BOP Linux User Group - July 16
Wandered over to the BOPLUG meeting held in LJ Hookers on Cameron and 8th in Tauranga - the first Tuesday each month at 7:00pm.
A friendly bunch with wide ranging interest in all things Linux - Robert, John, Denver, Fridolin, Craig, Trevor, Chris - the group includes quite a few more who didn't make this session.
Denver runs the NZ Debian Repo - 160G for Jessie alone. He got into it because there was no MX repo in NZ. He has links to http://www.basestation.nz in Tauranga - a start-up innovation meetup place - (Chris is a founder?). Denver has more hardware than the nearest Uni - HP Enterprise servers - 3 new, and 4 old if I heard correctly. He worked with Mike in Katikati - Mike is well known - I think this might be Michael Doerner of http://www.technologywise.co.nz. I think Denver now works at Full Flavour http://fullflavour.nz/ which looks like a small ISP.
Chris is the Hippie Hacker - he's been using Debain since 1.3 - Bo, 1997 (oh the nostalgia - I'm a mere newbie as I started with v2.2 Potato in 2000). It was freezing and he was barefoot, so I think he has hippie cred. Here is his github https://github.com/hh - he ran a docker-compose demo to set up gitlab mattermost and jenkins in a container. We got gitlab and mattermost. It was interactive - and worked :). In particular he demonstrated how OAuth2 tokens from other public sources could be used to authenticate against the services in the container. Jenkins was left for another day - nuff said, ironic that Jenkins before the recent v2 is awkward to configure.
Chris talked a bit about the issues with security / trust and Docker - he seemed to indicate that Docker provided some form of image vetting - I'm not sure if I agree.
John followed up with a brief talk on sharing secrets. It resolved down to a system whereby secrets are protected by shares, and a predefined number of shares can be combined to reveal the secret. John recommended we look at the Adi Shamir (of RSA fame) solution for secret-share systems. John also spoke about secretfs - a FUSE system that can be used to protect information. It sounded like links to components of decryption keys that are carried on USB keys or installed locally combine to give access. No USB-key and no access. Lets you have secure information at home or work, but only the holder of the USB-key can reveal the fs.
During the wind-up we chatted about upcoming projects and things of interest.
Chris talked about LimeSDF - https://www.crowdsupply.com/lime-micro/limesdr - a software defined radio, and also https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip as being on his horizon.
Fridolin mentioned that he was interested in something to do with CCTV - maybe hes going to opensource an AI with face and gait recognition?
Affable.