Meetups/Infra/2025-11-24

Discussion of systemd, flock security/surveillance, AWS outage, GrapheneOS + android, SearXNG, and nb garden k8s cluster.

Introductions

• [name] - [background]. [goals for meetup, or interests to explore]

• Loren - cloud hosting
• Gwen -- here to learn
• Elan -- doing self-hosting, k8s. Trying to cause outages, and failing. (Daniel & I have set up some outage-watching web monitoring software.)
• Daniel - just set up a file server, would love to talk about. Cherry blossom festival -- recommend
• Alex -- bg in ML, no topics requested today. Chocolate popcorn
• Cynthia - retired physician, paying attention to all fields of endeavor, like to help people with non-western medicine. Android question -- Samsung distrust, bloatware. Graphene question.
• Mark - background in software, ai.
• Kevin - mister_name - here to learn, working with various forms of ML. Graphene OS & other android OSes if people have experience. Working with, impressed with, PyTorch recently.
• Derek -- programmer. This week looking into systemd.
• Lulu - interested in infra, not confident in definition, so here to learn
• Curtis - building some wearable tech with integrated ai, visited shenzhen too
• Robert - running graphene
• Jet - software extremist online, talk a lot. Do stuff with drones, learning about surveilance. Got hit by a car.

Lesson or Demo

• Read aloud: clarify for meetup. We are taking notes in a riseup pad (or I am--help appreciated, and links). We have meeting notes posted to the wiki. noisebridge.net, search Infra, or Meetups/Infra. (the Infrastructure page has a disambiguation link.)
• Shell, web services, self-hosting, networking!

• Systemd - derek

on boot, your bios loads up the os, has to find the services to run. 
That was SysV init, which was a bunch of scripts and symlinks.

Now, with systemd, everything is a unit. A unit is the broader category that includes services, devices, sockets, timers.  Units have associated configuration files that define how they operate.
- systemd.unit (see man) -- template instances

GNU utilities and commands related to systemd:
- systemd-analyze dot: outputs a graphviz dot language image of systemd unit dependencies
- systemd-analyze plot: outputs a waterfall graph of systemd initializations and maybe executions
- systemd-analyze dump: outputs units and the values of their parameters / variables
- systemd-analyze security: outputs a security assessment of units, with a rating from 0.0 to 10.0 and a keyword from the set {EXPOSED, MEDIUM, OK, PREDICATE, UNSAFE}
- systemctl status|start|stop|enable [--now]|disable
networkctl
resolvectl
systemd.unit -- what are all the types
systemd-analyze security
systemd config linters?

• PyTorch flexibility, ease at hand

Kevin has been exploring dhg -- deep hyper graph
Exploring a kaggle dataset, vehicle maintenance records, VINs, service.
Can then use clustering -- unsupervised learning
PyTorch xla - incompat
Apache Giraph discussion months ago prompted this exploration. Ported as Jraph to JAX backend. Sadly, both projects have been removed from life support.
Impressed with PyTorch capabilities--on any matrix. Wide support for matrix operations, on gpu

• Outages! Outages! Outages!

cloudflare (twice?)
 bot rules, crashed, file got too big
 failed 
 program parsing the file, written in rust. X.unwrap() used in production
 
aws outage
 https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/pes/

• • https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
    • https://gist.github.com/jbreckmckye/32587f2907e473dd06d68b0362fb0048
  • https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/11/18/down/

• Security skill - phone number confirmation.

• Wearable AI, Shenzhen

glasses, AR, dual-screen. Double the tech of meta glasses. Necklace with extra cameras
have some prototypes, building soon. A few companies.  friend 1 devices, others. 5 others.  life logger(s).
ring for input, eye tracking (alt to EEG)

why shenzhen?  quick output, lots of providers, quick process. lots of misdirection in shenzhen. poeple trying to redirect tech. looking for handshake help. some professors have lots of info. creating a hackathon.  prototypes, would like better, want to mod COTS tech.

scotty, StrangeParts, made videos about Shenzhen visits, sourcing parts.  LTT as well.

• Holiday week!
• Graphene OS / android oses -- robert running himself

privacy (& security) focused distribution of android operating system / AOSP
has features to 
does not grant default rights for apps to use: background process, network, camera, mic, 
great to e.g. be able to call your friends a car, on services that want your GPS location
a whole new world for pokemon go--cheating, unethical.  Hotly con

takeaways -- it's very easy to use, about as easy as google. As with anything, less secure, more easy. May have to make compromises. Can sandbox.

there are others
LineageOS - https://lineageos.org/
CalyxOS - https://calyxos.org/

• SearXNG -- jet -- https://docs.searxng.org/

who uses a search engine
everyone searches. i hate the ads. 
meta-search engine -- queries and aggregates from ddg, google, others
https://searx.space/
anonymized? 
open source, no ads, customizable

• NB garden k8s cluster - updates

things are running. blew away
can i put something on ther? how do i get in there?   we'll talk after
router thing, tunnel
if you can run it docker compose, you can run it here.
can we visit the site?  no, it's over tailscale, by end of tonight, yet

Outros

• alex - pixel 6 in bedside table for a while, waiting for, now inspired to load Graphene.
• jet - security stuff, surveillance project
• learn more about flock cameras -- apparently quite hackable, 30s and a stick. Ben Jordan video.
  • deflock site. All of their footage was deemed public record, and so can be FOIA-ed

https://deflock.me/map#map=18/37.762327/-122.418289

• sean - llm on jetson, more tooling bandend
• erik -- liked wearable convo, want to bring in 1996 wearable glasses working just fine to this day. we have not come very far, it makes me realize
• elan - want to try graphene, ensure banking stuff works
• - set up CopyParty server - want to share -- too many cool things to check
• f-lock - flock
• curtis - flock amera of interest
• kevin - like systemd unit instances, templates, docker compose. granular startup
• derek - systemd-analyse, dig into more
• lulu - took notes, lots to learn, how was k8s built

Questions, Discussion, or Coworking

• [Issue]

For next time

Readings & Exercises

• Readings
• Exercises

Join online

• Try it yourself!
  • Join libera.chat #nb-meetup-infra

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra