May: Infiniband and Botnets

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Topic 1/2: Infiniband Demonstration

Speaker: Stephen Worthington

Comparing 40 Gbit/s Infiniband and 2.5 Gbit/s Ethernet between two PCs.

Topic 2/2: Self-hosting, self-defense

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Through March and April this year, Tom’s cgit instance was getting hammered with requests by what looked like an enormous botnet of nearly three million IPs, each making only one or two requests, crippling the server and making conventional IP address blocking impossible. He’ll run through the whole sordid story, and talk about how to mitigate attacks on self-hosters by a new generation of threats.

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April: LLMs and Grafana

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 9 April 2025

Topic 1/2: Experimenting with self hosting open source LLMs

Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue

Proprietary LLMs and their effects on the Internet have been a hot topic on the PLUG Discord of late. Richard has been experimenting with open source LLMs on his own hardware, which might just help to bring some balance back to the universe…

Topic 2/2: Metrics and Grafana

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Chris will return to talk more about homelab monitoring and metrics, this time using popular open source graphing tool Grafana. He’ll show how to use and view your server’s and docker containers’ info therein.

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March: Slackware and Lindows/Linspire

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Topic 1/2: My first Linux – Slackware

Speaker: Nick Skarott

We all started with something different, but did I start in the wrong way? Nick takes a trip down memory lane revisiting the distribution he cut his Linux teeth on: Slackware.

Topic 2/2: The Distro That Made Microsoft Chuck Its Toys – Lindows/Linspire

Speaker: Brendon Green

Brendon goes for another live install of a controversial distribution – The only one to make Microsoft chuck its toys so bad that Mr Softy took the distro maintainers to court! It’s time to look at Lindows, and its modern equivalent Linspire.

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