February 2017 - Roundtable

new ECC computer options
by Trevor Cordes 04 Mar '17

04 Mar '17

I'm looking for input from anyone in the club who may be knowledgable, eyeballing, or has purchased a "workstation" system recently with ECC memory. (Note, ECC is imperative!) I don't need dual-socket, crazy speed, just something like a mid-range modern i7 with modern RAM, slots, etc. (i3 speeds won't cut it.) By "workstation" I mean it has to have at least one PCIe x16 (full 16 electrical) slot so it can have a good video card installed (and handle upgrades in the future). So some "servers" will qualify, although most do not have a true x16 slot (they'll say x16 but the small print will say x8 or x4 electrical), especially on the low end. I also need tower form factor, as rackmount will (unless 4U) be a pain to fit cards in, etc. Lastly, I really want a DIY setup where I buy the board, cpu, etc individually, though if a perfect premade system (i.e. Lenovo) exists that fits the bill I might consider it (must use no propreitary form factor parts, including mobo & PS). It's basically impossible since the discontinuation of the Intel D975 chipsets (nearly 10 years ago) to do Intel with ECC without buying a Xeon CPU. So I'm probably stuck buying a Xeon CPU and getting slower than i7 for double the price. Ugh. I'd really love to hear from the AMD nuts out there if there are any good AMD options, especially ones that are more enthusiast/desktop oriented rather than same-price-as-Xeon competitors. If I'm going to spend big bucks, I'll buy Intel: AMD needs to offer a compelling price advantage to pull me over. I still believe AMD could carve a niche for itself by offering desktop enthusiast chips / mobos with ECC at desktop, rather than server, prices. Maybe add $50 each to a mobo and cpu as the price premium. Not the 100% premium Intel wants just to get ECC. (I miss the old days when getting ECC was cheap/easy.) If AMD already has such a thing (I'm hoping!), great! I know I'm not the only one in the club interested in these answers. P.S. being a computer reseller, I don't need prices or store suggestions, I can just buy it all wholesale :-) It's the "this chipset plus that CPU" that I'm really looking for. Thanks!

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sawfish on wayland
by Trevor Cordes 23 Feb '17

23 Feb '17

I thought this might interest some MUUGers. This is mostly about Wayland in general, though my query was regarding "porting" sawfish (my favorite wm for 10+ years) to wayland (the replacement for X we're all soon going to have foisted upon us). The pasted posts below come from the sawfish mailing list, mostly from actual sawfish devs, and other interested parties. I wouldn't mind hearing a MUUG discussion about wayland, if people want to chime in. With wayland, it definitely won't be "business as usual". I have a question: is wayland just a linux thing, and if so, that means the BSDs will stick with X? I sure hope so, as that would mean X will stick around, even on Linux. Also, I now welcome mir (wayland competitor from Ubuntu), as keeping things fragmented on the replacement side will also keep people (who don't want wayland for any particular reason) in X. Weird... I can't seem to find any Linus comment on wayland anywhere. He wasn't silent about systemd, why wayland? ============ From: Trevor Cordes <sawfish(a)tecnopolis.ca> To: sawfish(a)lists.tuxfamily.org Subject: wayland support? Maybe this has been asked already, but I can't find it on google anywhere... Is work being done on making a "sawfish for wayland"? Since wayland doesn't access wm's like X does, it looks like "wm-like" things have to be rewritten and merged somehow into wayland. It sounds like enlightenment is already working in wayland, so I suppose it is possible. Please tell me we'll have sawfish for wayland? With the amount of customization I've done in sawfish during the last decade my productivity will go into the dumps if I have to throw it all away, especially if the replacements (enlightenment) can reproduce the same customizations. It looks like with Fedora 25 defaulting to wayland that in about 7-8 months when F24 goes EOL I'll be forced into wayland whether I like it or not. Even if (?) F25 allows you to switch to X (not X in wayland, but pure X-only), all the desktop apps will start to be developed and maintained with wayland in mind. That means even if I can stick with X for a couple of Fedora revs, the X versions of things will get buggier and no one on bz will care. Kind of like the 32-bit kernel today. If anyone has some insights into these things, I'd love to hear them! Anything to keep my hopes up. -- Signed: a happy X user that sees absolutely no value-add for wayland in his happy 2D-only sawfish life. ================== From: Jan Kasprzak <kas(a)fi.muni.cz> To: sawfish(a)lists.tuxfamily.org Subject: Re: [Sawfish] wayland support? Hello, Trevor Cordes wrote: : Is work being done on making a "sawfish for wayland"? Since wayland : doesn't access wm's like X does, it looks like "wm-like" things have to : be rewritten and merged somehow into wayland. : : It sounds like enlightenment is already working in wayland, so I : suppose it is possible. This is a question I wanted to ask for some time as well. GTK supports Wayland, but I am not sure about how WMs are supposed to work in Wayland. : It looks like with Fedora 25 defaulting to wayland that in about 7-8 : months when F24 goes EOL I'll be forced into wayland whether I like it : or not. Speaking as a Fedora 25 user: there is no problem with Sawfish (+XFCE, in my case) on Fedora 25. It apparently uses Wayland only for GNOME-only setups. My lightdm starts the X server and XFCE session just fine, as it did in previous releases. My F25 systems run Xorg just fine (including a dual-seat workstation at home). : Even if (?) F25 allows you to switch to X (not X in wayland, : but pure X-only), all the desktop apps will start to be developed and : maintained with wayland in mind. That means even if I can stick with : X for a couple of Fedora revs, the X versions of things will get : buggier and no one on bz will care. Kind of like the 32-bit kernel : today. I guess the biggest push would not be from desktops being developed for Wayland, but from drivers for newer hardware being developed for Wayland. It is not a problem yet, but I think it will be. : If anyone has some insights into these things, I'd love to hear them! : Anything to keep my hopes up. -- Signed: a happy X user that sees : absolutely no value-add for wayland in his happy 2D-only sawfish life. +1. -Yenya ============= From: "Robert 'Bobby' Zenz" <Robert.Zenz(a)bonsaimind.org> To: sawfish(a)lists.tuxfamily.org Subject: Re: [Sawfish] wayland support? The "problem" with Wayland is that it is just a protocol. So there is no such thing anymore as a window manager on Wayland, there are just different compositors which do *everything*, from providing drawing capabilities to handling input, configuration and windows. There are efforts to extract most of these into libraries, though, but with other downsides, for example libinput has a lot of hardcoded assumptions. I don't know if something like the Wayland-X bridge can be used, getting Sawfish "natively" on Wayland would require to write a complete compositor for Wayland, which for sure is neither trivial nor easy. Also I'd like to take the opportunity to remind everyone that X is going *nowhere* within the next two to three decades at least. I mean, it could happen that some people like Gnome drop support for it within the next years, but I hope that's not going to happen because that would be pretty fatal to the Linux application ecosystem as a whole (a friendly reminder that Mir *is* a thing, and currently there is only a Mir-X bridge). So I hope nobody is that stupid. My personal opinion on Wayland is quite bleak, actually. It feels like it is tailored towards a mobile environment in which no application is trustable, similar to the sandbox and all-in-one package movements which seem to endorse a "download some completely random application from the interwebs and don't worry when running it" mentality. Which is in extreme contrast to what has been pushed in the last decades, "you can trust any application you run as long as it is coming from the official repository". That means that a Wayland compositor must bring all the functionality which are currently provided by different tools, because nothing is allowed to temper with the compositor or other windows. Having a nice compositor would be cool, but Wayland comes, in my opinion, with a pretty hefty price tag. =========== From: Christopher Roy Bratusek <nano(a)jpberlin.de> To: sawfish(a)lists.tuxfamily.org Subject: Re: [Sawfish] wayland support? Hi folks, to put it plainly: there are no such plans. As Robby Zenz already said X isn't going anywhere, soon. Also we do not have enough man power or free time. ============ Lastly, from "Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2017 edition": Wayland: !! Wayland works through rasterization of pixels which brings about two very bad critical problems which will never be solved: Firstly, forget about performance/bandwidth efficient RDP protocol (it's already implemented but it works by sending the updates of large chunks of the screen, i.e. a lot like old highly inefficient VNC), forget about OpenGL pass through, forget about raw compressed video passthrough. In case you're interested all these features work in Microsoft's RDP. Secondly, forget about proper output rotation/scaling/ratio change. !! Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own fonts antialiasing - there's no API for setting system wide fonts rendering. What??! Most sane and advanced windowing systems work exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac OS X. In Wayland all clients (read applications) are totally independent. !! Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own DPI scaling. The above issues are actually the result of not having one unified graphical toolkit/API (and Wayland developers will not implement it). Alas, no one is currently working towards making existing toolkits share one common configuration for setting fonts antialiasing, DPI scaling and windows shadowing. At least in theory these issues can be easily solved, in practice we already have three independent toolkits for Wayland (GTK3/Qt5/Enlightenment).

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enterprise antivirus that supports a Linux *manager*
by Trevor Cordes 22 Feb '17

22 Feb '17

Followup to meeting discussion topic last night: Does anyone know of (or better yet, use) an enterprise-grade (i.e. for pay) (think Symantec Endpoint Protection - SEP) antivirus solution that allows the manager/server component to run on Linux? To be clear, many AV's (like SEP) support Linux as a *client*, managed by the central Windows-run manager. I need one that supports Linux as the *server* (with Windows clients). Oh ya, and no cloud-anything, not interested! Thanks! (If not, why not? Sounds like a good idea to me.)

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cheap Windows Servers?
by Trevor Cordes 22 Feb '17

22 Feb '17

Bit off topic, but if anyone knows, it's MUUGers... Does anyone know a source for cheap, older, *legit* Windows Server servers? I'm looking for something that includes the hardware and the O/S. Obviously to be legit the license would have to be OEM (with COA) or FPP (full retail box), and not corporate bulk/blanket licensing. The minimum O/S version level acceptable Windows Server 2008 64-bit or R2. I need the dirt cheapest solution, like dirt dirt cheapest. They can be beat up, low ram, junk cpu, etc; just has to work and be cheap. By cheap I mean like under $250. Surely Server 2008 is old enough now that the 2007-2010 level of hardware is basically only good for recycling now? Alternatively I could also use cheap used FPP copies of Server alone (no hw), which I think would be legit to buy used(?). Obviously OEM wouldn't be. <crosses fingers> Thanks!

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Reminder: MUUG Meeting, TONIGHT, 7:30pm -- Room 1L11, Lockhart Hall
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 21 Feb '17

21 Feb '17

*** Please note the updated meeting date and location below *** The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly meeting on Tuesday, February 21 (i.e TONIGHT). The meeting topic for this month is as follows: Daemon-Dash: vsftpd Wyatt Zacharias will present VSFTPD - the very secure FTP daemon. VSFTPD supports FTP and FTPS protocols, and boasts being one of the fastest and most secure FTP daemons available. Wyatt will demo running the daemon with both anonymous and authenticated modes, chroots, whitelists, and more. RTFM: Fixing drive sector SMART errors Ruh roh! Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], 5 Offline uncorrectable sectors. 7 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors. Those just flashed across your console. Is your hard drive dying? Panic time? Not so fast: Trevor Cordes will show you how to gracefully repair such errors, allowing you to delay or obviate RMAs or replacement drive purchases. The group usually holds its meetings at 7:30pm on the second Tuesday of every month from September to June. (There are no meetings in July and August.) Meetings are open to the general public; you don't have to be a MUUG member to attend. ****************************************************************** Please note our *NEW* meeting location for this month: *Room 1L11* Lockhart Hall, University of Winnipeg, entrance on Ellice Ave. between Spence St. and Balmoral St. Parking is available on the surrounding streets and in the lots on nearby streets. Look for signage once you're at the building, or ask a security guard. ****************************************************************** For more information about MUUG, and its monthly meetings, check out their web server: https://muug.ca/ Help us promote this month's meeting, by putting this poster up on your workplace bulletin board or other suitable public message board: https://muug.ca/meetings/MUUGmeeting.pdf -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

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Winkler Linux User Group
by John Funk 21 Feb '17

21 Feb '17

As was decided at the inaugural meeting, the Winkler Linux user group will be meeting on the 3rd Tuesday of each month so that we won't conflict with the MUUG meetings. This week we'll be looking at installing a storage solution for a small office/church. Meeting time: 7:15 Place: South Central Regional Library, Winkler Branch.

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Fwd: Open Source in Brazil - Growing Despite Barriers
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 14 Feb '17

14 Feb '17

FYI, in case this is of interest to any of you... Gilbert -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Open Source in Brazil - Growing Despite Barriers Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 11:15:09 -0800 From: Rachel Roumeliotis, O'Reilly Media <oreilly(a)post.oreilly.com> O'Reilly Media Explore the country's open source community <http://post.oreilly.com/rd/9z1zfr23lhcbs293iv4lpun5gfsri47sb3pirp58jm8> Battered by a host of problems in recent years, Brazil still remains the most vibrant Latin American economy. With its strong extractive, manufacturing, and service industries, IT in Brazil is booming. Tech startups are springing to life and organizations everywhere are seeking to digitally transform their operations. And in spite of many obstacles, the use of free and open source software continues to proliferate. Open source advocates have turned to grassroots means of promoting open source software—rather than relying on government support—while hackers are creating meetups and other spaces for collaboration and training. As a result, open source is everywhere: business, education, and industry. We invite you to have a free copy of Andy Oram's 28-page report on /Open Source in Brazil/ <http://post.oreilly.com/rd/9z1znq11mcjmtf0tdpo1ktism38rucaiteis11l7gsg>. You'll see how the adoption of open source software continues to spread to businesses, education, and more, under even the most challenging situations. Get your free ebook → <http://post.oreilly.com/rd/9z1zj2epgd5edgh7rc8puot7npmmk9ncvglh1teri4g> Cheers! Rachel Roumeliotis Strategic Content Director, Programming P.S. Learn more about open source collaboration and community at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention <http://post.oreilly.com/rd/9z1zpr7oejbjcpanllfhka1u5csnt7637malgvs51p0> (OSCON) happening May 8–11, 2017 in Austin, TX. Learn useful skills, languages, and best practices and see how open source technologies fuel today's software and business systems. ... Did someone forward this to you? *Sign up here* <http://post.oreilly.com/rd/9z1zc82mv50fnep7tqbiq62auk70fvuso2pfhip4p2o>. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add *oreilly(a)post.oreilly.com* <mailto:oreilly@post.oreilly.com> to your address book. O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 (707) 827-7000 -- Manitoba UNIX User Group E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.ca> c/o Gilbert E. Detillieux Web: http://muug.ca/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

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MUUG Meeting, Feb 21, 7:30pm (date change) -- Room 1L11, Lockhart Hall
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 07 Feb '17

07 Feb '17

*** Please note the updated meeting date and location below *** The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly meeting on Tuesday, February 21 (note date change). The meeting topic for this month is as follows: Daemon-Dash: vsftpd Wyatt Zacharias will present VSFTPD - the very secure FTP daemon. VSFTPD supports FTP and FTPS protocols, and boasts being one of the fastest and most secure FTP daemons available. Wyatt will demo running the daemon with both anonymous and authenticated modes, chroots, whitelists, and more. RTFM: Fixing drive sector SMART errors Ruh roh! Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], 5 Offline uncorrectable sectors. 7 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors. Those just flashed across your console. Is your hard drive dying? Panic time? Not so fast: Trevor Cordes will show you how to gracefully repair such errors, allowing you to delay or obviate RMAs or replacement drive purchases. The group usually holds its meetings at 7:30pm on the second Tuesday of every month from September to June. (There are no meetings in July and August.) Meetings are open to the general public; you don't have to be a MUUG member to attend. ****************************************************************** Please note our *NEW* meeting location for this month: *Room 1L11* Lockhart Hall, University of Winnipeg, entrance on Ellice Ave. between Spence St. and Balmoral St. Parking is available on the surrounding streets and in the lots on nearby streets. Look for signage once you're at the building, or ask a security guard. ****************************************************************** For more information about MUUG, and its monthly meetings, check out their web server: https://muug.ca/ Help us promote this month's meeting, by putting this poster up on your workplace bulletin board or other suitable public message board: https://muug.ca/meetings/MUUGmeeting.pdf -- Manitoba UNIX User Group E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.ca> c/o Gilbert E. Detillieux Web: http://muug.ca/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

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limited Linux Desktop?
by Grigory Shamov 06 Feb '17

06 Feb '17

Hi All, That is perhaps a naive question. I have never had much tho do with desktops. Now, we offer remote Linux desktop (Gnome mostly) to users with x2go. Is there a way to configure GNOME (or another) desktop somehow locked to the particular users and perhaps even particular apps? I.e., so that any Filemanager would stay under selected paths the user has access to? Access itself is not a problem, as it is controlled by UNIX groups, but just browsing say /home with a few thousand user directories gets slow and disk/CPU-intensive. (Or perhaps the way would be to auto mount users, but thats a rather big change for the rest of the system too) -- Grigory Shamov Westgrid/ComputeCanada Site Lead University of Manitoba E2-588 EITC Building, (204) 474-9625

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ls auto-quote rant
by Trevor Cordes 06 Feb '17

06 Feb '17

Paging Lennart... paging Lennart... he must be around here somewhere... Fedora 24 (and all cutting-edge distros) has a nice surprise: >touch filenospace >touch file\ with\ spaces >/bin/ls 'file with spaces' filenospace Huh? I don't recall putting single-quotes in the filename. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/258679/why-is-ls-suddenly-wrapping-… Oh, so the genius "we know better than 45 years of *NIX" people strike again. "Why is this happening?" Several coreutils developers decided they knew better than decades of de facto standards. This change appears in coreutils 8.25-something. If you're running an older distro with 8.24, thank your lucky stars. Fix is... very systemd-esque ("it's your fault, you must do something to return to normalcy"): >/bin/ls -N file with spaces filenospace So update all your aliases folks, on every system, and re-source the alias file... assuming this would drive you as batty as it does me. Debian has reverted this change as they realized it was insanity. Fedora hasn't (I don't even see a bz for it). OpenSUSE already aliases to -N by default. The coreutils devs seem to think this bug is a good thing so as to make cutting & pasting consistent for noobs. Hmm, I'm not sure noobs are using the command line all that much, at least not enough to cause the old hands to go insane. And I'm still of the school that spaces don't belong in filenames unless absolutely necessary! What's your take? Any one for this change? /RANT

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