Oregon Latvian Community Center

Ever wondered how many package updates were released for your favorite distro in the past month? Or how many times you have had to upgrade Firefox?

The Linux Changelog Project is an attempt to present statistics for the development and maintenance of Linux Distributions based on publicly available changelog data. By creating a distro-agnostic view of all changelog updates for a given project, we can see how the size and activity of a given distribution compares to its peers. At the moment only Fedora and Slackware are supported, but over time more distributions will be added. The end goal is to provide a web interface that will allow people to search for and browse the millions of package updates across all major Linux distributions.

As someone who is largely self-taught in the world of GNU/Linux, projects like this are how I learn about the Linux ecosystem and practice skills that I apply to my career in IT support. While my experience goes all the way back to the dark days of HAL I'm still surprised by what I find hiding in the various corners of the Linux world. Working with the changelog formats of different distributions has challenged hat I thought I knew, and I hope other users (new and old) will find it interesting as well.

Fresh Beats: Creating The World's Thinnest Boombox

Combining 1980s music culture with a retro future, The World's Thinnest Boombox is a portable Linux-based sound system featuring active electronics mounted onto an artistically designed printed circuit board. In this presentation, Joe will discuss his engineering process, the complex circuit board fabrication techniques used in the project, and the challenges he faced along the way.

Bio: (scraped from https://grandideastudio.com/about/)

Joe Grand is a product designer, hardware hacker, and the founder of Grand Idea Studio. He specializes in creating, exploring, manipulating, and teaching about electronic devices.

Also known as Kingpin, Joe was a member of the legendary hacker group L0pht Heavy Industries, where he helped raise awareness of the hacker ethos and the importance of independent security vulnerability research. He also brought engineering to the masses as a co-host of Discovery Channel’s Prototype This, which followed the real-life design process of a unique prototype every episode.

Joe holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts and a Doctorate of Science in Technology (Honorary) degree from the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona.

Adrian, the person behind the popular YouTube channel Adrian's Digital Basement, will be sharing his story of ditching the day job to become a full-time YouTuber. Join him as he dives into the world of vintage computers, exploring his process of troubleshooting and fixing these fascinating machines using logic and critical thinking skills.

The Portland Linux/Unix Group has been meeting since 30 years ago this month. Please join us for a celebratory gathering to recognize our continuing longevity. It isn't possible to say right now who the speaker will be, but we'll work something out. More important than who is speaking is getting together to recognize the community of helpers that we are. Whether you are an old timer, there at the beginning, or someone who just started attending recently, or someone who has never attended before, we welcome you and hope that you can join us.

Date: March 24th, 1994
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.help
Subject: Linux Users Group!!!

There is a Linux users group forming in Portland Oregon, if you are
interested, email me at: ... our first meeting date has not been set,
but will be in April sometime.
Have Fun,
Sean

Who: Russell Senior
What: Part 1: A Network Relay via Cloud Instance ; Part 2: Retro Linux Tape Recovery Show and Telll
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, March 7, 2024 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

The first part is going to be a description of how I relay network connections from the Internet to my low-volume home-based email server to evade potential ISP blockages.

The second part is going to be a show and tell about my resurrection of an ancient Linux version in order to recover data from Quarter Inch Cartridge tapes and ancillary topics. It will also include a short demo of my MS-DOS 5.0 environment also (resurrected from tape) the month before I installed Linux for the first time in December 1992.

About Russell:

I am a person for whom the Year of the Linux Desktop started in 1992 and has continued annually, uninterrupted. I worked for a couple decades in scientific data management and analysis. Since 2005, I have been involved with the Personal Telco Project, a volunteer-based 501c3 non-profit trying to unscrew telecommunications policy in the Portland metropolitan area. I did a short stint in data management for an Oceanographic organization when it was housed at OH&SU. I also volunteer at Portland State Aerospace Society working on their OreSat program. My name, misspelled in glorious circuit board silkscreen, has literally been in orbit for most of the last 2 years. I have done a bunch of PLUG talks over the years.

Rules and Requests:

Masks are encouraged but not required.

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car

Who: Ted, Michael, YOU...
What: New Year Show and Tell
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, February 1st, 2024 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Ted: Bandwidth monitoring OpenWRT and DD-WRT routers with MRTG

Michael: Managing Windows from FreeBSD Environments

You: What have you been working on this last few months?

Rules and Requests:

Masks are encouraged but not required. CCC in Germany sent a LOT of people home with COVID-19. 19 as in 2019 and please people, it's not something we want to hang on to.

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Mark/Xe1phix
What: Firejail and Linux VPNs
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, October 5th, 2023 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

In this presentation, Xe1phix will cover:

Firejail - Sandbox - Namespace isolation (network namespaces, mount namespaces, user namespaces, PID namespaces), Seccomp-BPF - Syscall filtering Linux Capabilities (POSIX 1003.1e) filter AppArmor - Kernel module used to sandbox programs DNS-Over-HTTPS (DoH) - Encrypted DNS resolution using Mullvad DNS OpenVPN - Secure VPN setup Wireguard - Secure VPN setup Wireguard tunnels - Multihop VPN connections. Telegram - Instant Messenger Securely connecting to Telegram using Wireguard SOCKS5 proxy. Securely connecting to Telegram using OpenVPN SOCKS5 proxy. Sandboxing Telegram with Firejail Sandboxing Telegram with AppArmor qBittorrent Securely connecting to qBittorrent using Wireguard SOCKS5 proxy. Securely connecting to qBittorrent using OpenVPN SOCKS5 proxy. Using IPFilters to blacklist bad peers ProtonVPN - Trusted VPN setup DNS leak protection VPN Killswitch IPTables - Netfilter packet filter/firewall OPNSense/PFSense - OpenVPN setup Network forensics cheatsheets TCPDump, TShark, ngrep, ss, nfdump, etc Process logging cheatsheets Journalctl, lsof, ps, fuser, etc.

Xe1phix is a Linux systems engineer (Linux+, LPIC-1, LPIC-2).

He has studied Linux for 12 years, and has read over 200 books on Linux security. His primary focus, and passion in life is studying:

Linux system hardening/security Linux memory forensics & malware analysis Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)

Rules and Requests:

Please bring and properly fit a mask unless actively presenting

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Julia Iacoviello
What: Using DRBD and LINSTOR to Facilitate Cloud Migration and Mobility
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, August 3rd, 2023 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

There are many advantages to flexible cloud storage, but even with a good idea of how you might implement your environment in the cloud, the challenge of transferring legacy data may stand in your way. In this talk, Julia Iacoviello from LINBIT will explain core concepts of the open source, distributed replicated storage system, DRBD, as well as the open source storage management software, LINSTOR. Then, we will explore how these technologies can be leveraged to mitigate pain points in migrating production databases and other services into the cloud, including to containerized applications that rely on persistent stateful storage. Special considerations to be made for migration of existing data will be highlighted in this talk; additionally, a broad base of information about DRBD and general high-availability storage will be provided, with the hope that all that attend may learn something applicable to their particular use case, now or in the future.

Rules and Requests:

Please bring and properly fit a mask unless actively presenting

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Ted Mittelstaedt
What: Setting up inexpensive home security cameras with ZoneMinder to secure your home or business Part II
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, February 2nd, 2023 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Today there are a number of inexpensive home security cameras on the market that can be used to decrease the chance that your home or property will be tampered with. There's been a rash of catalytic converter and gasoline thefts in the Portland area in recent years, these require expensive replacements and repair of vehicle gas tanks that have been drilled into. Many homes in Portland do not have garages and residents use street parking. With the increasing use of electric vehicles and portable charging cables, the potential for theft and mischief exists as well. While a camera system may not prevent a theft, a good system can get a clear picture of the perpetrators and allow police to make an arrest. These systems also serve as a visual deterrent. This presentation will cover several camera systems and different concerns for mounting, cabling, and camera selection as well as recording camera data using ZoneMinder running on Linux and considerations for setting up this system.

Rules and Requests:

Please bring and properly fit a mask unless actively presenting

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car

Our speaker this month is John Stultz. John works for Google in the Android Systems team focusing on performance and working with the upstream Linux kernel community. He's spent most of his career prior working on AOSP devboards, Android upstreaming, PREEMPT_RT and Timekeeping. He'll be talking about Proxy Execution in the Linux scheduler for resolving priority inversion in cases where priority inheritance isn't sufficient.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Ted Mittelstaedt
What: Setting up inexpensive home security cameras with ZoneMinder to secure your home or business
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, February 2nd, 2023 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Today there are a number of inexpensive home security cameras on the market that can be used to decrease the chance that your home or property will be tampered with. There's been a rash of catalytic converter and gasoline thefts in the Portland area in recent years, these require expensive replacements and repair of vehicle gas tanks that have been drilled into. Many homes in Portland do not have garages and residents use street parking. With the increasing use of electric vehicles and portable charging cables, the potential for theft and mischief exists as well. While a camera system may not prevent a theft, a good system can get a clear picture of the perpetrators and allow police to make an arrest. These systems also serve as a visual deterrent. This presentation will cover several camera systems and different concerns for mounting, cabling, and camera selection as well as recording camera data using ZoneMinder running on Linux and considerations for setting up this system.

Rules and Requests:

Please bring and properly fit a mask unless actively presenting

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car