June 12 2017:Guacamole, test-driven development, Ansible and Wireguard Meet
As no-one had prepared anything,
Brian mentioned that his search for a replacement for Tomboy had led him to Apache Guacamole which is currently an Apache Incubator project.
Darren introduced test driven development in which you start by writing a test to test the code and check that that works before you start writing the code. After you have written the code, you run the tests to check that it does what you want it to. Then you repeat the process for each new element of the code.
This led into a discussion of D, which builds on C++ but is intended to improve on it, and Haskell.
Oliver mentioned that he was doing a lot of his work with Ansible which allows him to manage Windows computers from Linux. Like SALT, it uses YAML and enables him to have everything in sync; there are also modules for routers and so on. He learned it through Linux Academy and stressed that you can start learning to use it with really simple things.
He mentioned that Aptana can convert Tomboy notes to Markdown.
Brian hadn’t been too impressed with Nextcloud; so we looked at Pydio, formerly AjaXplorer.
From this discussion Oliver mentioned Tmux, which allows you to run terminal simultaneously and receive notifications from terminals. It also remembers if a connection is dropped and reconnects seamlessly. John H added that it is recommended for command line updates to openSUSE.
We noted that Google is planning an ad-blocker for Chrome based on the recommendations of the Coalition for Betters Ads, a group of mainly advertisers frustrated that annoying and intrusive ads are giving them a bad name.
Oliver then shared a presentation about Wireguard, a new secure VPN tunnel to replace OpenVPN and IPsec. It uses UDP, is configured using wg or wg-quick and existing resources such as ip and iptables. Configuration files can be stored in /etc/wireguard/vpn0.conf while static public keys provide the identities and, unless an authenticated connection is made, the endpoints remain invisible. The software must be on both endpoints.
We then turned to Google’s plans to make it easier for users to update Android ’phones by reconfiguring the software. John H commented that he had been astonished at this because Gary Kildall had created CP/M in the 1970s to enable hardware manufacturers to customise the hooks on the hardware side and software developers to be assured of a consistent interface whatever the hardware on which CP/M was installed.
We finished by discussing ways of running git including Cgit and Gitea.