Michigan!/usr/group

Next Meeting – Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 6:30pm EST

Debugging

This month we’ll be talking about debugging.

As a special treat, for everyone who shows up to the meeting, we’ll have a free copy of Julia Evan’s Pocket Guide to Debugging.

If you don’t know about Julia Evan’s, you are in for a surprise. She creates illustrated PDFs that she calls `Zines.

Her Debugging ‘Zine is fantastic and it would normally cost you $12, but we’ve worked out a deal with Julia that allows us to give a copy to everybody who attends our meeting. The trick is, you actually have to join the meeting, either through Zoom or the Live Youtube streaming event. During the meeting, we’ll ask that anyone who wants a copy give us their email address, either through the Zoom chat or through our Mastodon channel.

We’re also going to have a quick talk on the Unix find utility.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 6:30pm EDT

Run Your Own Mail Server

It’s impossible to run your own email! Not quite. But you must do it
carefully and correctly.

This talk discusses the current state of email, with a focus on the
small independent server operator. What do you need to run your own
mail? How can you use protocols like DKIM and DMARC without wrecking
either your ability to communicate with the outside world, or your
sanity?

It can be done. It’s not actually that hard, once you understand
what’s important and what you can ignore.

About the speaker:

Michael W Lucas’ new book is, coincidentally, Run Your Own Mail
Server. He’s giving this talk on the tenth anniversary of his becoming
a full time writer, so the meeting will end with cake. It’s a virtual
meeting, so you need to bring your own cake.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, September 10, 2024, 6:30pm EDT

Unix/Linux: The basics

We’ve had a lot of requests for an Intro to Linux type of presentation so this month, we’re going to jump in and have some fun.

Here’s what we plan to cover:

• Brief History of Unix/Linux
• Entering commands at the command line
• Filesystems
• Users, Groups, permissions and sudo
• Intro to package installation
• Getting started editing files
• ssh and remote file copy (sftp,scp)
• Questions and Answers

If you are new to Unix/Linux or want to get into it, this meeting should help you get started.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, August 13, 2024, 6:30pm EST

Operating System upgrades in a High Performance Computing environment: The long and winding road to Ubuntu

View the video on Youtube

Joe Ryan will be discussing how the High Performance Computing Cluster at Michigan State University transitioned to Ubuntu 22.04 from CentOS 7 and the operating system upgrade process. Constraints, challenges, OS evaluation, and a brief overview of how we transitioned users to the new operating system will be discussed.

After a full career as a U.S. Army Pilot, Joe transitioned to the technology sector and currently works as a Linux sysadmin using multiple automation tools to manage a 1000+ node High Performance Computing Cluster at Michigan State University. He’s been learning programming languages since the 80s, but he’s never had a professional developer role. In addition to playing with open source technologies in a home lab, he enjoys riding motorcycles, bicycles, and being on the water sailing or paddling.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, July 9, 2024, 6:30pm EST

Slides

A brief introduction to tmux.

tmux is a terminal multiplexer, a tool that makes working on the command line better and easier. It can allow you to work across connections, and to get multiple views on the computers that you are using. murph will show what it does, how to install it on popular systems, and how to use it.

murph is a long time Linux user, long time Fediverse denizen, and EFF supporter.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, June 11, 2024, 6:30pm EST.

Mastodon and the Fediverse: Decentralized Social Networking and Services

Mastodon and the Fediverse is a collection of decentralized and digital
social spaces.
Decentralization empowers small groups with local community moderation
while also allowing worldwide interaction.

Free Software projects in the Fediverse include Mastodon, PixelFed,
PeerTube, Mobilzon, Nextcloud, Matrix, Friendica, WordPress, and
WriteFreely are helping us re-decentralize the Internet.

Standards like the W3C recommended ActivityPub allow the various services
to interact.

Other FLOSS projects helping build the Fediverse include Misskey,
Funkwhale, Pleroma, Plume, Diaspora, Hubzilla, and Owncast.

Most projects offer hosted instances.
All enable us to self-host as a community or individually.

Attendees will learn about:

• overview of Mastodon and the Fediverse
• advantages of decentralized social networking
• how to join and participate in decentralizing the web
• history of the Fediverse and decentralized social networking
• data ownership
• list of some services in the Fediverse
• pros and cons of self-hosting

CW: The presentation also features an homage to famed Fedizen and MUGizen
Craig Moloney.

Our speaker, der.hans is aFedizen, Rush fan and friend of Craig

Next Meeting – Tuesday, May 14th, 2024, 6:30pm EST.

Code from the meeting

This month, we’re going to do something different and fun.

There’s a programming website called Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com.

It’s an Advent calendar of 25 small programming puzzles for a variety of skill
sets and levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

You can see the first puzzle at https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/1.

We’ve rustled up a few volunteers to show us how they solved it in the following languages:

• Javascript – Justin Triplett
• Perl – Jim McQuillan
• Python – Wolf
• Rust – Justin Triplett
• Swift – Dave Satwicz

We should be able to get through each language in 10-15 minutes. Hopefully that’ll

allow enough time to explain how the solution works.

If you’d like to volunteer, join us at the meeting show us how you’ve solved the
puzzle using your favorite language.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, April 9th, 2024, 6:30pm EST.

Join the ZOOM meeting

This month, we mourn the loss of one of our own. Craig Maloney put up a courageous battle against cancer but unfortunately, the outcome isn’t what we were hoping for.

If you’ve attended any of the MUG meetings in the last 20 or so years, you’ve seen Craig running the meetings, complete with his vast knowledge, wit and charm.

People everywhere knew and liked and appreciated Craig. He was generous with his time and advice everywhere he went.

He cannot be replaced, and we celebrate his life today.

Election for MUG Board of directors

April is the month for the election for the MUG board of
directors. Currently, we have 6 positions and with the
unfortunate passing of Craig, we have only 5 nominees.
Without a full slate of nominees, the election is pretty
simple. We just declare that all the nominees are elected.
However, if anyone would like to nominate themselves, we’d
strongly encourage them to do so.

Presentations:

This month, we have two presentations to educate and entertain you.

Py Hole by Wolf

Pi-hole: the tiny, whole network, ad-blocker that can run on
your Raspberry Pi. What it’s for, what it does, how it works,
and what else you can do with it.

Wolf has spoken many times at MUG; and is always a popular
speaker. He’s been a developer for decades, worked at many
interesting places, with many languages. But of all those
languages, Python is his favorite.

Intro to Vim by Jim McQuillan.

Vim is an extremely useful free and open source screen-based
text editor. Jim will cover the basics of how to start it,
move around within the file, make changes to your file, save
your changes and exit. If you can do that, you are well on
the way to writing great programs or documents or config
files or whatever else you want to edit. He’ll also delve
just a bit into some more intermediate aspects of the
editor, such as block selection and split screens.

Jim has been solving problems for customers since the early 80’s, mostly
in the health care industry using Unix and Linux and a variety of
programming languages. He’s the founder of the Linux Terminal Server
Project (LTSP) and he’s given talks on it all over the world.
He’s been involved with MUG since 1986.

Jim’s Vim Slides

We’re very sorry to report that Craig Maloney passed away this morning, April 2, 2024.

Craig has been battling colorectal cancer for the past 2 years and while he fought a courageous battle, the end was not what we were all hoping for.

The Celebration of Craig’s Life will be on Saturday, April 13th from 3:00pm to 7:00pm at the Sawyer-Fuller Funeral Home at 2125 12 Mile Road in Berkley, MI 48072.