Minutes 2024-11-21

1. Allen brought the HGST Drives to the meeting
   1. Hoping to tinker with the firmware to fix the firmware lock preventing them from working on our servers
   2. More info at Locked HGST drives
2. Presentation from Lucas on X11/Wayland!
   1. History of X
      1. Evolved from it's predecessor W
      2. Stallman was actually at MIT when X was being developed
         1. Recommended they use the GPL
         2. They decided not to, because working with Stallman was "challenging"
   2. X terminology
   3. Problems with X
   4. Wayland enters the scene
   5. History of Wayland
   6. What's a Compositor?
   7. X vs Wayland
      1. It's up to you!
      2. X typically has better compatibility
      3. Wayland typically has better latency and smoothness
3. Thoughts?
   1. Linux is very fragmented
      1. Wayland compositors have been criticized as inviting fragmentation
         1. KDE has their own implementation
         2. GNOME has their own implementation
         3. wlroots is used by most WMs, but even then projects like Hyprland are splitting off
         4. We may see a lot of fragmentation in the future
      2. Josh brings up why do we need this much fragmentation?
         1. This is basically the same argument the BSD guys used against Linux in the early 90's
         2. We have a bunch of different init systems
            1. systemd
            2. openrc
            3. runit
            4. upstart
            5. s6+66
            6. dinit
         3. Audio too
            1. ALSA, used to be standard but limited
            2. then JACK
            3. pulseaudio
            4. pipewire
         4. all the reverse shims for backwards compatibility
         5. We should just switch to plan9
         6. Make Zayland with ZXWayland and ZWayland for backwards compatibility
4. Drive flashing
   1. i forgor screwdriver
   2. Josh knows about a blog ost of someone doing something similar, says it's his "his favorite blog post"
5. Talking about Fall Break
   1. Dorms are like a ghost town
   2. A lot of classes were cancelled today and tomorrow, looks like profs want an early break too
6. Bad apple over telnet
   1. telnet lug.mtu.edu
   2. doesn't work off-campus
   3. Could we maybe get a whitelist?
   4. It's not even a 'real' telnet server, just sends static C char arrays for each frame
7. NCSA Infra
   1. They have their own internal mirrors server
      1. They host Rocky since they use it internally
      2. Maybe we can host Rocky?
      3. We were also asked to host Alma and Raspberry Pi, we plan to do it after the mirrors rebuild
   2. They're working on trying out XCP-NG
      1. Proxmox doesn't work when AD Groups have spaces in their names
      2. NCSA not very happy with proxmox rn
      3. I've also ran into issues with multi-tenant clusters
      4. Want to hear how it goes, LUG might want to switch over
      5. Proxmox is okay, but there's a lot of improvements that could be made