August 14 2018 Glances, Nextcloud, Handshake and Brian Kernighan Meet

Brian demonstrated Glances, a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python, running in tmux on his server.

He then said that he had installed Nextcloud using a server running on a Raspberry Pi. This is relatively easy on a Raspberry Pi 2, less so on a Raspberry Pi 3. It involves downloading the server image onto a desktop computer, copying it onto an SD card, putting this in the Raspberry Pi, booting it and then updating the image.

The server needs a static IP which can be obtained from DynDNS or No-IP and port forwarding needs to be enabled.

He then demonstrated the end results of all this in his NextCloud installation which has options, among others, for storing files, contacts, calendars and images and also installing apps to run within NextCloud. He explained that you have to install an app like DAVdroid to connect to your contacts/calendar on another device.

Finally, he drew attention to Handshake which describes itself as ‘An experimental peer-to-peer root DNS.’

Darren mentioned Gres, a program with similar functionality to sed which he had found, but closer investigation shows that the last update was in September 2000.

John ended this shortened meeting by showing Brian Kernighan’s account of the creation of the book The C programming language. This is one of a series of short videos created at Nottingham University about aspects of the development of Unix (see this search query for the full list).

Past Meetings