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Bandwidth for Video Conferencing

For the Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) I’ve run video conferences on Jitsi and BBB (see my previous post about BBB vs Jitsi [1]). One issue with video conferences is the bandwidth requirements.

The place I’m hosting my video conference server has a NBN link with allegedly 40Mb/s transmission speed and 100Mb/s reception speed. My […]

Qemu (KVM) and 9P (Virtfs) Mounts

I’ve tried setting up the Qemu (in this case KVM as it uses the Qemu code in question) 9P/Virtfs filesystem for sharing files to a VM. Here is the Qemu documentation for it [1].

VIRTFS=”-virtfs local,path=/vmstore/virtfs,security_model=mapped-xattr,id=zz,writeout=immediate,fmode=0600,dmode=0700,mount_tag=zz” VIRTFS=”-virtfs local,path=/vmstore/virtfs,security_model=passthrough,id=zz,writeout=immediate,mount_tag=zz”

Above are the 2 configuration snippets I tried on the server side. The first uses mapped xattrs […]

Links September 2020

MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1].

Debian Quick Image Baker – Debian VM images for various architectures [2].

Insightful article on Scientific American about how dental and orthodontic problems are caused by our modern lifestyle [3].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus Magazine about Intellectual Property [4]. He makes […]

Burning Lithium Ion Batteries

I had an old Nexus 4 phone that was expanding and decided to test some of the theories about battery combustion.

The first claim that often gets made is that if the plastic seal on the outside of the battery is broken then the battery will catch fire. I tested this by cutting the battery […]

Dell BIOS Updates

I have just updated the BIOS on a Dell PowerEdge T110 II. The process isn’t too difficult, Google for the machine name and BIOS, download a shell script encoded firmware image and GPG signature, then run the script on the system in question.

One problem is that the Dell GPG key isn’t signed by anyone. […]

More About the PowerEdge R710

I’ve got the R710 (mentioned in my previous post [1]) online. When testing the R710 at home I noticed that sometimes the VGA monitor I was using would start flickering when in some parts of the BIOS setup, it seemed that the horizonal sync wasn’t working properly. It didn’t seem to be a big deal […]

Setting Up a Dell R710 Server with DRAC6

I’ve just got a Dell R710 server for LUV and I’ve been playing with the configuration options. Here’s a list of what I’ve done and recommendations on how to do things. I decided not to try to write a step by step guide to doing stuff as the situation doesn’t work for that. I think […]

BBB vs Jitsi

I previously wrote about how I installed the Jitsi video-conferencing system on Debian [1]. We used that for a few unofficial meetings of LUV to test it out. Then we installed Big Blue Button (BBB) [2]. The main benefit of Jitsi over BBB is that it supports live streaming to YouTube. The benefits of BBB […]

Jitsi on Debian

I’ve just setup an instance of the Jitsi video-conference software for my local LUG. Here is an overview of how to set it up on Debian.

Firstly create a new virtual machine to run it. Jitsi is complex and has lots of inter-dependencies. It’s packages want to help you by dragging in other packages and […]

Links July 2020

iMore has an insightful article about Apple’s transition to the ARM instruction set for new Mac desktops and laptops [1]. I’d still like to see them do something for the server side.

Umair Haque wrote an insightful article about How the American Idiot Made America Unlivable [2]. We are witnessing the destruction of a once […]