MUUGLines The Manitoba UNIX User Group Newsletter Volume 33 No. 5, January 2021 Editor: Trevor Cordes Next Meeting: January 12th, 2021 0e virtual meeting room will be open around 7:33 (Online Jitsi Video Meeting) pm& with the actual meeting starting at 7:,3 pm. Feature Presentation: Open Sour!e Solutions 4ou do not need to install any special app or for Remote Wor& so5ware to use jitsi: you can use it via any modern webcam'enabled browser by going to the aforemen' Alberto Abrao and Troy Denton will give an tioned link. overview of free and/or open source solutions for modern remote work needs. 0ank you MERLIN (the Manitoba Education Research and Learning Information Networks) for providing the Topics include: hosting and bandwidth for our meetings. • Video meetings – hosting your own with itsi. Existing free#$% services& and self'hosted )o(*s +our Jitsi, installation 6778 wants to hear from you about your e"peri' ences with Jitsi& the open source so5ware M778 is VPN – how to host your own with wireguard • using for its online meetings. Have you had any • *+ce 3-. alternatives: Ne"t/loud and trouble or glitches: Has performance been O;: The /ollabora O+ce. Overview and installation 6778 board is here to help if you are still e"peri' encing issues. Email the roundtable mailing list, or [email protected]. <ince the last meeting we have updated the Jitsi server and you may notice a few changes this month. For one& we>ve made it mandatory you enter a screen name in order to join the meeting. 'he latest meeting details are al(ays at: Ne( -istro #eleases https://muug.ca/meetings/ Activity continues on the distro front. Some of the %here to Find the Meeting: more notable releases are: jitsi.merlin.mb.ca/muug.2021.01 • /entO< 8.,: makes it easy to migrate from the legacy release paradigm to the new 0is month /entO< Stream “just ahead of R9!B” rolling #1ust like last release. month% we are using our own • =reeD<D 1F.F: includes updated Intel wireless online Jitsi support, a Linu"'in'1ails feature& and newer meeting server *penS<B& OpenS<9& clang, and more. hosted by merlin.mb.ca. 1 Notable So/(are 0pdates wasn’t decreasing after each read$ 13 bytes read: hardly any change. 133 bytes read: hardly any • =irefo" 8H: WebAender is now on by default, change. 1333 bytes read (more than the pool if you use G)*6E and XEE& making things indicated%: hardly any change. Why was /dev/ faster and smootherK Flash support goes the random behaving like /dev/urandom: way of the dodo& but hardly anyone will noticeK and Linu" shared memory will be Gt turns out Linu" 5.- quietly removed the blocking- used for improved performance. ness aspect from the LA)8 system in a ma1or revamp. From the patch submission: • Auby 3.3.3: in progress since 23E-& this ma1or milestone focuses on performance& concur' The main improvements compared to the rency and typing. They claim 3J speed existing /dev/random is to provide su!cient improvement in some benchmarks compared entrop" during boot time as well as in virtual to 2.3$ environments and when using S$Ds& A secondar" design goal is to limit the impact of • 8nu/*D*B 3.E.F: Yes& you too can learn the entrop" collection on massive parallel /*D*B and become one of the most-direly' s"stems and also allow the use accelerated needed programmers$ Surprisingly& this cr"ptographic primitives& version gets support for modern things like <*N and X6B generation. Yes& in C*D*B. =or the compliance crowd& this new LA)8 system is • Jfce 4.E-: 1., years in the making, this @<(?33'Q3D” compliant and ships with the reMuisite release includes the developers> switch to assessment, as well as related test tools. Apparently 8itLab and other behind'the'scenes <(?33'Q3D does not permit using system interrupts workLow enhancements. There are also tons #such has HGD and disk events%& which the old LA)8 of user'facing changes. As a small sample& utilized& and as such this new one does not. 0unar can now pause copy/move operations 0e new LA)8 is also “about 53S faster in the and you can queue file transfers& and a new performance critical interrupt handler code pathC. visually'consistent set of icons helps to 0e only time this LA)8 should block is before the deNne Xfce>s new visual identity: /A)8 (Binu" crypto'strength R)8% is readyK something that occurs very early in the kernel boot process. A new flag has been added to getentropy#%& 8ANDTG)<!/7A!& for when junky& “best effort” randomness is acceptable. Gnterestingly& the following still reports a variable amount which changes continually over time& yet • 8T; 4.3: is the result of four years of devel' the LA)8 is no longer constrained by it: opment. They have dropped the “+” from the 8T;+ moniker. Highlights of 4.3 are built'in cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail media playback& drag & drop support, improved accessibility& and more. It will be 0e kernel also makes more e"tensive use of in' the basis for the upcoming G)*6E 43 hardware R)8s such as the quality (when the bugs desktop. (8uess those Xfce people have to have been fi"ed& see the Sept. 23F3 issue of get back to work to migrate from GT; 3.% 6778Bines% ones found in the latest Ryzen and Gntel C(7s. However& for the conspiratorial'minded& 1inux #ando$ Ne2er 3lo!&s the increased reliance upon opaque C(7 R)8s and elimination of HGD/9DD “noise” as an entropy 0is author got a big shock one day while reading source may make it easier for a maleNc entity to random bits from /dev/random: the entropy pool 2 control the quality of the world>s cryptographic Red Hat's announcement has le* users looking security. for an alternative with a## that CentO$ provides and without the disruption of having =or fun and laughs& boot your 5.-+ kernel with the to move to alternative distributions& We kernel command line option: promise to dedicate the resources re.uired to Pro0ect Lenix that will ensure impartiality and dyndbg=file drivers/char/lrng/* +p a not-for-pro2t community initiative& +#oudLinux alread" has the assets3 infra1 to view all the activity of the LA)8 in dmesg. structure3 and experience to carr" out the mission3 and we promise to be open about the https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php? process of developing Pro0ect Lenix. page=news_item&px=Linux-5.6-Random-Rework https://lwn.net/Articles/817575/ 4 Igor Seletski"3 CloudLinux CE, Pro2ing Dae$on File 4!!ess Ie>ve all been there. You>re editing some obscure Pro0ect Lenix will be a free3 open-source3 conf file for a daemon. You reload the daemon but community-driven3 165 binar" compatible fork you swear it’s ignoring what you>ve put in the conf of R(EL 8 (and future releases)& For CentO$ Nle. Is it even reading the files you are editing? users3 the compan" promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted wa" to convert Now you can easily prove the daemon (or other existing CentO$ servers with abso#ute#" zero program% is using/ignoring your conf file so you can downtime or need to reinstall an"thing& open up a bugzilla, or troubleshoot the chain of conf Nle reads: using inotifywait. Is BGND named really 4 Anon"mous on ZDNet accessing all the zone files you think it is: Apparently Lenix is just a placeholder name for the inotifywait -r -m -e access \ time being. /var/named/data Gn addition to Lenix& CentO<>s original co'founder 8regory Kurtzer also announced he will create his 0is will show you every file the daemon accesses as own R9!B clone: Rock" Linux. So there is a lot of you restart the daemon& in the order they are movement in the community to counter Red Hat’s accessed. Very handy for troubleshooting comple" somewhat controversial move. It hearkens back to daemons with long conf file include chains. inotify prehistoric times when Red Hat ditched the free R9B is the gi5 that keeps on giving. and created R9!B and le5 the free'as'in-beer crowd in the lurch for about a year until Fedora was 5entOS 6For&ed7 4lready created. (6uch to the delight of Debian, et al.% Iell that didn’t take long! Those at the last M778 https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloudlinux- meeting will recall the discussion regarding Red to-invest-more-than-a-million-dollar-a- 9at’s changes to CentO< where they are basically year-into-centos-clone/ turning it into not-so'bleeding-edge'=edora, thus making it useless for its sole purpose for many people: being a drop'in, free& e"act replacement for 1inux On 4pple*s M1 5P0, A9!B. 9ector Martin, who ported Linu" to the PSH& is trying to port Linu" to Apple>s new ME C(7. By Enter CloudBinu"& who recently announced it was now almost everyone has heard that Apple is investing over a million dollars into making a changing their Macs from Intel C(7s to their own /entO< (the original paradigm% clone. in-house'designed silicon. 3 9ector is crowdfunding to support his porting goal and he promises to not only get the kernel working, but to fully support the custom Apple hardware& including the “most complicated component” the @custom Apple G(7C. https://apple.slashdot.org/story/ 20/12/01/234232/hector-martin-promises-to- bring-linux-to-the-m1-chip track nearly everything you do and allow govern' Dut maybe not so fast, says Linus Torvalds: ments to access your data.