Wyatt Zacharias presented Terraform,
an open-source infrastructure-as-code tool maintained by HashiCorp,
used to automate deployment of compute resources.
Terraform provides a universal configuration language
that can define resources across many different platforms.
It offers stateful deployment to track and maintain deployed resources.
Additionally Terragrunt is an open-source wrapper tool maintained by Gruntworks,
which provides additional management features
and fills in feature gaps of the vanilla Terraform tool.
Wyatt has made his slides available in PPTX and PDF formats.
Adam Thompson discussed a UNIX-based solution to a
Microsoft Office 365 email problem,
allowing the arbitrary replacement of the sending domain,
in a way that preserves legitimate DKIM, SPF, etc. anti-spam features.
This involved using Postfix on a Debian Linux system,
and using Ansible to maintain and backup the configuration between
multiple server instances on a Cloud-based provider.
Adam has made his presentation slides, in
PPTX and
PDF format,
available online.
Kevin McGregor introduced PowerShell Core,
an open-source and cross-platform
(Windows, Linux, and macOS)
automation and configuration tool/framework
that works with your existing tools
and is optimized for dealing with structured data
(e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models.
It includes a command-line shell,
an associated scripting language
and a framework for processing cmdlets.
AGM
Plus, this month's meeting was the MUUG annual general meeting,
which included the election of the MUUG board of directors
for the 2019-2020 year (by acclamation).
UNIX turned 50 this past summer.
Gilbert Detillieux has worked with UNIX systems
for the last 40 of those 50 years.
In this not-too-technical presentation,
Gilbert took us through 5 decades of UNIX evolution
(with some personal reflections on the last 4 of those decades).
Folks came for the interesting trivia, and stayed for the philosophical musings!
Gilbert has made his presentation slides, in
PPTX and
PDF format,
available online.
UNIX Trivia!
Think you know a fair bit about early UNIX?
Or just want to learn some obscure trivia about it?
This quiz from a 1984 USENIX conference may be just for you...
(from the July 1984 ;login:)
Stumped? Here are the answers, but don't peek until you've at least tried...
(from the Sept 1984 ;login:)
Want an easier set of trivia questions?
Gilbert has made
his own list of questions available.
Answers will be provided next month,
but you should be able to find most of them online
(either directly or indirectly)
by following links in the presentation notes above.
As 2019 drew to a close,
MUUG continued our recent tradition of
turning the December meeting into more of a social event.
Winnipeg Harvest Food Drive
Also as in previous years,
we combined our pot luck with a food drive for
Winnipeg Harvest.
Cash donations were preferred this year as
for every $1 Winnipeg Harvest receives,
they are able to pick up and deliver $20 worth of groceries.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows the installation of
any of several different Linux distributions.
They all utilize the Windows kernel.
In this talk, we discussed the good (really easy to get started)
and the bad (where did X go?)
with an emphasis on several demonstrations of the software capabilities.
Michael Doob was the presenter.
Adam Thompson talked about the recent Debian updates to the MUUG server
that triggered a wave of unexpected upgrades and performance tweaks.
Special attention was paid to the ZFS filesystem
and Apache-to-Nginx conversion.
Other collaborators were introduced and their roles in this work described.
Adam has made his presentation slides, in
PPTX and
PDF format,
available online.
Troy Denton presented
FreeSWITCH,
"a Software-Defined Telecom Stack enabling the digital transformation
from proprietary telecom switches to a versatile software implementation
that runs on any commodity hardware.
From a Raspberry PI to a multi-core server,
FreeSWITCH can unlock the telecommunications potential of any device.
Combined with our hosted cloud platform, SignalWire,
FreeSWITCH can interconnect with the outside world and scale to any size."
In light of the current concerns over COVID-19 and the risk of infection,
and current directives from the
University of Winnipeg,
the MUUG board has decided to cancel the April 14th meeting.
The board will be looking into ways we can provide a remote, virtual meeting
for subsequent months,
as the current public health circumstances and meeting restrictions continue.
(Stay tuned for updates on future meetings.)
In light of the current concerns over COVID-19 and the risk of infection,
and current directives from the
University of Winnipeg,
the MUUG board has decided to try our first online meeting at 7:30pm!
Troy Denton demonstrated how you can build and deploy
Jitsi,
a secure video conferencing solution.
An added twist -- this exhibition was hosted on Jitsi...
to demonstrate Jitsi!
Troy has made his presentation slides, in
Google Docs format,
available online.
Simple Network Management Protocol
(SNMP)
is a widely used protocol for monitoring the health and
welfare of network equipment (e.g. routers),
computer equipment and even devices like UPS's.
Net-SNMP
is a suite of applications used to
implement SNMP v1, SNMP v2c and SNMP v3 using
both IPv4 and IPv6.
Adam Thompson demonstrated how to quickly set up the
Net-SNMP
daemon using the built-in configuration tools.
