Topic: Interfacing Bluetooth devices with Linux in Python
Presenter: Warren J. Jasper PhD, PE
When: Thursday, 10 October 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps will get you close, but use the NCSU College of Textiles link for proper directions to building
Video: This Presentation will not be recorded
Speaker notes
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/mnstrqyznbnb/

Summary

I recently wrote a "driver" to interface my Raspberry Pi to a bluetooth data acquisition board in Python. There are some interesting subtleties in talking to a device in Python that may be of interest to the beginner as well as the intermediate Linux user. This talk will cover some of the basics of how Bluetooth is implemented in Linux with Python.

Bio

Dr. Jasper has been interested in real-time data acquisition and control since his undergraduate days when he measured the variation the earth's gravity due to the tides. Although he has worked in the aerospace industry designing spacecraft altitude and control systems, he currently designs data acquisition and control systems for textile processes. His research interests include measurement and control of dyeing, plasma textiles for nanoparticle filtration, and writing Linux device drivers which can be found at https://github.com/wjasper/Linux_Drivers. In 2014 he was the recipient of a Fulbright grant in engineering education to promote study abroad for undergraduate textile engineers.

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Topic: Observability Through the Lenses of Metrics and Events
Presenter: Jack Neely and Breandan Dezendorf
When: Thursday, 12 September 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps will get you close, but use the NCSU College of Textiles link for proper directions to building
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_TFuPPlyxc
Speaker notes
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/mnstrqyzmbqb/

Summary

What are logs? What are metrics? A look into the challenges you face when building log aggregation pipelines, and how to build an operable and efficient pipeline at any scale. Also a collection of best practices for using metrics for health and alerting and optimizing both metrics and logs for successful observability.

Bio

Jack, a Senior Operations Engineer at 42Lines, has just shy of 20 years experience in Linux/UNIX system administration leading into the DevOps practices currently in use today. He's architected backend, scalable systems for universities with more than 100,000 users and companies with millions of users worldwide. The last several years he has focused on building and deploying telemetry based monitoring, alerting, and analysis tools such as Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, and Graphite. Turns out that metrics can be quite powerful when used with best practices. Jack has always enjoyed math and has found his passion in working with time series data, statistical analysis, and in training others to get the best use of their metric data.

Breandan has been working in UNIX and Linux operations for almost 20 years. As a Senior Operations Engineer at 42Lines, he currently focuses on distributed systems and log aggregation at scale, building aggregation pipelines that handle hundreds of terabytes of log data a day. He has spent considerable time working for academic institutions and traveling internationally.

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Topic: How to measure Linux Performance Wrong
Presenter: Peter Zaitsev, CEO of Percona
When: Thursday, 08 August 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L47nh5oNvkI
Speaker notes PDF
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/mnstrqyzlblb/

Summary

In this presentation, we will look at typical mistakes measuring or interpreting Linux Performance. Do you use LoadAvg to assess if your CPU is overloaded or Disk Utilization to see if your disks are overloaded? We will look into these and a number of other metrics which are often misunderstood and/or misused as well as provide suggestions of better ways to measure Linux Performance.

Bio

Peter co-founded Percona in 2006, assuming the role of CEO. Percona helps companies of all sizes maximize their success with MySQL. Percona was named to the Inc. 5000 in 2013. Peter was an early employee at MySQL AB, eventually leading the company's High Performance Group. A serial entrepreneur, Peter co-founded his first startup while attending Moscow State University where he majored in Computer Science. As CEO of Percona, Peter enjoys mixing business leadership with hands on technical expertise. Peter is the co-author of High Performance MySQL published by O’Reilly, one of the most popular books on MySQL performance. Peter blogs regularly on MySQLPerformanceBlog.com and speaks frequently at conferences. Peter lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children. In his spare time, Peter enjoys travel and spending time outdoors.

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Topic: Cloud In a Box 2: Remote Desktop System and more on LXD Containers
Presenters: Brian Mullan
When: Thursday, 11 July 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps
Video:
Speaker notes PDF
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/mnstrqyzkbpb/

Summary

Demo of new addition to CIAB for MANO (Management & Orchestration) of LXD containers using LXDMosaic across multiple clouds AWS, Hetzner in Germany or alternative.

Bio

Brian Mullan is a CIAB author/integrator, long-time Linux/LXD user, retired Cisco Worldwide Advanced Service Broadband Manager, and CCIE #1134

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Topic: Blinking lights! And also two talks on programming languages.
Presenters: Mark Sidell and Jack Hill
When: Thursday, 13 June 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4bvBIASSU4
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/zmzvnqyzjbrb/

Summer is here, and soon we will begin the hurricane season. While we wait, how about if we have two presentations for the price of one?

Summary

"On the sorry state of modern programming languages and other rants, with some surprises" by Mark Sidell

I begin by explaining why I hate all modern programming languages, explore alternative, and then declare that PDP-8 assembly is really the best choice. Next, I briefly explore the PDP-8 instruction set, but switch gears to what every programmer really wants to do -- make lights blink. I demo blinkenlights on the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and finally on a replica of a PDP-8. Of course, the only thing the audience knows at the beginning is the title of the talk.

Bio

Mark started his career designing speech recognition hardware at a startup in Cambridge, MA, and then at Dragon Systems when it was a five-person company in a living room. Later he wrote the Forte Agent Usenet newsreader, which some folks might remember. Today he does software at Viasat, focusing mainly on the AWS cloud.

Summary

"Random Thoughts on Programming Languages" by Jack Hill

It is supposed to be random, so the summary will be up to whatever your mind makes it be. Focus on Clojure, Go, Haskell, Rust, or Scheme.

Bio

Jack is on the Systems team at Duke University Libraries, and is passionate about Free software, storage, and functional programming. When not thinking about computers, he cares about Catholicism, trains, fountain pens, amateur radio, and ultimate (frisbee).

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Topic: Open Source and Drupal.
Presenters: Chris Russo
When: Thursday, 09 May 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps
Video:
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/zmzvnqyzhbmb/

Summary

Those of us who work (and play) in the open source software world tend to think of contributing back to open source software as something highly desirable to do. It's practically a given for most professionals that we should do it as users of open source software. Ideals of democracy, decentralization, volunteerism, and altruism are genuine motives for many of those who contribute to open source software.

In the best-case scenario, an open source project is comprised of a virtuous, reciprocal community in which participants donate their time to improve a tool that is freely available to all people. However, this scenario doesn't always sync with how open source really works in the wild.

And, what does it require to meaningfully contribute to open source projects? Should open source contribution be an expectation of organizations that use open source software and those who they employ?

As skilled, designers, project managers, engineers, et al, are open source contributions the most impactful way to spend our precious, valuable, voluntary time, or are there alternatives we should consider as individuals and organizations who benefit from using open source tools?

We'll use the Drupal open source community as a lens to explore the broader world of open source contributions and how volunteer individuals and commercial stakeholders fit in.

Spoiler alert: it's all gray, though strong opinions will be shared and expected to be challenged!.

Bio

Chris made his first foray into open source software development when he was 11-years old, creating a website on geocities.com (young people won't know what this is). He moved to the Triangle from Boston, MA in 2010 and shortly after that started a web consulting business AND a bicycle-powered organics recycling service called Tilthy Rich Composti. Rooted in his passion for the environment and justice (a skosh above his love to write in the third person), bicycles transcend much of Chris's professional and personal life. Whether it be a 4-month ride across the U.S.A in 2008i, biking from Boston to Washington to participate in civil disobedience at the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline, leading a i100,000+ member bicycle/hospitality focused global nonprofiti through a challenging transition, or simply riding into the Savas Labs office in downtown Durham each day where he leads the team as the CEO, you're likely to find Chris on or near his bike. Wave to him; he's friendly. Chris constantly schemes on how to use his resources to be a force for positive change. He'd love and needs your help!

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Topic: Apache Guacamole Project and the CIAB (Cloud in a Box) Remote Desktop System.
Presenters: Nick Couchman and Brian Mullan
When: Thursday, 11 April 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkQjEUi7SxA
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/zmzvnqyzgbpb/

Summary

This month we will have two exciting presentations for the price of one!

First presentation will be an overview of Guacamole which is a clientless remote desktop gateway (only a web browser required - no plugins, no software installs) which provides

• Remote Desktop: Support for common remote desktop protocols
  • RDP
  • SSH
  • Telnet
  • VNC
• Gateway: Web-based, authentication, and permission control

Next presentation will be a project called CIAB Remote Desktop System which utilizes Guacamole, Tomcat8, NGINX, MySQL and XRDP (as an RDP server for Linux) and LXD containers. This will also include a live demo utilizing the CIAB software installed on an AWS EC2 server instance.

You can participate! This demo system has 75 user accounts pre-configured so all of the TriLUG attendees will be able to use their laptop web browser to access a MATE Desktop running in an LXD container on that EC2 Server. The Guacamole/Tomcat/NGINX/MySQL/XRDP are installed and running in a separate LXD container on that EC2 Server.

Bio

Nick Couchman is a Coty Inc. Linux Systems Engineer and Apache Guacamole Project Engineer

Brian Mullan is a CIAB author/integrator, long-time Linux/LXD user, retired Cisco Worldwide Advanced Service Broadband Manager, and CCIE #1134

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Topic: Kubernetes from the Trenches
Presenter: Jeff Sloyer
When: Thursday, 14 march 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBXI-DfUpEg
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/zmzvnqyzfbsb/

Summary

Deploying a Kubernetes cluster is relatively simple but managing multiple highly available Kubernetes clusters is quite difficult. Come hear straight from the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) team how they run thousands of highly available Kubernetes clusters for IBM customers. Don't worry, this is not going to be a talk filled with sunshine and rainbows. In this talk we will share lessons of the issues we have had to overcome as well as best practices for using Kubernetes to deploy highly available applications. If you ever wanted to learn the real stories around hosting and managing Kubernetes without any sugar coating then this is definitely a talk that you shouldn't miss.

Bio

Jeff Sloyer is currently the core dev lead for IBM Cloud Containers Service. He currently leads multiple squads of developers that build IBM's managed Kubernetes service.

Jeff's previous role at IBM was a Developer Advocate. He promoted IBM's Platform as a Service (PaaS), Bluemix. He's a Node.JS developer most days, but tinkers in Java and Python. Sloyer is a hacker at heart who loves playing with new tech and cobbling together new demos and projects. He's an avid traveler, flying around the world and speaking about Bluemix at conferences and events.

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