Next Meeting - 30th June

[Duncan Roe]

Hi everyone,

The next meeting is 4 weeks from Monday. I have reset the attendance
list and updated https://mlug-au.org.  Here's the URL for the online
meeting anyway: https://meet.jit.si/mlug-au

We have yet to schedule any talks: does anyone have something they'd
like to share?

Do put your name on the attendance list (on the website) if you'd like
to have an in-person meeting again next month. I book the venue once we
have 4 names: if you find you're the 4th person to register then drop me

or the group an email so I know.

I know it's over 4 weeks from now. but if people who *expect* to come

could please put their names on the list then we might manage to
actually get the dining room this time.

Cheers ... Duncan

[Malcolm Herbert]

Let's spin it the other way - what would people like to see a talk on? I was wondering whether it might be useful to do a small series of talks on the basics ... the tough bit is always working out the level to pitch these at, but it's a forum, so what have people been puzzled about in Linux for a while? Happy to deep dive into anything that might find an audience.

How about a How Things Work series? Covering things like DNS, HTTP, TCP/IP, Routing, SSL, maybe filesystems, permissions etc etc ...

systemd and friends is always a pain in my side bcause I came at linux before it was a thing so that's one of my blind spots, another is docker and containers etc, for approximately the same reasons ... learning how one might drive cloud-init and preparing scripts etc for a fleet rollout would be good also ... I'm also happy to talk on these as a spur to get to grips with them myself ...

What do people think?

Regards,
Malcolm

--
Malcolm Herbert
mj...@mjch.net

[zak martell]

If so, 

I call dibs on containers! 

I actually started my career by being told I needed to find a way to spin up new virtuozzo hosts 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ as we were selling them at an alarming rate. I remember learning red hat kickstart files and expanding on my bash skills so I could automate it start to finish. It had even taught me how pxe boot worked. 

I could do a whole “how we got here” from bsd jails , chroot, to lxc, to openvz to where we are today with the evolution of docker. 

I wouldn’t be able to go into management things like Kubernetes and openshift (and so much more..) though. 

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[George Patterson]

Hey Zak, As an aside, I spoke to Duncan during the May 26 meeting. I'd be happy to do a talk or demo on Proxmox. Proxmox has a container system. 

I'd like to see a talk to touch on running a service such as something you may have written yourself. My queries How do you have it start on boot, or crash, and the best practices on where to put the logs on a modern Linux distro.

George

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[zak martell]

Hi George, 

In the past I was very involved as I worked in web hosting and we sold containers (both windows and Linux) along with VM and web hosting, but these days my use is mostly just Cloud, rather than on premises. While I do use docker at home and on work on premises on Linux machines, routers, nas devices etc they are non-important services and have no sort of high availability. The only high availability I have is storage (s3) - and while they do technically run in docker- it’s more out of laziness than need. 

That’s why I was thinking of doing more of a history lesson, and how our focused has changed from “OS” containers into the modern “app containers”, and the pros and cons. With some real world examples along the way of course. 

I wasn’t going to go as far as Kubernetes or even Proxmox, or things like portrainer, as honestly I never used Proxmox before. 

Bootup is generally a systemd/init lesson? Likely nothing related to containers, unless you’re referring to container creation and restart policies? 

Should we do a dual talk? I will cover history, you cover modern day? 

I never done a talk before so I’d be super shy. Definitely would need some cider in me. 

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[George Patterson]

Sorry. Perhaps I should have address the suggestion to Malcolm as well as yourself.

You take sounds like a great angle to take. The venue is pretty good for a first talk.  The worst situation is a very large room and some people are sitting at the back of the room. Are thy not overly interested? Interested but camera shy? Perhaps they are actually waiting for the next session? 

Funny, The best I have seen for in house storage, is CEPH, which is distributed, multi server block storage. Haven't had the opportunity to use it at all.

George

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[zak martell]

Hi George, 

No no. Malcolm and Duncan are the experts. They are also very aware of my expertise, shyness and alcohol confidence.  Sometimes I question whether I should be drinking because I get far more annoying. 

I don’t like Ceph honestly, it’s quite bad for anything besides like massive $200k+ whole rack deployments. I am a big fan of garage. 

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ . It’s very good for certain types of storage where things like lifecycles aren’t needed. 

I go up to about 4 nodes in different geo of 50tb (per host), with 3x replica. Gives me 66tb usage space. 

Perhaps I could do a lightning talk on it actually. It’s more home-use s3 oriented. Just simple binary. 

I work in Karaoke mostly, so things like http and database requests are small, but song videos are massive - so I don’t mind making a few http requests to cloud using a few KB, and then leaving the 500mb video to on premises. It’s much easier to manage. 

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[zak martell]

I suppose it also depends on how much people want talks to focus on things like business/work or home use/hobby 

Do you want to see and learns things to potentially further your career, or just learn about random cool stuff that won’t help you career/wise? 

Do you want to learn about things you may be able to try yourself on your own hardware when you get home? 

How do people view the meetups? What is that line for people? What makes it a “useful” talk? 

[Duncan Roe]

Hi everyone,

There are 4 names on the list and I have managed to book the Dining
Room.

Zak and George offered talks on Containers and Proxmox respectively so I
have put them on the website. Thank you both.

I'm still working on the slides for my talk last month but in the
meantime a small spoiler: in Ubuntu (and Debian), install package
"bash-builtins" to get the loadable builtins I was talking about.

Cheers ... Duncan.

[Duncan Roe]

Hi everyone,

Next meeting is 30th June, the day after tomorrow. We have 7 people
expecting to come at this stage and the venue is booked.

We have 2 talks scheduled: "Containers" given by Zak Martell and
"Proxmox" given by George Patterson.

So I know when everyone who's coming has got there, will anyone else
intending to come please put their name on the attendance list.

Cheers ... Duncan.

On Thu, May 29, 2025 at 07:59:34PM -0700, Duncan Roe wrote:

[Duncan Roe]

Hi everyone,

George just emailed me that he has a medical issue so won't be able to
present at the meeting tonight.

As a replacement I could maybe do something off-the-cuff about TCP/IP,
Unicode / UTF-8 or setting up a Wireless Access Point. Any preferences?
Or we can just have a general discussion.

Cheers ... Duncan.

[zak martell]

Hi Duncan, et all, 

I unfortunately won't be able to attend either. Doing some last minute end-of-financial-year planning, and overall behind in work-load. 

Perhaps George and I can both reschedule for next month? @George? 

I also have a new coworker (uni student) who may want to attend as well. 

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[Duncan Roe]

Hi everyone,

On Mon, Jun 30, 2025 at 12:09:52PM +1000, Duncan Roe wrote:
> As a replacement I could maybe do something off-the-cuff about TCP/IP,
> Unicode / UTF-8 or setting up a Wireless Access Point. Any preferences?
>

I've just uploaded slides for the Unicode / UTF-8 talk I ended up giving.

There's a bit more in there than on the night, in particular WTF-8 but you'll
have to read the notes to find out what that is 😏

Only 1 more week until next meeting, see you then.

Cheers ... Duncan.