay, thank you. The question came up.
Last month about. Dns. And some I mentioned pihole at one of our meetings.
And then the question after that was, well, what is it?
The thing called a pie hole, which was what we'll talk about.
is basically a DNS system. And again, we'll define all this as we get started here.
that blocks ads. in a very efficient manner.
And the one we're going to be talking about.
He's running here on this system. It's called a pie hole because it was originally built.
Kapoir Raspberry Pi. and basically you took that.
credit card size computer, put it in a case, hooked it to the network, and installed a an image on it.
that was called Pi Hole. It's a very… simple to build takes you few minutes to burn ISO or burn a chip, stick it in the computer. In fact, we've got. We use raspberry pies here in the shop all the time.
for servers, email servers, Dns servers, things like that.
Anyway, that's where pie hole came from. And it is a DNS black hole.
And we're going to define that here as we get started.
To start off with.
Ad blocking. Everybody's seen ads personally. Every time I sit down at a Windows computer with.
Edge or Chrome or whatever people think they like.
You get ads all over the place. What are you going to do about them?
Well, most people want. Some people want ads. Most people don't like them.
for 20 years I've used Firefox. And my Firefox configuration includes things like ad block.
no script. Oh.
things things like that. Mary.
If you need to block anybody, you can do it over here.
So you can. You can block ads at the network level.
You can block them in a browser. But that takes a reasonable level of management.
for all the an option is Dns level filtering.
Which means that when the request goes out to an advertising.
to an average. do an advertising site.
It just gets dropped. And again, we're going to talk about that.
The other aspect of ads. is that they almost always include some sort of traceable information.
You know, Google for 2020 some odd years, 25 years.
Includes a… includes tracking information every time you use a Google search.
Or every time you click on a link on a Google website.
And so the next place you go. on the web knows where he came from.
That's how Google makes money selling that tracking information.
So blocking the ads is a good way to reduce that tracking, make it a lot more private.
also speeds up browsing because you're downloading less. information.
And if you do it at the network level.
It works across any device on the network. because you don't have to do it on the network.
I'm sorry, you don't have to do it on the device.
So basically, we've talked about 3 different levels of ad blocking at this point.
At the network level. the Dns level and at the machine level at a browser.
Everybody knows what Dns is, I hope. The whole point of DNS is you need to take a name.
and turn that name into an IP address that is usable on the net.
to get to get to that source, that destination.
It's used for web browsing, OS updates, streaming, mobile apps.
Traditional ad blocking, then. A browser receives a page. The ads partially load. The browser extension attempts to remove them.
The issue there is is browser-specific. You have to have an add-in.
Again, I've been using Firefox for probably 25 years.
And the extensions you get in Firefox do a pretty good job.
With no script, I block all the Google tag services or Google syndication.
with add block or you block origin, I think, is one of question.
you know, those extensions will do a pretty good job.
But they have to be installed and configured. in each browser you're using each device you're using.
and they can be bypassed, and sometimes you have to bypass them to make the site function correctly.
The pie hole is a DNS level filter. Where your browser?
Submits a DNS request. and your machine is configured to use the pie hole.
Dns system. to either allow that request.
or block it. And when you block it. It's just thrown away.
So what happens is, whenever the browser requests something that the pie hole recognizes as.
A malicious site or a site to blacklist. It gets blocked.
and the system never sees it.
Okay, we talked about what Dns is. Basically, 10erexample.com into an IP address.
and like a phone book. Ads. Then there are many levels, many components to add systems.
An ad itself could just be, oh, hey, buy this product with our phone number happens to belong to the website.
That's an ad from the website. Most commercial services nowadays, though, take that to the next level.
where they sell ads to third parties. and then Google's claim to fame is those third parties that can say, we want you to present our ad to users that have an interest in this subject.
So those servers will serve up an ad. There are analytic providers that will look at the data that is.
track as that ad goes passing around the system.
The tracking systems will. collect the data for that particular ad ID.
and a lot of cases there are ad networks involved, primarily Google. They're the big boy in the room.
because they've made trillions of dollars serving ads to companies that want to pay them for it.
All those little aside, 20 years ago, when they were just really… getting big. They had this concept called Google Adwords.
Well, I spent six months trying to find a way to pay Google.
10 cents, 25 cents, whatever for any search that included the terms Linux and St. Louis or Linux and Missouri.
I couldn't do it. They would not take my money. They would not take an offer. They would not give me a caution.
which was extremely frustrating. But eventually I learned. Late a lot later on, that there were so few requests for those keywords.
Google didn't want to bother with them.
Some of the ads, Google syndication we mentioned double click news sites, Facebook scorecard research.
There's a whole bunch of them that you see over the years.
The basic concept of that Dns black hole. is to recognize the fact that this domain is not nice about ads and tracking.
So they get blocked. It by blocking it, it means that when the Dns request is made.
For tracker.example.com, nothing is returned. It's just discarded.
A return is is sent. So the process doesn't hang, but the contents of that response is null.
And of course, if there is no IP address returned for that name, the connection cannot be made.
There's no ad download, no tracks or execution. Your IP address is not added into the tracker log for that ad site.
Which means… It breaks.
So the next question is, how do we implement that black hole?
Well, one of them, which I mentioned earlier, was… I could grab a raspberry Pi off the shelf.
build an image for it. put it on a micro SD card.
drop it in the… Pi.
Plug it in, you know, add power, plug it into the network.
and assuming you set the Ips correctly, it would start working in about 45 seconds to a minute.
Unfortunately, that presented a practical problem when I started thinking about this the presentation.
Because you don't have a console on a pie.
that you can easily share with a presentation. Yeah, you could SSH to it.
But you can't walk through it. You can't see the gooey. So I decided to build it on my machine.
So we can play with it. The admin page we're looking at here for the pie hole, which again is running on my workstation here. We'll see more about it here in a few minutes.
is actually in a container. We've talked about containers a lot over the last, what, 10, 12 years? You know, way back when.
Chuck and I, Chuck mostly did a whole series on how to run a container.
I've been doing it a lot. There's actually some really sophisticated container environments like Kubernetes, which is the foundation for almost every mainstream application on the internet.
You know, every major server is running Kubernetes. Because it's the only way you can do it.
You have to have redundancy, you have to be able to load balance across different geographical layers areas.
and at the simplest level, that is just a connection of 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 different containers.
Each container. By the way. What's this? What's the simplest way to look look at a container? How do you? How do you tell if a container is running?
Somebody give me a command. You may have to unmute.
talk repeated.
This way, you would run… you would run this on the on the Raspberry Pi, or is it something you…
No, no, on my machine. I built a container for the pie hole.
If you're running on a pie, it's native on the pie. And you have a command prompt.
But since it's running on a container on my workstation here.
Let me bump the font a bit for you guys.
It is running in a container. And what runs containers? There's 2 ways to do it.
I believe it's Docker PS is the command.
You got it. Thank you. Docker Ps.
shows me what containers are running on this system.
In this case, I have an ID. I have an image that this container was built from.
I here have the command. that started the container.
This instance was created 3 hours ago. It's been up 3 h. It's healthy.
and it shows the port bindings.
port 53 is what?
53 Tcp. and 53 Udp. What's what's Pcp ip port 53?
Okay, nice.
Dns. Thank you.
Everybody knows what port 80 is, right? HTML. Which is.
HTML.
how you talk to it. This is, you know, you usually this is the admin console here on port 80.
In fact… Let me shrink this… This is the actual URL to talk to it.
Local host slash admin. Since the the pie hole binds to port 80 or is bound to port 80.
You talk to it, you look at the admin page.
by going to it with a container localhost slash admin.
We'll see more details here in a few minutes when we talk, when we look at the compose file.
This is Stan. I got a little question. Port 443, isn't that HTMS secure?
Go.
Yes, it is. But since it's a local machine, there's no network transport involved.
And.
There's no no reason to to build a certificate for it.
Although it's easy to do. Yeah, there's no there's no reason for it. Besides, I had enough problems this afternoon getting this thing running properly.
Thank you.
You're welcome. Anybody else?
I don't know if they still do it. But I thought at one time.
When they would look up a name. And if it was like a, you know, a… tracking side or whatever.
Pyle would, in effect. Give it.
its own IP address. And so when the web browser requested that from the pile, the pile had a web server on it and its only purpose was to send back a.
one pixel transparent GIF file, I think it was.
through the web browser. So the web browser was none the wiser on what was going on.
Good. Good point. I'm not sure.
I I I remember seeing.
I remember reading about that a long time ago, but, you know, I haven't kept up with it, so maybe they changed that lately.
I do remember that story, Phil. I don't know if it was.
So just from us talking about it years ago, or I don't remember where I would have read it.
Yeah. Okay? And and finally on the Docker PS line is the name of the container Pihole.
So here's here's another command that I use all the time.
If I actually want to connect to the container.
I don't have to SSH Stuart. I don't have to.
use any tool. From the host where the container is running.
I do Docker exec. minus TI.
Container name and command. And I'm actually.
I have a command prompt inside the container.
You know, this is that actually that actual pie hole container.
And this is how I can go in and change things.
Although, if I do change something.
you know, if I create a file in this container.
What is the… ramification of restarting the container.
In other words, doing Docker compose up minus D.
I would assume that that file goes away.
Why?
There is an ephemeral system. It's going to rebuild the entire container from from the registry or whatever's cached everything the moment you tell Docker to shut down everything in the Docker.
container goes away. You'll have to mount… The directory that you're looking to hold onto.
Locally.
Yep. A Docker container is a read-only image.
When you run it. you instantiate it, you create a copy in memory.
You can go in there and play with it all day long.
But when you shut down. you revert to the image that was saved before.
Uh…
Oh, never mind. It helps if you're on a host.
Good. These are the 2 physical images I have on the host.
This one latest had problems this afternoon. So I looked up and grabbed.
A recent version. and that's the one I'm using.
continues. It's also it's also a lot bigger, 115 meg versus 42 meg.
No. Okay. And I'm confused. The one that's called latest then is not actually the latest.
That is the latest image. Remember? Container images are always.
Read on it. In other words, they're static. Right.
Once you run them. They're in memory, and yes, you can change them, but as soon as you stop them, it's gone. It's gone. And then when you next time you start it, you get a copy of the original image again. Okay.
And this happened to be the latest one. I don't know what the data was on it. It's immaterial.
But I had a problem with that. The web server, the admin server wasn't running properly.
So I went back to a previous version.
Okay… Okay. Okay.
and that whole process. Let's see, where are we?
Uh, let's see why a container? The simplest way to provide a service. Containers provide services. We'll talk about that here in a few minutes.
They isolate that service to a simple environment that is contained.
within that container image.
You can easily… you can upgrade a container at any point in time.
You never have to touch a host Os. In fact, sometimes at some point soon, I've been building some servers in the back room for AI.
I will show you what. A.
OS looks like that is built to run containers.
where the OS itself acts like a container. It is a read-only system.
That is immutable. It cannot be changed.
Thank you.
They got to be replicated.
Hey, Tyler. Is your mic open?
Yeah. Let me turn it off.
We can hear a lot of key clicks. OSP clicks. It's not like somebody sucking on a straw.
Thank you. All right.
What makes it possible? Well, in the Docker world, in the container world is called is git.
We've had many presentations on Git over the years. It is the backbone.
of almost every system on the Internet. Windows and Linux and everything else.
Because it gives you a lot of advantages. It runs on everything.
When you check out a version, it is guaranteed to be the same as the last time you checked it out.
If you want to upgrade it, you can easily.
Post a commit. If you have something breaks, you can roll back to the previous one.
There are no dependencies involved. and it also also works great for demos.
Okay, this is what we have tonight.
The lab is my workstation. Actually, my workstation right here.
We have a pie hole container. We have the slides we're looking at.
and we have a demo Vm. that uses… by whole DNS.
In fact, that's why. We've got the numbers up here.
13, 1,375 report queries so far, 127 blocked around 9%.
building a container. There is a thing called a… Compose file.
Notice that in this directory I have a compose file right here.
See, what tab is it on right here? I put the compose file in the presentation here so that if you want to, if you download the PDF, you can find it.
If you want, drop me a note. I'll be happy to send you a copy of it.
I want to make sure that you don't mistype anything.
A composed file is very simple. Remember, before I said that Docker is… has one function in life, and that's to provide a service.
There's one service in this compose file. pie hole that is a service involved.
So I'm going to like the compose file for Jitsi had like 15 or 20.
Services, all defined in a single compose file. Each service.
Has a name. as an image.
We've talked about this in the past. The restart allows you to control what happens if.
You lose power, our systems reset, or whatever. In this case, this container will always restart.
Upon boot up. Unless you… it was physically stopped at the time.
post name. Here's the 3 port definitions. DNS can be either TCP or UDP.
and then port 80, then, for the admin console.
Here's the environment.
time zone central web web password change me, which I didn't bother to change.
and FTL conf. FTL is the.
Name that they use internally in Pihole. and we have 2 upstream servers of 5.
1.1 9.9.
I forget which is which. I think 1.1 is Cloudflare. 9.9 is one of the other major providers, if I remember correctly.
What did FTL stand for? I even think it was faster than light, but that's the name that PIHO uses for his services. Right.
Sometimes you need to keep data between. container boots.
in which… in which case you mount a local volume.
to the container.
So the container container is on the the left.
the… system is on the right.
our our vice versa. So there's 2 actual directories.
in the directory where the container runs. Here's scdnsmask.d and Etsyhole.
Miss Dns mask. nearby home.
And if we and if we look in the container.
You would see the exact same thing in Etsy slash piho.
Where's my container?
Here's Etsy pie hole directory. in the container.
and I see what was the other one? The other one was Dns masks.
and here's Gina's mask up here. you guys may ask that D.
and there's the 2 files we just saw on a host.
In the directory. Okay, cool.
So that's the Docker compose in a nutshell. If you want to run it.
Docker command. Compose. We'll look for the docker compose file in the current directory.
Up is the command up. and minus D.
means convert to a demon. In other words, once you will not see any standard out will not go to the console and the container will just start itself.
And then it will run in the background. and that is how.
I started a container here 3 hours ago.
Okay.
One of the problems I did find this afternoon.
Is the permissions were wrong. on.
the buying mouse. come to find come to find out there was an SE Linux problem.
as sclinux is the the favorite tool everybody wants to hate.
In the Docker world. by putting a colon Z on the end of the mount.
volume, volume mount.
a capital Z. Means keep the volumes private.
and only this container should use it.
Notice that I have lowercase Z's on these volumes.
And that's the opposite case.
It's that volume can be shared. amongst anyone.
or any container.
and you were joking that… People hate this because of SC Linux. No, people hate SE Linux, because when something breaks, you never know what it is. Okay.
Just as an aside.
Whenever I said, whenever I have a weird problem on the server, the first thing I do is look for SE Linux.
can't enforce.
Okay, we talked about starting at a composed file.
And again, that compose file is. What would you… what we were just looking at?
If you name it docker-compose.yaml. Then you don't have to get. You don't have to give compose a file name.
It will assume that that is a file name in the current directory where the command is issued.
We mentioned the dashboard. This shows all the information about.
you know, a pie hole? It is… You know, if query log, we've got, this is just everything in the last three hours.
and there is only one system using the pie hole for the last 3 h.
and it has come up with 18 pages of crust.
and you can probably guess who guess who it is by looking at that page.
That is my ancient Windows 10 Vm. and he has just been farting around looking for.
Oh. updates, probably.
Yeah, he's doing updates.
Of course, I I haven't booted it in probably a year.
That's the only way around windows in the Vm.
Yeah. Speaking of windows… When I create my Windows VM, I have one.
I don't like it, but… I give it eight gig of memory. Is that enough to run a Windows VM?
Yeah, most of the time.
Okay.
If you want decent performance out of it, though, but you might want to go to 16.
No. That'd be the whole computer.
Okay, the dashboard has query logs. Domains that were blocked, see if we can see how I can find that real quick.
Uh… We lost…
Hmm.
No, I'm not. I'm not sure.
I will come back to query log one.
Okay, we're in the status column. block, and then it says gravity in parentheses.
Gravity is the source of the blacklist.
Yeah, remember there we. Uh, see, there's… 80, 82,000 domains on the ad list. There are many different ad lists that are used.
or that pile uses to decide what to block. Okay.
So that when you 1st start this out, you have to choose.
No, it's it's all built in. Okay, okay. It just so happens those 1st 2 were found in the gravity list because I'm looking down further now, and there's other ones that are came from other places. Okay.
Yeah, I see. Oh, that might have been. Yeah, that was the oldest page.
That was some of the first the 1st cruft that threw out.
Although… I'm surprised that the.
list of block domains isn't isn't up here. because this is domain management.
That allows you to whitelist, I'm assuming.
got domain to be added. Project.
Okay.
Remember, we've got a VM with a browser. We've got the pie hole.
container that is running pihole. Which passes the query upstream to 1.1 or 9.9.
and then the reply comes back and gives you a valid IP address.
This is the part I haven't looked at yet.
Friday thirteenth adds pop-ups, trackers, autoplay junk. Oh, speaking of which I was going to try.
YouTube.
Notice the DNS server configured here. which is my workstation where the port 53 is.
Damn it.
Is it nice to have no ad pop-ups on the on the home page? Yeah.
All right. We talked about containers. I would challenge anyone.
to get familiar with it. There are a lot of gotchas.
I can pass along a hint ChatGPT 5.5 is pretty good about debugging.
Okay. In fact, that's that's how I got the Jitsi server running this last week.
I actually did find a problem. There are various utilities that could be.
bound to port 53. If you have a problem, look for some system D resolver possibly.
which are which is basically a DNS forwarder. Dns mask.
is actually what the pile uses.
and name D, obviously, since that is actually a server.
One of the best advantages of using something like a pie hole as your DNS server.
is that you get to trap all. devices on the network.
I'm just using the one Vm here, which is still humping Windows 10 updates.
But you know, as we saw, there are…
153… Dns queries that have been blocked.
Just in the Windows update cycle.
In addition, yeah, go ahead.
Have you noticed how many major PC companies are switching over to default to some version of Linux?
No, they're not switching over, they are making it available as an option.
Actually… I was reading something yesterday that said Dell, if you don't say anything, you get… Linux, I forget which version they use, but… If you want to pay a little extra money, you can have windows.
And I think HP is doing the same thing.
That's, that's on certain models that they give you the option is what it amounts to.
And it's generally the lower-priced units because those are the ones that they can build without the.
TPM or TMP version 2 chip and all that kind of stuff.
TPM. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you can… I'm not sure it's a TPM, but.
When I got my… when I got a new laptop last fall, I actually had to replace the Wi-Fi chip in it.
Because the one that came with it was built for Windows, and it wasn't standard hardware.
and there was no Linux driver for it. So I spent 20 bucks for an Intel chip, dropped it in there, and they're at a problem.
Now, when you say dropped it in. Explain that a little bit.
I think… the laptop.
I dropped in the laptop.
Write the keyboard off. pry the keyboard off.
Yeah, I know what you said.
No, in this case, and in this case, it was a back panel. Depends on the hardware.
Okay.
But the point I was making is. Dell and HP aren't going to offer Linux on their cheapy stuff.
Because they don't want to spend the extra 15 bucks a unit to put in hardware that's guaranteed to be compatible.
Wait a minute, say that again?
I said, I don't think Dell or Hp. Is going to offer Linux on their cheapy models.
Because to guarantee the Linux work on the cheapy model, they're going to have to spend an extra 10, 15, 20 bucks for hardware that doesn't require.
a Windows driver that's actually the program to run the hardware.
Because what I… what I was reading, it says that's exactly the ones they were going to do it on.
There's not much money in a cheap laptop, not much profit for Dell or HP.
And if you take out the cost of the… Windows software, which is not free.
They make more money. The other thing that they were saying is they get so many fewer.
A customer calls, because when Windows 11 doesn't want to work.
The computer manufacturer has to field that… those calls don't go to Microsoft, they go to HP or whatever.
And apparently that's a significant savings.
Good point. I'm surprised by the low end models, though, because there is so much croft.
I don't know.
Especially Wi-Fi drivers on laptops. You know, if it's the El Cheapo version.
is not going to use a standard driver. It's going to have to use a Windows driver which actually downloads the executable code into the chip.
When you boot it.
Because that that's that's the way I figured it out on my vivo book.
Hmm.
Jackson, you know, it actually has the same Cpu as my main workstation does, so 1010 core i9.
Yeah, go ahead.
Man, yeah. Oh, I guess I have a question about well.
in one environment, uh, also that pie hole could run in, can we could it work in the terminal on on windows?
Uh… I don't know if there is a Windows version.
Let me check. Okay. Oh.
I'm thinking you might, you might be able to run a container under Wizzle. Anybody? Any of you guys that get stuck in the Windows world know if that's possible?
Say that again?
He was asking if he could run pi hole on Windows.
Oh, uh…
and I don't know if there's a Windows version out there, but I was wondering if you can run containers in Wizzle on windows.
Yes, yes, I do it. I actually build my containers at work on my work laptop in the WSL.
Okay.
It's the only way it actually works.
Interesting.
Okay, cool. Because I've been I've been learning a little bit about, you know, Vms a little bit. But I guess I was kind of wondering how I could.
Um… You know, get it to work where it's still… Uh, on Windows, that way I don't, like, maybe have to, uh, you know, fire up the virtual machine along with it, or… If I'd have to do my browsing on the virtual machine, or… I was just thinking about it, and just wondered.
Yeah, well, technically, then you would use Windows Subsystem for Linux.
You'll run Docker there and run the container there, figure out your bindings, and then every time you start a laptop, it would bring up the container.
Oh. Okay.
Can you use that for your Dns server?
Okay, yeah, that's awesome. That sounds… hold on. Sounds like worth learning how to do that, yeah.
Well, thank you.
Yeah. Maybe if somebody wants to do that from the Windows world, maybe we do a base in the future. Yeah, yeah.
But that means I have to install Windows.
Well, can you run Wizzle on in a VM?
You know, in a Windows video. Say again.
Whistle is a VM. Whistle is a VM.
No, no, I'm saying, can you run it in a Windows VM?
Maybe…
I think he means a VM… Running Windows.
Maybe.
Yeah. In other words, I I don't have any hardware with windows on it.
Yeah. Nope.
No.
and it'd be nice if I could take one of, you know, one of the Vms I've got.
because the main issue is. There are very few containers that, in fact.
Tyler, what what is the container world for windows?
I've never looked at it.
about like Minikube or like just Docker running in WSL?
No, I'm saying are is there such a thing as a Docker container that'll run natively on windows?
No, I think it all says install WSLN.
Okay, that that's what I thought, because. You know, many, many years ago.
One of my clients wanted… to go to a SQL server.
And unfortunately, since they run Microsoft, it had to be Microsoft SQL Server.
and I found the SQL Server container, which is the you know, stripped down version. You don't have. I guess it's equivalent of express. It's free.
So I dropped a SQL Server container on the Linux server, and everybody in the office uses it for their application.
Yeah, about 10 years ago I did a couple presentations on it.
Some other features, smart TVs are terror are terrible.
constantly phone home, send telemetry, generate massive DNS traffic.
That's one of the reasons I I hate the fact that I bought a Samsung or Jim or.
Joey bought me a Samsung. Six years ago. Biden.
That's where I spent my COVID check on. Oh!
Why are you plugging your TV into the internet?
Because sometimes you need it.
Go buy Android box and plug that in at least it knows if you don't like it, you'll yank it off and tell it to.
Pitch it in the trash.
Hmm.
Oh. Yeah, Windows telemetry. You saw all of the Microsoft cruft and the query query log here.
All right. which I mentioned whitelist. You know, there is a whitelist here for.
domains. You can add anything you want.
Add to blacklist or add to whitelist.
Security considerations. You never want to expose a pie hole publicly.
You want to add in password on it, update the containers, backup persistent volumes.
Remember, we were talking about persistent volumes. Those are the 2 directories here.
Etsy DNSmask.d, and etc pi hole. That's what you want to back up.
When we talk about. persistent volumes.
Makes sense.
And why are you backing him up?
If you want to be able to recover the pie hole.
In other words, after you've used it for 4 or 5 years, you may have.
Okay.
a big whitelist of domains and configuration information, etc.
If you… Back up those persistent volumes.
that we talked about before. Remember, these are the 2 physical volumes on the host.
that the container uses to store its configuration information that would survive a restart.
Okay, thank you.
Did that work for you, Stan? you know. Remember, containers are static.
You cannot change a container. You could add to it when it's running.
But as soon as you stop it and restart it, whatever you've added is is is gone.
you know, because what what you're adding to running container is ephemeral.
Now, there are ways to save it. One of those ways to persist the information from one instance to the next, or from one boot to the next.
is to save it in a directory that's actually on the host instead of in the container.
You know, these these directories are not part of the container file system.
So that when you restart the container, it knows to look for these 2 directories on the host.
and adds them into the container. And let's see… where can I continue? Right here.
you know, they are right here. This is physically in the container.
And those two directories are mine mounted here into the container.
whenever the container boots because they are configured here.
in the Docker compose.
Okay. Okay. cleared his mind right man still catching.
got me in the right direction.
All right. If you want to play around all kinds of different stuff you can do.
I'm going to be doing some Kubernetes stuff here later on, because.
I got two different projects. One of them is a full AI implementation, the other is a Raspberry Pi implementation that runs Kubernetes.
Podman is a little bit different manager than Docker.
I can't tell you the difference between them. Podman basically came from red hat doctor.
You know, they did their… did their own thing, but it has some advantages over Docker. But again, it's.
Not totally in the public domain, the way I understand it.
All right. If you run containers, obviously, you can run more than one, two, three, four, whatever you need.
Each one I'm going to have a different IP, so you can have… 2, 3, 4 Dns servers as pie holes on your network.
with one host.
alternative blocking, extracns. All right. Lessons we've learned.
DNS is critical infrastructure. You don't have to take my word for it.
point point any system at a DNS server that is down, and you're not going anywhere.
The flip side of that is kiss rules. Keep it so keep it simple.
Visibility changes everything. Here we're talking about the fact that.
If those ad blockers can see you, in other words, if you're visible to them.
then you're tracking information, and any information that is gathered as you pass through sites on the internet.
can be collected and sold.
The bottom line here, can doing it in a container.
makes the deployment trivial. Assuming you have a Linux host or run it in Windows system for Linux.
Final thought, if you don't control a DNS, you don't control your network.
All right. Questions.
This is Stan. Say you got cousin Willie and he's got a Windows machine.
And you've got him running things like, uh… unit… Origin or privacy badger and stuff like that. What's the advantage over a pie hole, and how much do you have to do to get him to use a pie hole?
And just, you know, and he… You know, can you just have him buy a pie machine and install it on there and he's got to buy a cable to make a sort of a network to it?
No, what what in that case, what I would recommend is buy yourself a pie and a case.
burn a chip, put it in there, set the IPs for his network, send them the Pi, a cable, and his power… and a power supply.
and then remote into his machine, or walk him through changing his DNS server to the IP on the Pi.
And that… and for him, what's the real advantage of pie hole over.
The other stuff these installed. In a nutshell.
Compared to Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin and things like that.
So… With uBlock and Privacy Browser, you're limited to just the browser.
If anything else on the computer goes to look something up.
You block origin… Brave privacy brat.
The Privacy Badger. can't get in the way.
By setting the… By putting the block at the DNS layer.
So, when it tries to go look up known bad domain, he… then it doesn't matter what it is. It's the DNS server that it's talking to it. If the network is set up properly, it's the only DNS server it can talk to.
I think basically you block origin does a great job.
But only on the browser that it's installed with.
Edinburgh.
So if you hook up your cell phone to the.
to the same network, uh… then you're not going to have the protection that you block origin is bringing to say Firefox. So that's the beauty of the pie hole is it protects everything that goes through the network.
If I understand it correctly.
Yeah, that's true. In fact, normally what you would do.
is build your Raspberry Pi, send it to send it to Norm, or not not Norm, or Stan's.
Billy. Cousin Willie.
Willie? And then walk him through logging into his router.
Go into DHCP. and set the DNS server for DHCP to the IP address of the pie hole.
And that way everybody on the network that gets a DHCP address would have the pi hole as the Dns server.
for every device on the network. including your smart TV, your phones, your Wi-Fi, etc.
Thank you.
Certainly.
All right. Anybody else?
I was just going to add comment to Stan.
If you decide to do that, just remember your cousin Willie.
Whenever his computer will not get onto the internet, for whatever reason.
You hear me calling you?
They'll be calling you.
Who else is he gonna call, right? Right.
That's right.
He probably does that anyway.
So Gary, you want to put a book in on here and then we continue on with Q&A and discussion or why do I get the feeling that Phil has a cousin, Willie?
I always like to to let the rain recording going. Sometimes we get some good good.
Good question. I mean, if anybody has any questions specific to tonight's topic, by all means, ask them now. But.
Every farmer. Audre Whitaker Jr. Had lost her mind by the next morning.
And sorry about that. I think somebody might's mic was open.
Dave again. That was Steve.
Oh, you got them, Ken? Okay. Alrighty.
So so yeah, definitely everybody go ahead and ask questions or make comments about tonight's material and.
If you don't hear anybody else talking about tonight, feel free to.
Make comments or ask questions about other. things in the world of.
open standards. Okay.
on our discuss mailing list? Is that what you're saying?
of of. Sure, go ahead and chat about it. Go ahead. Go with it, Sam.
I'm asking, I missed that a blurb where I missed something you said. Sorry!
Oh, I just said that if you don't have to keep your question specific to tonight's topic.
If people don't have anything specific to what Lee was just talking about, you can go ahead and broaden it out to general Q&A.
I was just going to make a comment. Um, on my desktop.
I run L Ubuntu and. Yeah, yeah, I know it's not as good as Susilee.
And I run Brave Browser, and I've never bothered to set anything up on Braze, I just, you know, out of the box, turn it on.
And I don't get the ads. They're just not there.
That's brave browsers basically set up with uBlock origin slash.
No. I'm sorry?
A brave browser? is set up by default with some of the best ad blocking tech in there.
Yes, sir.
built in. You actually have to go turn it off.
Yeah. Yeah. What? Well, okay.
I believe it's under the brave shields.
Yeah, I have turned it off for a couple of websites, you know, but… I have noticed that if I run Brave on my phone.
Oh, God. I mean, I've just given up using a browser on my phone. It's pointless.
You know.
I think that… I think that's because the application stores, like the Android store and the Apple Store won't let things that have ad blockers through, basically. That's my understanding.
Well, that could very well be.
But if you let ad walkers through the Apple Store, the Android store won't let you on.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Well, I have hang on, I can tell you for certain that when I install Firefox on my phone, the first thing I do is go out there and get you block and no script.
and all my standard extensions. Because they don't come on the browser for on the from the Google Play Store, but you can install them.
Well, I wonder about the Brave browser there. Could it be that they've taken them out, or could they just have it turned off, Tyler?
It could be that they're just turned off, but it's very possible that, you know.
To put it bluntly, Google's not a search engine company.
Not at work.
Our ad company. Google is an ad company with a whole bunch of expensive hobbies.
Oh, yeah, no question about it.
So… so them using allowing through their. store a product that blocks their main method of making money?
is…
How should I put it? Counterproductive.
Stupid?
Shooting themselves in the foot.
Yeah, I understand. And from your viewpoint, but I don't give a rat… about their viewpoint.
You're not going to press your boss.
But I wonder… I'll check with ChatGPT and see if it's possible to turn some of that stuff back on.
I misunderstood you, Steve. I thought you were saying that.
possible. Um…
When you ran Brave on your phone. the.
It was so tightened down that you don't get any response.
No, um, websites and things come up, but the amount of ads you get.
And of course, the thing jumps to Facebook once every 5 or 10 minutes.
That's not right.
And I love Facebook software.
That's not right. It sounds like you got something on your phone.
Well, that could be. It's an Android. It's an Android.
Using Android or, uh, iOS?
It's a Samsung Galaxy 15, maybe? Does that make sense?
I got a lot of volume. You might try mole browser.
And it comes with uBlock Origin already built in. Get it F droid.
dot com or .org f droid. dot com.
It's called the Mull Browser. No ads. Nothing.
Interesting. Yeah, I mean… When I run Brave on my desktop, it just… it's, you know, the world is quiet.
Yeah, I hate.
Yeah, but…
Oh, what?
Or is if the person on the website says, this is our sponsor today, and, you know, they'll go on for minutes, but… you know, I know who that is, and I can fast forward through it.
Or listen to them. Whatever.
Steve, before you do anything, go into your Brave settings and shield and make sure block ads and trackers is set to aggressive.
Okay. I'll have to figure out how to… I don't necessarily know how to do that on this postage stamp phone.
Oh, it's got to be hamburger on there somewhere.
Screen. Well, you would think.
There isn't. There isn't Firefox on the top right.
Yeah, here's a couple of dots.
Settings… Brave Shields, let's see what happens there.
Okay.
Shields and privacy.
It's Firefox, but that's who. Yeah. Firefox on Firefox. There's 4 vertical dots in the top right, and that takes you to settings and the rest of the rest of what you need.
Well, the thing…
On my Android, it's on the bottom right, there's a… The three dots in settings, and it's right there at the very beginning.
have the brave shields.
Yeah, I found the Brave Shields… What is auto-redirect AMP pages?
Don't move.
AMP is Google's attempt at bandwidth saving. When 2G and 3G were the norm.
So, instead of getting the actual page from… The website, the… Uh, the Android… Uh, browser would go out and ask Google to retrieve the page, and then.
Dumb it down to reduce bandwidth. Utilization.
Hmm.
So.
Well, I turned a bunch of stuff off here. Let's see what happens.
Yeah. It also would help if I could spell.
That's what that sixth grade teacher was telling me.
Yeah, that would help.
Does anybody have any experience with specific block lists that they like?
Are we all just not doing this?
Yep, here we go. YouTube, and the first thing I see is some doctor selling some goddamn… stuff.
Oh yeah. Are you in the Brave browser or did it kick over to YouTube itself?
Well, I started the Brave browser, and then I went to YouTube.
Right, but sometimes the browser understands that you may have a…
native app for it, and it boots up that…
No, I don't think I have that.
I'll play with it. Sometime.
But, Tyler, your point is well taken. But if I actually want to do some browsing, I will generally.
go to my desktop computer. I much prefer a big screen anyway.
Yeah, that's where I do 90% of my stuff unless it's… my audiobooks and that runs on my phone because I'm buying them through Audible.
Yeah, I've got, uh, I've got, um… books I read on my phone.
But, you know, they don't… they don't use… they don't use a browser at all. I mean, I download them from Amazon and.
done, they work offline.
Until Amazon says no but you know that's that's the only with Amazon publishing.
Pardon? Yeah. No, that works great.
So, Lee, what are you using to run… containers and Kubernetes.
Uh, rancher.
I'm working trying to get through Talos OS. I got it running on four mini PCs tied together.
Okay.
Um, the list of devices it's supposed to run on include this.
SBC called a orange pie. It actually has a, uh… On the back it has a… NVMe slot, but I can't get the damn thing to boot to that.
Something's not updated, right?
Yeah, sorry. Actually, my cluster is.
L. 34 51 small form factors with a 6 core Xeon in a 3 and a half gigahertz.
And I got… I got 3 of them, so that gives me 36 cores, and… 256 gate.
Don't say that out loud. Somebody might come and raid you.
terabyte of memory.
It's not like I have 128GB sitting in the Dell 720 back there that runs all my disks.
Yeah, when I… winter.
I don't know exactly what model they are, but the IBM Think Centers. I got them because they actually have a PCIe slot that you can get an adapter card to put a… low form factor… PCIe card. Can't put the the standard riser on it, but if you take that.
that off you can at least get it plugged in and then you know… GM something non-conductive in there to keep it from coming out of the slot.
The biggest problem I keep on running into is that.
Yeah.
couple of my loads I need GPUs for and um… When the OS is a API, things get squirrely.
Let's see if I can actually go pop up.
Now that button.
A sad question, Lee. I've heard you say in the past you've collected thousands of.
Yeah.
bad sites and so forth. Did you pass that collection into the Raspberry Pi, or the Pi Hole?
No, that's that that that's on our mail servers.
like 170,000 at this point. Plus, they got a list of about 50 class C's.
And what?
If I see if I see more than 4.
Ips in a single class CI block or whole class C is the provider doing their due diligence.
And… And where are you blocking that in the host file, or what?
No, in the access file for postfix.
Oh, okay. That was my question. Thank you.
Sure.
Over.
Yeah, Lee, I was going to mention that when you were talking earlier about having that incompatible Wi-Fi chip in that laptop.
There's a guy over on Github. I put it in the chat.
And he has a list of a whole bunch of USB sticks.
That their firmware or whatever has been submitted and is.
currently in the kernel. So, you know, in other words, if you buy one with that chipset or whatever, it should just run with no problem, you know, on Linux.
Yeah. No. And there's a lot of them out there. But the problem is sometimes a vendor goes cheap.
Yeah.
and they want to save 10 bucks on the hardware, and they use one of the stupid windows only.
hardware devices like the Wi-Fi chip in my laptop.
that can't run under Linux, because there's no code in the chip that gets to ask it and has to download on every boot from the driver.
Yeah, well, these are… I thought of having one of those, or whatever.
hanging around just as like an emergency backup. Somebody brings a machine over and you're wanting to try to either put Linux on it or.
Ah, okay, yeah, I I I see where you're going. Yeah, that that's a good point.
Just see if it works. You know… Yeah, and the other thing, too, is even though he's talking about USB sticks, he does talk about the chipsets in them.
And, you know, if the chips are in the kernel, and it's conceivable that they could come up with a you know, many Pcie.
card for a laptop, also.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, I I just threw my, uh… access list.
I don't know how many lines we got here, but this is all the class C that I've collected over the last few years.
and you do a WC on it.
In Vim, you just do a shift or control gene, it would take you to the bottom and then you'd see the count.
Yeah, but I got blank… I got blank lines in there.
Oh, oh, oh.
580. What's the 71 and 88 Phil? Do you remember?
I think 71 is the number of lines. I think 88 might be either the number of words, maybe?
or 1180 might be the number. Well, I think 1180 is the number of characters, maybe.
Yeah. So I… and see.
It's line 24. 67 lines. So yeah, it's probably about 35.
Or probably 30. Yeah, because some of them are blocked contiguous blocks.
like the like. Yeah.
That's the whole domains, this slash 24.
Yeah, sure, they're all flash 24s.
Yeah. And like I say, my role is, if I see 4 Ips in a Class C, I block the whole class C.
Because that means the provider doesn't give a damn.
God bless you.
Okay, well, people are thinking of other questions apropos to tonight's talk. I'm going to drift off to a different.
area or different topic. Android. Oh.
I just added some. micro SD into an Android, and that freed up space and moved moved the.
application files over to this to the micro SD.
Pardon me. Turn that off. Um… But the I now have the option of utilizing the original internal.
Memory on the chip or on the phone, 64 gig.
Uh, and I could… take some of that memory and apply it to being used.
As memory for the operating system. So it suggests 1, 2, or 3 gigabytes.
My first thought is, it's great. If I do that, then I need to get some of that internal memory back on the.
phone itself, how difficult is it to get back that three gigabytes of memory that I've now allocated to the OS?
When you say memory, do you mean RAM or storage?
Is it true? Ram.
Well, on a cell phone, yeah, it's like… What it's offering is now that I have moved.
moved some of the application stuff off. The internal storage.
It's offering to use that internal storage as as RAM for the OS.
allowed some of it to be used. It's suggesting 1, 2, or 3 gigabytes.
Huh. with the promise that it'll improve the speed.
I don't believe you.
No, you mean you don't believe the phone. And I'm sure Gary, you know, it doesn't have a clue.
I don't believe it.
I mean, you know, my my first guess would be. Okay, fine. If you.
If you. go into the settings after you've done that, let's say I give it 3 gigabytes of what used to be.
internal storage, turn that over to to be used as.
as RAM for the for the OS. I should be able to go back into the settings, I would think.
and reclaim one, two or three of those gigabytes, I probably would have to power cycle the phone.
Shut it down, and when it would come back up it would.
It would realize it can't use that for internal store or for, uh… Ram or anyone.
Okay, nobody's got the experience. going to be doing more research. It was something I just stumbled on this afternoon, so haven't had a chance to research it yet.
Hmm.
Like I said, I don't believe you.
Thank the guy at the phone store lied to you.
It wasn't even a human. It was a smart-ass phone all on its own, suggested it.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
In case anybody's interested, I put the link that alternative2.net.
About Pyle tells a different, uh… was out there, like, AdGuard. I think that's relatively popular.
And then, uh, I think I showed Tyler's one Tyler uses in there, too.
I understand that last part. He said, what about Tyler uses that too?
Uh, I think he's using a tech medium. DNS server?
Is that right, Tyler?
I thought he said something about that earlier.
guessing Tyler must have stepped away from his box for a moment. He's still logged in, but.
Yeah, I think he didn't realize he's muted.
Somebody keeps on muting me stop that!
I'm about 42…
Yeah, I'm working with Technetium because it's… where pie hole comes from the… The position of I want to block stuff and then I tack on it.
DNS on to that technician is… technitium looks like it's more of, I need a DNS server.
full-blown DNS server that I can configure via web and is… Not aurora pain.
Now I'm going to attack ad blocking onto that.
I actually had an interesting conversation. Monday afternoon with some guys from Boeing.
Um… Do you guys use to check and make sure that your certificates are getting renewed?
Were you got any of you guys actually do that?
When the box stopped working, they didn't get renewed.
all we all I use around here is let's encrypt search, and that's automated.
Right. So none of you actually have something watching that certificate and making sure it never gets or never expires?
Well, the I watched the certificate with an Agios check to make sure it's still good.
And then there's a cron job that runs. I don't know if it was daily or weekly.
that if it's over 60, if you get. If you hit 60 days, it renews it.
Lars. to jump ship their Boeing and apply to… what they call… Network integration engineer.
But it was really… the job is to manage… Sounds like an enterprise version of… Unify.
pushes out policies and patches to routers and switches within the network.
Hmm.
They had a guy retire and since I'm looking to jump ship off of Siemens, because… I gave them a year.
They haven't talked to me at all about where.
I'm going personally.
And I started throwing… resumes are boring because they had that.
new fighter jet that they're building down by. The Saint Louis airport.
No, I think they're doing the trainer over there.
All the trainers over there too. I've thrown my resume at… I've literally had.
The resume version of the money gun pointed at every job that says Python in it, and I'm like… And you're going, will any of you respond?
I think you should zoom right now.
But these guys finally did, and I'm like… Sounds simpler than the identity management.
platform that I just or I currently manage that's supposed to die.
management ever gets around to actually, you know. spending money…
Watch your language.
They actually asked me what was my greatest weakness? I'm like Epic downtime.
I literally just can't get over shutting down a system to cause pain.
Because the person who wants to write the check is an.
In better terms than that, but…
Ready to shut her down
Well, questions and comments seem to be slowing down.
For those who
applied lately
What's the general accepted, I'm annoying you about a job
Right, that you guys usually do
Once a week, twice a week
Say it again, I didn't follow you.
How often
Have you gotten any response back from the company yet, or
You just sent in the resume and they haven't sent you anything back
A lot of them, it's just I've applied
Some of these
Well, these last two, I've actually interviewed once or twice
One, I got rejected
I was in the 70 percentile range of the map match, because
I don't have a credit card to
have a$ 12,000
fine hit against about
from Amazon for because an AI thought my website was tasty
I don't understand that
I didn't understand that either. I'm sorry.
the… there was a guy that woke up the other day, says, I put a$ 10 limit on my Google
Infrastructure
Woke up one day
Google had charged him$ 12,000 because an AI looked at his website that looks neat
It started
banging away at it
I half understand that
And why did that become a$ 12,000 charge?
As the AI generated so much traffic, it turned into$ 12,000.
Oh
Google did not shut down the service when when the charge hit the$ 1$ 10 it kept let it kept running and let the AI continue to munch on his website
Okay.
I'm like
I have this nice little firewall over here
And when AI decides it wants to bang on my door, I go
No, go away
And there's nothing for for the
Amazon or AWS to charge to
So, when the people say, do you have experience running
on AWS, I'm sitting here going
I've been going through the training
Work hasn't given me an account
Okay.
Well, how about a bookend, Gary
Yeah, I think
Unless somebody has a last minute objection, we're going to turn off the recording and start shutting down.
But thank you all very, very much for being here this evening. Good questions, good observations. Thank you to Lee for putting together an excellent presentation on
Subject we need to learn something about.
And thank you, Lee, for
or stretching it a little to make up for grants and ability to be here due to his work emergency
And thank you all for putting up with me being a little wordy to also stretch time a little bit at the beginning.
So
Anyway
By the way, for those of you, I'll put this as part of the bookend for those of you who were looking for the tutorial, the base on the front of this recording. There was none tonight because the presenter, Grant
Got a called at work for an emergency, and so he wasn't available to do the base tutorial at the beginning of this.
This was Wednesday, the 13th of May, 2026. It's the monthly general meeting of SLU, the Saint Louis Unix User Group. And our main speaker tonight, our only speaker tonight was Lee Lam
Omni tech and Lee was talking to us about
Well, pihole use of pie hole to capture all those annoying ads and stop
Stop those things be at us. It shouldn't be having.
Thank you very much, all.
And we will see you hopefully next Thursday. Stay tuned and watch the website, and we'll see what the topic will be for next Thursday, the St. Louis location. Good night.
Thank you all
Good night.