PLUG

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Topic 1/2: Infiniband Demonstration

Speaker: Stephen Worthington

Comparing 40 Gbit/s Infiniband and 2.5 Gbit/s Ethernet between two PCs.

Topic 2/2: Self-hosting, self-defense

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Through March and April this year, Tom’s cgit instance was getting hammered with requests by what looked like an enormous botnet of nearly three million IPs, each making only one or two requests, crippling the server and making conventional IP address blocking impossible. He’ll run through the whole sordid story, and talk about how to mitigate attacks on self-hosters by a new generation of threats.

Continue reading “May: Infiniband and Botnets”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 9 April 2025

Topic 1/2: Experimenting with self hosting open source LLMs

Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue

Proprietary LLMs and their effects on the Internet have been a hot topic on the PLUG Discord of late. Richard has been experimenting with open source LLMs on his own hardware, which might just help to bring some balance back to the universe…

Topic 2/2: Metrics and Grafana

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Chris will return to talk more about homelab monitoring and metrics, this time using popular open source graphing tool Grafana. He’ll show how to use and view your server’s and docker containers’ info therein.

Continue reading “April: LLMs and Grafana”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Topic 1/2: My first Linux – Slackware

Speaker: Nick Skarott

We all started with something different, but did I start in the wrong way? Nick takes a trip down memory lane revisiting the distribution he cut his Linux teeth on: Slackware.

Topic 2/2: The Distro That Made Microsoft Chuck Its Toys – Lindows/Linspire

Speaker: Brendon Green

Brendon goes for another live install of a controversial distribution – The only one to make Microsoft chuck its toys so bad that Mr Softy took the distro maintainers to court! It’s time to look at Lindows, and its modern equivalent Linspire.

Continue reading “March: Slackware and Lindows/Linspire”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Topic 1/2: Red Hat 6

Speaker: Brendon Green

Let’s start the year by talking about our first experiences with Linux.

Topic 2/2: Syslog da Lab

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Syslogging is a great idea for homelabs because it centralizes log management, making it easier to monitor, troubleshoot, and secure your systems. Chris will demonstrate how he manages this with his own fearsome home-lab rack.

Continue reading “February: Red Hat and syslog”

It’s been another great year for PLUG, and you’re again invited to celebrate with us, with some pizza and good company!

Weather permitting, we will meet at The Esplanade, at the tables near the paddling pool, on Wednesday December 11th, at 6:30pm. If the weather is looking bad, the venue will change to the Milson Community Centre. We will update the post here if this happens.

Please bring $10 in cash to contribute to the pizza. Bring along anything else you’d like to eat.

Family and curious friends are welcome, as always.

We’ll look forward to seeing you all there!

NOTE: The original plan for this month’s meeting was a set of lightning talks, but in part due to your humble secretary’s pre-occupation, we haven’t found enough speakers, so instead we’re going to have two shorter and more relaxed talks and just have our usual coffee and chat the rest of the time.

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Topic 1/2: OpenTTD: A Free Transport Game

Speaker: Tom Ryder

OpenTTD is a free and open-source software remake of the classic MS-DOS-era game Transport Tycoon Deluxe, in which players build a transport network of trains, trucks, planes, and ships, moving both passengers and cargo around a map of towns and industries. On top of re-creating the original game for the modern era, the developers of OpenTTD have added many niceties, including entirely new features—and, perhaps most fun of all, networked multiplayer. It’s one of Tom’s favourite games, and he’ll close the talk with a short demonstration of gameplay.

Topic 2/2: Making a vent of frustration useful—WTF is TF?

Speaker: Nick Skarott

Things sometimes don’t go your way and you need to vent a volcano of stress. Thankfully, someone made a helpful command line package so you can make those vents useful. Nick will walk you through this hilarious wee program that will turn your frown upside down and potentially restore productivity.

Continue reading “November: TTD and TF”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 9 October 2024

Topic 1/2: Reverse engineering ASUS ROG laptops—Part 2

Speaker: Luke Jones

Finding and reversing binaries to figure out WMI calls and args. Plus a short demonstration of looking for info in a DLL. And if time permits, demo of reversing the ASUS ROG Azoth keyboard.

Topic 2/2: Tools, old and new

Speaker: Tom Ryder

A lot of text-based terminal tools on GNU/Linux systems have been around such a long time that when someone attempts to replace them with something that works better, nobody even notices. Even formally deprecating them doesn’t help if people don’t notice! Tom will run through a few tools that are deprecated, or at least sub-optimal, and that have widely-available replacements that are very likely already installed on a GNU/Linux system. You may be surprised how much of your tool-set has better alternatives—and no, not just more colorful ones, or ones re-written in Rust…

Continue reading “October: ASUS and new tools”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Topic 1/2: Goodbye [insert your cloud provider here], Hello Coolify

Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue

Coolify is an open-source and self-hostable platform as a service (PaaS) alternative. Richard will show us how it works.

Topic 2/2: Reverse engineering ASUS ROG laptops

Speaker: Luke Jones

Luke will walk us through his work making ASUS ROG laptops first-class citizens in the Linux kernel.

Continue reading “September: PaaS and ASUS”