MUUG Monthly Meetings for 2021-22

Please note our current meeting location: In light of the current concerns over COVID-19 and the risk of infection, and current directives from the University of Winnipeg, MUUG meetings will take place online (typically using Jitsi) until further notice. Meeting link will be provided on the home page, prior to meeting start time.

September 14, 2021: tmux(1) - THE terminal multiplexer

This month, following up on his newsletter article from June, Brad Vokey demonstrated tmux(1). tmux enables a number of terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. It can then be detached from your screen and continue running in the background, and then reattached later. Each session is persistent and will survive accidental disconnection (such as a ssh(1) connection timeout) or intentional detaching. Each session can also be attached to multiple different terminals, for easy access to your running server processes and current environment from multiple different computers all at the same time. Brad went over the basic commands and concepts and also demonstrated the tmux plug-in manager (tpm) showing us some useful plug-ins including:

tmux-resurrect (persists tmux environment across system restarts)
tmux-yank (tmux plugin for copying to system clipboard)
tmux-autoreload - Watches your tmux configuration file and automatically reloads it on change.
tmux-continuum - Continuous saving of your tmux environment. Automatic restore when tmux is started. Automatic tmux start when computer is turned on.

October 12, 2021: Ardour Audio Software and grepcidr

This month, Troy Denton presented Ardour. Available on Linux (as well as macOS and Windows), Ardour allows you to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. If you are an audiophile, or a beginner wanting to know how to get into audio manipulation, or just curious and like to see audio represented graphically, then this presentation is for you.

RTFM: grepcidr

Katherine Scrupa talked about grepcidr, a tool that filters input by IP addresses and networks, using both IPv4 and IPv6. The grepcidr command can be very useful in networks, including mail filtering, network security and log analysis.

November 9, 2021: Jitsi vs Big Blue Button

Jitsi setup on AWS - Wyatt
BBB setup on OVH - Adam

This month, Wyatt Zacharias and Adam Thompson demonstrated setting up two different videoconferencing solutions on two different hosting platforms. MUUG has been using Jitsi for its own meetings over the last year, and tried out Big Blue Button for last month's meeting. The presentations focused on both the VM setup on the respective hosting platforms and the actual software setup. (Wyatt's presentation mostly covered the details of AWS hosting.)

December 14, 2021: Jellyfin, Extended Round-Table and Show-and-Tell

MUUG has a tradition of making the December meeting more of an informal, social gathering. Because we're still meeting online, we've had to let go of some of the traditional aspects of this year-end meeting (like sharing food), but we tried to keep some of our socail December tradition alive.

Show us your favourite gadget! As part of an extended round-table discussion, we kept the gadget show-and-tell. (This year, nobody had to haul their gadgets to the meeting site, but folks used their webcams or screen-sharing to show off their latest projects!)

Mini-Presentation: Jellyfin

This month, Wyatt Zacharias demonstrated installing, configuring, and using Jellyfin, a suite of free and open-source multimedia applications designed to organize, manage, and share digital media files to networked devices. (And, true to form, although out of season, Big Buck Bunny made a cameo appearance.)

January 11, 2022: Network Monitoring with Netdisco and LibreNMS

Netdisco is "a web-based network management tool suitable for small to very large networks." LibreNMS is "a fully featured network monitoring system that provides a wealth of features and device support." Which one is right for you? The answer to that depends on what you're looking to monitor. In this presentation, Gilbert Detillieux described and demoed both of these web-based monitoring tools, and showed some of the unique advantages of each one.

Gilbert has made his presentation slides, in PPTX and PDF format, available online.

February 8, 2022: Tactical RMM

This month's presentation was on Tactical RMM, a powerful, self hosted tool for managing large amounts of Windows computers. Chris Audet demonstrated some common use cases for TRMM such as patch management, client system health checks, and remoting into client computers to provide support.

March 8, 2022: Serverless Web Sites with AWS

What? How do you host websites without a server? Impossible? Technically, yes, but functionally, no! Wyatt Zacharias took us through using AWS (specifically S3 and CloudFront) to set up so-called "serverless" web sites.

Wyatt has made his presentation slides, in PDF format, available online. He has also made the YAML template file, used for the Cloudfront distribution, available.

RTFM: tldr(1) - a simpler alternative to man(1)

This month, Brad Vokey gave us a quick demo of the tldr command that he introduced to us in the December 2021 newsletter (last page). tldr is a Python command-line client to the TLDR pages. The TLDR pages is a free and open-source collaborative software documentation project that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages. It's a collection of community-maintained help pages that covers command-line utilities and other computer programs.

April 12, 2022: Cloud-init

Kevin McGregor provided an overview of cloud-init, a widely-supported way to initialize instances of cloud-aware distros (i.e. pretty much all of them!) on your public, private or home cloud.

Kevin has made his presentation slides, in PDF format, available online.

May 10, 2022: Running Containers in the Cloud With AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a serverless container solution that greatly simplifies the infrastructure required to run containerized applications. Without the need for Kubernetes or physical hosts, containerized apps can be quickly created and scaled with ease. Wyatt Zacharias took us through an overview of Fargate's features, and how it differs from other AWS container solutions (EC2 and EKS). He then demoed how to set up containers using Fargate.

Wyatt has made his presentation slides, in PDF format, available online.

June 14, 2022: Nftables vs pf

Alberto Abrao showed how to use nftables - the modern firewall subsystem of the Netfilter framework provided by the Linux kernel, and the successor to iptables - to create a basic firewall for your network. He also compared it to OpenBSD's PF.