Brittania Board Room

• [x] Kelly Kendrick
• [x] Scott Murphy
• [x] Bruce Davis
• [x] Ian Gorman
• [x] John Nash

• None

19:00

• Approval of March minutes - approved
• Approval of AGM minutes - approved

• President: Scott Murphy
• Vice President: John Nash
• Treasurer: Ian Gorman
• Secretary: Bruce Davis
• Member(s) at Large: Kelly Kendrick

• Scott will be provide as a PDF scan of the physical sign in sheet and the list of proxies received

• Finance
  • Change account type so we only receive electronic copies
  • If this does not allow for viewing online, then RBC offers this service. Maybe even TD. Tangerine might serve, but read-only and deposit access may be an issue.
  • Get at least one additional signature on the bank account
  • We will appoint a treasurer at the first meeting after the AGM - Ian Gorman assigned as treasurer.

Don't be alarmed at the size of this agenda. It is a distilled collection of things that have been running around in my mind for a while now. Bear with me a little as I had some time to gather my thoughts and I'd like to get them up for discussion. We can carry some things forward and a few are going to be here just for record keeping.

In keeping with my plain text mantra, the source for this is a markdown file and we can see how well pandoc converts it after it gets massaged by our secretary. Editing can be done in a browser with an in-browser editor such as:

• StackEdit
• Dillinger

After the comments from Alex, I did check and I seem to be using CommonMark as my flavour.

This email is the HTML rendered with pandoc pasted into my email client. The nice thing is that a slightly different command and we have the dokuwiki page source as well.

The pandoc commands (for those interested in playing) are:

• pandoc --from markdown --to html oclug_agenda_20170426.md -o oclug_agenda_20170426.html
• pandoc --from markdown --to dokuwiki oclug_agenda_20170426.md -o oclug_agenda_20170426.doku

It would be nice if I could just use markdown as the email body, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards at this time. I'll have to look into it.

• None

• IanG - no report

• John ** Hacking event scheduled ** John to send out reminder ** John updated the wiki

• We will have one next month (hopefully)

Scott has sent an email to Richard Hagemeyer to get rooms assigned. He will get back to me with the list for the next few months. I asked to have the same room if possible. People seem to be able to find it easily enough.

• We will not have a room for September ** Scott will arrange for the Dymon Kanata board room for September as a possible solution or Kelly will check on the price and availability of the party room in his building.

• Scott ** Have not spent any time on this yet, hoping to get to it shortly.

• Scott added his talk from April to the wiki
• Comment Plugin ** Could not find one. There are plugins that permit comments within the wiki markup that will not render on the page, but that is not what I am guessing we are looking for. ** Discussion page?
• ACL implementation ** Not sure what we are doing here, John may be able to add a little clarity as to where we are going with this.

• What are the colours? ** I'll just use the existing ones and get the RGB values from my existing artwork ** Red, Black and Blue
• OCLUG sticker ** Hexagonal shape as shown last meeting on order from sticker robot in the US. They will take from 2-4 weeks to arrive, as they are silkscreen rather than digital printed. ** Ordered from Sticker Robot ** Ordered 1000 because it was $10 more than 500, but getting 1500. They threw in a bonus 500 due to a deal of the day.
• OCLUG Mugs ** When I gave my talk at OPCUG, they gave me a mug and a ticket for a door prize. Apparently they have an embarrassing amount of money from some event they ran years ago and they are still accumulating more there is an annual membership fee. They do a mug print run every now and them and give them to speakers. They also appear to get meeting sponsors from the high tech stores, firms, etc. and get donations to give out as prizes. We could investigate doing something like that to see if it improves attendance. I suspect we need some swag for promotional purposes.
• An OCLUG Branding Guide ** “Official documents” concept/repository ** Logo usage ** Style Guide for the wiki, etc. ** I'm thinking I'll find an existing one and strip out the majority of the marketing stuff and make it rather basic. ** Theming for the website. It is pretty basic, so we could base a guideline from that. ** Themed presentation blanks? I'm happy to make my slide generation environment available. I'm also thinking that we should have a gitlab or github presence where we can store projects for the group ** I need to create a repository where we store all of this stuff so it can easily be located. If I get hit by a bus, nobody will know where to look. ** The rationale for the previous bullet is in the next section
• Should we explore the concept of Sponsored Meetings?
• Should we take steps to get control of our domain name? ** What would those steps be?

Report from Scott

Based on some commentary during the April meeting, revisiting Tux has come to my mind as a necessary exercise. There are a number of issues with Tux

• It is running the 32-bit OS, not the 64-bit version
• There are known issues with the system and the IPMI interface, causing one processor to lock at high usage. This is well documented and I would not have found it is I wasn't attempting to break the HW mirror of the on-board RAID controller so I could dump the server contents into an image file for the purposes of virtualizing it eventually.
• Do we still want a physical box? ** Consensus = Probably not
• Are we still continuing to act as a technology demo for a Django site we do not really need to run? ** Consensus = Probably not
• We could get a VPS for $5-10(US)/month that would provide all necessary functionality. Not to kill a stream of revenue for RGB, but we could save a few dollars on hosting fees and get a more “portable” service as a result. The lack of not performing maintenance on an old box is attractive as well * Do we want to explore going the static route? We have a pretty heavy setup for something that just indicates when the next meeting is. We are using dokuwiki for most things, so a db based system is overkill. ** Scott will inform him that we are likely to discontinue the use of the existing set up.
• Where you aware that the Tux hardware is now roughly 14 years old?

• Should we open up the meetings to a wider audience? ** There is willingness from the Board ** How do we communicate that?

Report from Scott

• All of this information was in the email I sent out previously. I'm replicating it here so that it is in the minutes.

I was involved in a bit of detective work earlier today and as a result, I have the following bits of data: Current OCLUG Mailing Lists (from the web interface)

I was involved in a bit of detective work earlier today and as a result, I have
the following bits of data:

Current OCLUG Mailing Lists (from the web interface)

-------------------  -----------------------------------------------------
List                 Description
-------------------  -----------------------------------------------------
Linux                OCLUG Technical Discussions
linux-novice         OCLUG's 'Linux Novice' List
Mailman              [no description available]
oclug-announce       Event/Meeting Announcements
oclug-board          oclug politics
oclug-events         Event Planning List
oclug-www            Oclug Webmasters
Oclug-www-errors     [no description available]
OffTopic             Ottawa Canada Linux User's Group Off Topic List
Ottawa-school-of-it  Ottawa/Pythian - System Administation Education group
Photography-sig      photography special interest group - oclug
SIGS-L3GO            Low Level Linux Group of Ottawa
Sysadmin             tux system admins

I looked at each of them to see when the last archived message was posted and
we have a pretty inactive set of lists:

*  Linux -  Active
*  linux-novice - Nothing past 2010, probably dead
*  Mailman - Possibly necessary, just part of mailman, idle
*  oclug-announce - Emergency Moderation is set, so nothing can be sent here 
                    - do we know why? Flame wars? SPAM? 
                    Nothing archived since 2009
*  oclug-board - Nothing since 2015, and we usually communicate via email. I'll
                 discuss this one a little more below.
*  oclug-events - Nothing since 2011
*  oclug-www - Nothing since 2013
*  oclug-www-errors - No archives at all
*  OffTopic - Nothing since 2004
*  Ottawa-school-of-it - Nothing since 2010
*  Photography-sig - Nothing since 2013
*  SIGS-L3GO - Active
*  Sysadmin - Nothing since 2014

Examining the mail system that feeds this, we have the following lists:

*  mailman:              "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman"
*  #oclug:               "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper post oclug"
*  oclug-announce:       "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper post oclug-announce"
*  oclug-events:         oclug-announce
*  oclug-www:            "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper post oclug-www"
*  oclug-board:          "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper post oclug-board"
*  linux-novice:         "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper post linux-novice"
*  oclug-test:           "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper post oclug-test"
*  #offtopic:            "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post offtopic"
*  linux:                "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post linux"
*  sysadmin:             "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post sysadmin"
*  photography-sig:      "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post photography-sig"
*  #ottawa-school-of-it: "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post ottawa-school-of-it"
*  oclug-www-errors:     oclug-www
*  sigs-l3go:            "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post sigs-l3go"

You can see from the above that oclug-events is an alias to oclug-announce
and that list is dead. oclug is commented out, so it discards messages, the 
same for off-topic and ottawa-school-of-it. oclug-www-error redirects to oclug-www.

I think that I should archive the inactive lists with something like mhonarc and 
make them a menu item from the top menu, something like "historical archive of 
mailing lists." 

That way I can remove them from the mailman interface and maintenance would go 
down accordingly.

As for the oclug-board list, I believe we used it for transparency and to allow
for group participation. As far as I'm concerned, we currently publish the minutes 
and communicate to the membership at large, most of whom do not care about the
politics, as we can see by the rush to volunteer to be on the board.

In the interests of openness, we should probably post something regarding the board 
meetings and that people are welcome to attend. I think a calendar that people can 
subscribe to would be more suitable, as we do not have a fixed location, date, or 
time for the board meetings.

Comments welcome.

I'd like a vote on this one. I think it makes sense and it allows for the easing into a lighter weight system for future management. I'm not sure how many of us are Mailman experts, so reducing that to just two lists will make the maintenance easier.

Result of Vote: Remove extraneous lists

Action items that come out of this are:

• Calendar system that allows subscriptions
• Archiving of the old lists and making them available
• Investigate upgrading Mailman to v3 or replace it with mlmmj

• Speaker: Dianne Skoll
  • Topic: Roaring Penguin's CanIt anti-spam software, architecture, and scaling tips and tricks
• Speaker: Scott Murphy
  • Topic: Scratching the Surface4

• Speaker: Bruce Davis ** Topic: What I learned at HTML 150 (tentative)
• Speaker: John Nash ** Topic: Caption confusion

• July 16, 13:00 at Strathcona Park
• We should have a demo of something - ideas? My drone is out, no longer allowed to fly it there.

• Speaker: Scott Murphy
  • Pi Night
    • Using a Raspberry Pi as a Software Defined Radio
    • Raspberry Pi FM transmitter

• Nothing yet

This is a live wish list. It should grow and shrink with the topics we come up with. It is good to have a reference so we don't lose possible topics. Feel free to add to the list.

• Use the update of the wiki as fodder for discussion?
• Blogging
• Tools for making graphics in a productive fashion
  • Ditaa as a possible option
  • Mermaid as a possible option
  • GraphViz
  • Dia
  • Even raw SVG production might be of interest
• Node.js
• MongoDB
• Arduino Talk (Peter S)
• AngularJS & VScode
• Platform independency for application users: Why doesn't my program work on my computer? - done
• MicroVAX (will be a topic after Scott gets it all working)
  • HW seems OK now that motherboard has been replaced
  • Issue getting the console working properly
• PDP8 emulator & PiDP8 Hardware Panel
  • Scott Murphy (when completed)
• Obsolete telephone reuse
  • Scott Murphy (has a project in the works)
• Virtual Box and Docker integration
• Setting up a Domain or Website ( for a wider audience)
• Phil Harvey - Exif tools
• Lightning talk (John):Avoiding Multiple Mailing accounts problems

Perhaps we could manage to come up with a schedule of repeating topics from this list. I pulled it from the past meetings list on the site. It does appear that we have a history of redoing topics at intervals, perhaps some formalization would be good. If we have enough repeats, maybe we could do one every three months over a two year period or something like that

• 2017 April Meeting AGM, Static Sites revisited and filesystem discussion
• 2017 March Meeting DTMF Generator on Rotary Phone & OS Agnostic Computing
• 2017 February Meeting Deep Neural Networks & GalliumOS on a Chromebook
• 2017 January Meeting Speech Synthesis & Linux on the Surface
• 2016 December Meeting PDF data extraction & What do we use Linux for?
• 2016 November Meeting Tiny Clusters & Portable Toolkits
• 2016 October Meeting Ransomware
• 2016 September Meeting Cancelled
• 2016 August Meeting Overview of Intellectual Property Issues in Open-Source Software, ongoing projects update
• 2016 July Meeting LITW 2016
• 2016 July Meeting Rescheduled: Block box testing and short dashing presentation
• 2016 June Meeting Block box testing and short dashing presentation
• 2016 May Meeting Presentation frustrations and Block box testing
• 2016 April Meeting AGM, IPv6 talk, Presentation issues and maybe more
• 2016 March Meeting (Updated) Scanning Woes, Pandoc bugs, Let's Encrypt
• 2016 February Meeting Libreoffice and more
• 2016 January Meeting Ansible talk
• 2015 December Meeting Distro Talk 2015
• 2015 November Meeting Malware Reverse Engineering
• 2015 October Meeting Short topics and open talk night
• 2015 September Meeting Cancelled
• 2015 August Meeting Using browsers securely
• 2015 LITW LITW 2015
• 2015 June Meeting From Latex to Epub, and in between
• 2015 May Meeting FIRST Robotics Competition
• 2015 April Meeting AGM and mutt presentation
• 2015 March Meeting The GNU EMACS Editor
• 2015 February Meeting Short Topics and BoF
• 2015 January Meeting Recent interesting legal news regarding open-source software
• 2014 December Meeting Vim Talk
• 2014 November Meeting BoF Session
• 2014 October Meeting Intro to Arduino
• 2014 September Meeting Open Topics and Swap Meet
• 2014 August Meeting A Short Introduction the Ecere SDK
• 2014 LITW Linux In The Wild 2014
• 2014 June Meeting BBQ, Beer, BOFs
• 2014 May Meeting Experiences with Modern Document Production
• 2014 April Meeting AGM and EEC Memory Talk
• 2014 March Meeting OO+R, systemd, UEFI installations and GPG key signing for interested persons
• 2014 February Meeting OpenOffice and R, GPG update
• 2014 January Meeting Open Discussion on UEFI
• 2013 December Meeting Regular expressions, asterPibx followup, presentation software, and BOFs
• 2013 November Meeting Virtualization Intro and Device Trees
• 2013 October Meeting Remastersys, Asterisk on Raspberry Pi, BoFs
• 2013 September Meeting Introduction to the Suckless Project
• 2013 August Meeting Using VMs for Special Purposes, SUSEstudio talk and BTRFS presentation
• 2013 July Meeting Linux in the Wild 2013
• 2013 June Meeting Too much RAM breaks Internet! News at 7!
• 2013 May Meeting OpenStack Cloud Software
• 2013 April Meeting Annual General Meeting
• 2013 March Meeting Output! One way or another!
• 2013 February Meeting Share, Share
• 2013 January Meeting Graphical output - newsletters in Linux
• 2012 December Meeting Email backup from an IMAP server
• 2012 November Meeting Creating an Oracle RAC Cluster in VirtualBox
• 2012 October Meeting GPG Key Signing
• 2012 September Meeting Android SDK!
• 2012 August Meeting Debian's got packages!
• 2012 LITW Linux in the Wild 2012
• 2012 June Meeting Programming devices, hands on
• 2012 May Meeting Wordpress for professionals, Gerbi-CMS
• 2012 April Meeting 2012 AGM + Games
• 2012 March Meeting Not your Gramma's “Dr. Who” robot!
• 2012 February Meeting Web site install fest!
• 2012 January Meeting January meeting canceled
• 2011 December Meeting Getting your next gig
• 2011 November Meeting Huxly Linux, Yocto! It's embedded!
• 2011 October Meeting The Edison Approach: Science helps the office
• 2011 September Meeting Linux Games and Other Fun
• 2011 August Meeting Distros, Window Managers, tools - Demo your fave!
• 2011 LITW Linux in the Wild
• 2011 June Tutorial Leavitt Memorial Seminar: The GIMP
• 2011 June Meeting VirtualBox on Ubuntu / Inner workings of a Darknet
• 2011 May Meeting OCLUG AGM, IPv6 summit report and discussion
• 2011 Special Event Ottawa IPv6 Summit
• 2011 April Meeting Python 2 and Python 3
• 2011 March Meeting Remote Access
• 2011 February Meeting Kernel Modules
• 2011 January Meeting PS3 Super Computing Cluster
• 2010 December Meeting BSD and Computers for Communities
• 2010 November Meeting expect-lite and Ubuntu hiccups
• 2010 October Meeting October Board Meeting
• 2010 October Meeting World Domination and Control, over USB
• 2010 Special Event Software Freedom Day
• 2010 September Meeting The R statistical language
• 2010 August Meeting GNews and GIMP
• 2010 LITW Linux in the Wild
• 2010 June Meeting GNU Lilypond and GPS in Linux
• 2010 May Meeting Disk Partitioning, Ubuntu LTS, Net Neutrality
• 2010 AGM OCLUG AGM, USB key Linux
• 2010 March Meeting Digital Photography with Linux
• 2010 February Meeting Real time and embedded Linux
• 2010 January Meeting Group51.org http://Group51.org and ethical hacking
• 2009 December Meeting Myth TV
• 2009 November Meeting Tracking code changes in a distributed environment
• 2009 October Meeting Virtualization panel
• 2009 Special Event Back to School With Linux
• 2009 September Meeting SED part 2 and Music production distros
• 2009 August Meeting SED stream editor
• 2009 LITW Linux in the Wild
• 2009 June Meeting Linux Distributions - Panel Discussion
• 2009 May Meeting New to Linux BOF summary and Regular Expressions
• 2009 Special Event End of School with Linux
• 2009 AGM Jamii OLPC, FOSSLC Summercamp, BOF Sessions
• 2009 March Meeting SETI and Wine
• 2009 February Meeting Australian Linux Conference, HDR photography
• 2009 January Meeting Linux and Photography
• 2008 December Meeting Shamir's Secret Sharing, QCad
• 2008 November Meeting Wordpress and etckeeper
• 2008 October Meeting Asterisk
• 2008 September Meeting OpenCOBOL and Django
• 2008 August Tutorial Kernel Walkthrough: The Boot Process
• 2008 August Meeting The REBOL thinking environment
• 2008 LITW Linux in the Wild
• 2008 June Tutorial Kernel Walkthrough: Source Tree Layout
• 2008 June Meeting Opera web browser, IPv6
• 2008 May Meeting Neuros OSD/Copyright Update, OSBR and Ingres
• 2008 AGM Annual General Meeting 2008
• 2008 March Meeting BIND Name Server Administration
• 2008 February Meeting Dell Ubuntu Linux, LCA09 Tasmania
• 2008 January Meeting Linux at White Wind Zen Community, Nokia Linux PDAs and Cell Phone Integration
• 2007 December Meeting Wireless Networking at Storm, OCLUG web tools
• 2007 November Meeting Remind Calendar Tool, ASUS eeePC
• 2007 October Meeting Backups with amanda 2.5.xx
• 2007 September Tutorial OpenWRT Linux on the WRT54GL
• 2007 September Meeting Linux on WRT54GL, Bembed, Webcams
• 2007 August Meeting Building a Coding Dojo, Future of OSS scientific software
• 2007 LITW Linux in the Wild
• 2007 June Meeting One Laptop per Child
• 2007 May Tutorial Redesigning the OCLUG web site with Django
• 2007 May Meeting Linux on laptops lighting talks
• 2007 April Tutorial Inkscape
• 2007 AGM Annual General Meeting 2007, Transgaming/Cedega
• 2007 March Tutorial Introduction to GIT
• 2007 March Meeting Xen and virtualization
• 2007 February Meeting Asterisk and VoIP, Fractal Poetry
• 2007 January Meeting Window Manager Bakeoff
• 2006 December Meeting Embedded Development with UML 2
• 2006 November Meeting Linux out of the box, National Capital Freenet
• 2006 October Meeting Corporate Services, SSH public key authentication
• 2006 July Meeting Smalltalk Application Server, TIPC
• 2006 AGM Annual General Meeting 2006, Urwid, mom and groff
• 2006 March Meeting Efficient Use of GIT
• 2006 February Meeting PostgreSQL
• 2006 January Meeting Lightning Talks

None

*Motion to adjourn: Kelly

*Seconded: John 20:40