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Material for Monday's meeting
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jan '16

26 Jan '16

Hi everyone The material from Monday's meeting is now available from our github account: https://github.com/WLUG/meetings/tree/master/2016/2016-01-25 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux 4.5 Adds Raspberry Pi 2 Support, AMD GPU Re-Clocking, Intel Kaby Lake
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jan '16

24 Jan '16

"Linux 4.5 is set to bring many new features across the kernel's 20 million line code-base. Among the new/improved features are Raspberry Pi 2 support, open-source Raspberry Pi 3D support, NVIDIA Tegra X1 / Jetson TX1 support, an open-source Vivante graphics driver, AMDGPU PowerPlay/re-clocking support, Intel Kaby Lake enablement, a Logitech racing wheel driver, improvements for handling suspended USB devices, new F2FS file-system features, and better Xbox One controller handling." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/24/1329206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Atom-Based JaguarBoard To Take On Raspberry Pi
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jan '16

24 Jan '16

"The tiny single-board PC movement that's leading the Internet of Things (IoT) market is largely dominated by ARM-based processors, and for good reason — they're cheap, low power and capable. However, what if you prefer to work with the x86 architecture? JaguarBoard looks strikingly similar to Raspberry Pi, which is arguably the most popular single-board mini PC. But unlike Raspberry Pi, JaguarBoard allows users to develop for x86, courtesy of its Intel Atom Z3735G (Bay Trail) foundation. The chip is a quad-core part clocked at 1.33GHz to 1.83GHz with 2MB of L2 cache, offering a fair amount of horsepower for IoT applications. In addition to an Atom processor, JaguarBoard also boasts 1GB of DDR3L memory, 16GB of eMMC storage, three USB 2.0 ports, 10/100M LAN port, HDMI 1.4 output, SDIO 3.0 socket, two COM ports, four GPIO pins, and audio ports. It's an interesting device that you could use strictly as a mini PC for general purpose computing, as an embedded system, a learning or research tool, or for whatever DIY projects you can conjure up." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/01/24/1729241 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Searching For Vulnerable Webcams
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jan '16

23 Jan '16

Customers don’t understand and don’t care about the security of the devices they put online. And vendors are in no hurry to enlighten them, if it adds to costs and cuts profits. If anybody is in a position to intervene, it has to be a Government authority. <http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/how-to-search-the-internet-of-thing…>

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Linux Filesystems On Windows
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Jan '16

22 Jan '16

Came across this <http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/8468…> rather informative posting about different filesystems for cross-platform use. One interesting possibility is UDF (“Universal Disk Format”), which is how DVDs are usually formatted. It turns out it is useful not just for read-only media but read/write as well. There is widespread built-in support for it on Linux, OS X and Windows, albeit with some limitations in the proprietary OSes (as usual). It can even work on flash drives, though there may be some issues with the hardware layout being optimized for FAT32 or other antiquated filesystems. Alternatively, the article mentions a number of choices for accessing Linux filesystems on Windows: <http://www.fs-driver.org/> <http://uranus.chrysocome.net/linux/ext2ifs.htm> <http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/> <http://www.chrysocome.net/virtualvolumes> Disclaimer: I haven’t tried any of these.

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Command-Line Options For CUPS
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Jan '16

20 Jan '16

I was looking for some options to tweak scaling and positioning of images printed with the CUPS “lp” command. This page <http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.5/options.html> lists various keywords that can be used with the “-o” option, in particular “natural-scaling”, “ppi” and “position”. You’ll notice that section has a large banner at the top saying “Not Supported on Mac OS X”. Which is slightly ironic, given that CUPS is owned by Apple. Anyway, the description of those options has disappeared from versions of that page for CUPS 1.6 and later, e.g. <http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.6/options.html>, <http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-2.1/options.html>. This even though I have CUPS 2.1.2 on my system, and the “position” option, for example, does seem to do something.

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Tracking Protection In Wi-Fi Networks Coming Soon To Linux
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

'Fedora contributor and NetworkManager developer Lubomir Rintel explains how your devices are being identified on a network by a unique number that most of us know by the name of MAC address. Same goes for mobile networking, as your laptop's or mobile phone's MAC address is, in most cases, broadcasted everywhere you go before you even attempt a connection to a wireless network. And that's a problem for your privacy. The solution? Randomization of the MAC address while scanning for Wi-Fi networks. Apple is already using this method on iOS 8 and later mobile operating systems, and so is Microsoft in Windows 10, so Linux users will ["likely"] get it in the upcoming NetworkManager 1.2 release.' -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/01/19/1345210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Building Your Own Internet Router
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

<http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/numbers-dont-lie-its-time-to-build-y…>: A lot of you are probably muttering, "right, pfSense, sure." Some of you might even be thinking about smoothwall or untangle NG. I played with most of the firewall distros out there, but I decided to go more basic, more old school: a plain, CLI-only install of Ubuntu Server and a few iptables rules. His benchmarks show his homebrew router handily beating off-the-shelf products in wired performance. In wireless performance, however, he feels available PC cards are way behind what dedicated router boxes can do.

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Serious Linux Kernel Vulnerability Patched
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

"A patch for a critical Linux kernel flaw, present in the code since 2012, is expected to be pushed out today. The vulnerability affects versions 3.8 and higher, said researchers at startup Perception Point who discovered the vulnerability. The flaw also extends to two-thirds of Android devices, the company added. An attacker would require local access to exploit the vulnerability on a Linux server. A malicious mobile app would get the job done on an Android device. The vulnerability is a reference leak that lives in the keyring facility built into the various flavors of Linux. The keyring encrypts and stores login information, encryption keys and certificates, and makes them available to applications." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/19/1326212 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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WLUG meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting coming up next Monday: "Lawrence D'Oliveiro and Ian Stewart will demo RAID 1 configurations and also using rsync for backups." More details: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/228022101/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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