WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:16.080 So, Colin Dean is going to talk about Nick's OS and how we've $60 second turn his laptop 00:16.080 --> 00:19.760 in a cellular router, which sounds like a cool topic. 00:19.760 --> 00:20.760 The stage is yours. 00:20.760 --> 00:21.760 I have fun. 00:21.760 --> 00:22.760 Thank you very much. 00:22.760 --> 00:23.760 Great. 00:23.760 --> 00:35.640 We're going to talk about running Nick's OS on a really cheap laptop. 00:35.640 --> 00:36.880 My name is Colin Dean. 00:36.880 --> 00:43.320 I have been a programmer for about 27 years, paid to do it for about 20 years this year. 00:43.320 --> 00:46.240 And I really enjoy it. 00:46.240 --> 00:53.200 I come from Pittsburgh in the United States, metropolitan area of about 2.5 million people, 00:53.200 --> 00:58.040 and Northern Appalachia in an area of the US we call the Rust Belt. 00:58.040 --> 01:01.480 So my accent slips a little bit, sorry. 01:01.480 --> 01:03.360 We have our own accent. 01:03.360 --> 01:05.520 This is not my first Faustin talk. 01:05.520 --> 01:10.880 I first spoke at the 2021 Faustin that was online, and I've been coming out for, I think 01:10.880 --> 01:16.480 this is my third year in person and my fifth Faustin overall. 01:16.480 --> 01:19.280 You can generally find me hanging out at the Homebury table. 01:19.280 --> 01:24.080 I've been a Homebury contributor for about 12 years, and I'm finishing my first term 01:24.080 --> 01:27.720 on our Board of Directors a few. 01:27.720 --> 01:31.760 So hello from a fellow packaging project, although I know Nick's is much more than just 01:31.760 --> 01:34.160 packaging. 01:34.160 --> 01:36.320 Please do save your questions to the end. 01:36.320 --> 01:40.760 I'm going to be really blessed for time, and I want to try to get to everything. 01:40.760 --> 01:42.040 Also, I'm a Nick's newbie. 01:42.040 --> 01:46.960 I'm just learning Nick's, and there may be things in here that are a little bit strange 01:46.960 --> 01:52.400 to you because you may be learning them a long time ago. 01:52.400 --> 01:54.400 Me and Linux give back a long time. 01:54.400 --> 01:59.000 I've used Linux in various forms since about 2001. 01:59.000 --> 02:03.040 Started with Trostix Secure Linux, Long Dead Destro. 02:03.040 --> 02:10.320 It's been about a decade using primarily Ubuntu before switching mostly to MacOS and Windows 02:10.320 --> 02:11.320 for work. 02:11.320 --> 02:16.320 Currently, I've split my time between elementary and Chrome OS, you can see I'm using 02:16.320 --> 02:22.640 a Chromebook up here, but haven't had an unexplored interest in Nick's OS for quite a long 02:22.640 --> 02:23.640 time. 02:23.640 --> 02:28.880 Going back to about 2017, it was the first time that I heard about them. 02:28.880 --> 02:36.600 About a year ago, I instantly picked up Nick's OS when I spotted a clear opportunity 02:36.600 --> 02:44.600 to treat this shiny new Nick's OS installation as an appliance of sorts. 02:44.600 --> 02:48.040 There's the use case that I was looking for. 02:48.040 --> 02:53.040 So this talk, well, I'm not full of this talk, but this talk is about the system I threw 02:53.040 --> 02:57.840 together that was supposed to be very temporary and ended up lost in several months. 02:57.840 --> 03:04.200 It grabbed some unused hardware with a very specific advantage, LTE modem, to turn into a 03:04.200 --> 03:07.160 gateway for a mining house. 03:07.160 --> 03:13.200 I'm a huge fan of addressing problems through describing them as a problem a diagnosis 03:13.200 --> 03:14.200 and a remedy. 03:14.200 --> 03:19.200 If you search for my name, calling dean, and problem diagnosis remedy, you'll find a bunch 03:19.200 --> 03:22.320 of stuff that I wrote on the internet about it. 03:22.320 --> 03:29.800 So just talk, I'll be presenting in this style from the most part. 03:29.800 --> 03:37.440 So in February of 2024, about a year ago, just a couple of weeks after falls done last 03:37.440 --> 03:44.240 year, I finalized the purchase of a house, about a 10-minute drive from where I'd lived 03:44.240 --> 03:45.880 for about 12 years. 03:45.880 --> 03:53.920 I immediately started renovation on that house built in 1968 with a very high-end furnace. 03:53.920 --> 04:00.360 The previous owners were very wealthy CEO of a local dairy company and had put in a spare 04:00.360 --> 04:04.800 no expense in 1987. 04:04.800 --> 04:10.240 You can imagine what a 40-year-old furnace in the United States is working with, especially 04:10.240 --> 04:12.240 in a very cold area like Pittsburgh. 04:12.240 --> 04:20.040 I was too really good though, because it could heat the whole about 105 square meter 04:20.040 --> 04:28.080 house in about 40 minutes from 15 degrees Celsius to 20 degrees Celsius, I guess that's 04:28.080 --> 04:30.920 pretty good. 04:30.920 --> 04:34.880 I wanted to be able to control it remotely, because I also didn't want to pay to heat 04:34.880 --> 04:41.840 two houses, and it would be a game changer for working there comfortably, because it could 04:41.840 --> 04:43.600 get very cold. 04:43.600 --> 04:52.040 February and March in Pittsburgh is around 0 to negative 10, sometimes negative 20 Celsius, 04:52.040 --> 04:54.040 so you can get pretty chilly. 04:54.040 --> 04:56.760 I also wanted to know when packages were coming. 04:56.760 --> 05:00.840 We were going to have so much new stuff delivered to the house that we were renovating 05:00.840 --> 05:04.280 that I wanted to know when it arrived so that I could know if I could go immediately 05:04.280 --> 05:07.760 start working with something got here. 05:07.800 --> 05:12.960 The cheapest reason about internet service that we could find was about $50 a month for 05:12.960 --> 05:16.400 a 300-megabit line. 05:16.400 --> 05:26.200 At that price, I also had another option that was a T-Mobile cellular service, but it's 05:26.200 --> 05:32.840 10 gigabyte data cap was too little for the expected usage of the one webcam that I was 05:32.840 --> 05:36.800 going to have running in there. 05:36.840 --> 05:41.120 T-Mobile's data cap wasn't going to be good. 05:41.120 --> 05:49.000 Verizon offered a one of our local fiber provider offered a 300-megabit plan with no 05:49.000 --> 05:51.920 data cap, but I didn't need that much. 05:51.920 --> 05:59.040 I only needed about 32 kilobytes per second in order to have the webcam running 24-7, 05:59.040 --> 06:03.720 and I needed like a half a kilobite per second for the thermostat average to a month. 06:03.960 --> 06:09.480 I didn't have a mobile hotspot device available to me, and everything that I saw that 06:09.480 --> 06:13.680 I could get quickly was just kind of crap, throw away hardware. 06:13.680 --> 06:20.720 I didn't have some extra unused Raspberry Pi's, but none of them had LTE modems. 06:20.720 --> 06:29.400 Then I remembered that I had three laptops that I bought at the mech over electronics 06:29.520 --> 06:32.520 in the US these days called MicroCenter. 06:32.520 --> 06:43.160 I bought these laptops for only $60 a piece, new during the 2022 recession of the COVID pandemic 06:43.160 --> 06:45.160 in the United States. 06:45.160 --> 06:50.160 I remember that they had this strangely expensive feature in LTE modem. 06:50.160 --> 06:55.800 Why would you put an LTE modem in such a cheap laptop, especially when that LTE modem 06:55.880 --> 07:00.680 was $25 on the used market, and these laptops were $60. 07:00.680 --> 07:03.400 How are they making any profit here? 07:03.400 --> 07:07.880 Well, it turns out they probably weren't, and that's why the companies in the business anymore. 07:07.880 --> 07:12.360 But these laptops were pretty low and spec. 07:12.360 --> 07:15.080 I'll talk a little bit more about their specs later. 07:15.080 --> 07:20.920 All they really needed was horsepower, storage, and compute. 07:20.920 --> 07:25.320 Raspberry Pi's were kind of hard to find, come by, and I thought, hey, 07:25.320 --> 07:28.760 when I buy these and just use them for a cluster, you know, I'll build a day off 07:28.760 --> 07:33.000 cluster, I've always wanted it, I forgot about it. 07:33.000 --> 07:37.640 It's not very ambitious project, just put in a box someplace. 07:37.640 --> 07:39.880 After some searching, I found the laptops. 07:39.880 --> 07:45.800 With some more research, I found another wireless provider mint mobile, could give me 07:45.800 --> 07:53.560 a $15 a month for 10 gigabytes, which wasn't going to be enough, but if you read the 07:53.560 --> 08:00.600 fine print for once, you'd find that they just reduced your speed, and they reduced your speed 08:01.560 --> 08:08.760 120 kilobytes per second, 120 kilobytes per second, I only needed 32. 08:10.520 --> 08:11.720 Okay, I'll take the free bandels. 08:13.240 --> 08:15.480 But Nixon also was the thing that completed the idea. 08:15.480 --> 08:23.320 I wanted to treat this like as an appliance, and Nixon was a pledge of a single configuration file 08:23.320 --> 08:29.080 for a system, it was very attractive, so I decided to see what the prestige would deliver. 08:31.880 --> 08:33.080 So turn into this. 08:33.080 --> 08:36.840 Can I actually define an entire router in one file? 08:38.520 --> 08:42.600 Having built a router distro for my college graduation project, I knew a thing or two about the 08:42.600 --> 08:43.960 components that I'd need. 08:43.960 --> 08:49.640 Need things like DACP, DNS, some stuff to control the firewall, and master it in 08:50.600 --> 08:57.400 whatever, didn't need to be fancy, this was a network for a webcam, you know, that was it. 08:59.800 --> 09:02.680 And shortly somebody else had done this in next OS. 09:04.280 --> 09:07.480 And eventually it took me a lot, but I did find somebody else had done something similar. 09:08.600 --> 09:14.040 Here's a somewhat picture of the actual beast in situ. 09:15.000 --> 09:16.920 Evolved three is the name of the company. 09:17.640 --> 09:19.160 Mystro is the name of the model. 09:19.160 --> 09:24.120 It's got a 29 centimeter screen, keyboard, the track pad. 09:25.880 --> 09:27.960 Our speakers are all step above garbage. 09:29.240 --> 09:35.880 But for the elementary school students who were using these in schools in the U.S. during the pandemic, 09:36.440 --> 09:39.400 it was just enough for what they needed, and that's what mattered. 09:40.360 --> 09:46.040 Has two USB ports on the side, USB 2.0 over there, USB 3.0 over here, 09:46.840 --> 09:49.800 and those would be able to work around all those limitations. 09:51.240 --> 09:54.360 The Ethernet adapter would just plug into the switch. 09:56.040 --> 10:01.000 And the USB Wi-Fi was used to connect to the internal network, so I could actually get packages. 10:02.440 --> 10:03.880 Everybody loves a good board shot. 10:04.680 --> 10:12.600 It's got an Intel cell-on quad core at 1.1 gigahertz, 4 gigs of RAM, 64 gigs storage. 10:14.440 --> 10:19.080 I'm come to learn while setting up that the Wi-Fi card in this is rather ace of terror, 10:19.080 --> 10:21.640 and the drivers are not already in the corner, not in the curl. 10:22.680 --> 10:27.000 I gave about a 10-minute try to build a next package for those drivers. 10:27.000 --> 10:27.800 Couldn't do it. 10:27.800 --> 10:28.760 Move done. 10:28.760 --> 10:29.960 Got the USB driver. 10:29.960 --> 10:31.880 USB Wi-Fi adapter implaked it in. 10:32.840 --> 10:34.680 I also love that it had a battery. 10:34.680 --> 10:37.960 I mean, how many people's routers have a battery in it? 10:39.800 --> 10:41.320 That was going to be really useful. 10:41.320 --> 10:45.480 As we knew, we were going to be toggling the electricity in the house frequently. 10:46.280 --> 10:49.720 Sometimes the whole house, maybe just a circuit, and this was going to move around, 10:49.720 --> 10:51.640 based on what, where we were working on. 10:51.640 --> 10:55.800 So I wanted to have the internet working, even if we had the electricity off for a couple of hours. 10:56.760 --> 11:01.320 It also saved me the runny to buy a UPS. 11:03.160 --> 11:04.840 So these are the values that I've decided. 11:05.880 --> 11:08.920 I wanted an inexpensive hardware with two back-up devices available. 11:09.320 --> 11:09.960 Great done. 11:11.160 --> 11:13.720 We produced a book configuration, something went wrong. 11:13.720 --> 11:16.360 I had the entire configuration on a flash drive. 11:17.720 --> 11:20.760 And then minimal maintenance, I didn't really need to update it. 11:20.760 --> 11:25.640 Yeah, okay, security could be a concern, but this is a network for a webcam. 11:26.200 --> 11:29.400 And there's only going to live for three to four months. 11:29.400 --> 11:33.080 So any big security updates, I wasn't going to be that worried about. 11:34.920 --> 11:37.080 Most importantly, it had to be partner compatible. 11:39.080 --> 11:42.120 It had to reboot cleanly and work immediately on reboot. 11:42.120 --> 11:44.040 No human intervention, necessary. 11:44.920 --> 11:48.600 No Linux administration, certainly no next administration, 11:48.600 --> 11:54.360 just had to turn off and on again in order to be working again. 11:55.880 --> 11:59.240 And this did happen several times where we left the electricity off too long and the battery 11:59.240 --> 12:03.800 drained, and then as soon as it became back up, it came right back up and we had internet again. 12:06.920 --> 12:10.200 So I'll show you the next configuration, just because it's so short. 12:11.400 --> 12:16.520 This is the hardware configuration that next, when I installed, next OS through the installer, 12:16.520 --> 12:17.800 I didn't have to touch anything. 12:17.800 --> 12:23.560 It worked great. It's a very basic hardware, you know, off the shelf, nothing custom in here. 12:26.200 --> 12:28.920 Again, nothing special, auto-detect for the win. 12:31.480 --> 12:39.000 I did find that I needed to enable network manager to best play with the LTE modem while studying it up. 12:39.560 --> 12:45.080 The one thing I couldn't figure out how to do in NYX was to set the network manager 12:46.200 --> 12:50.120 cellular access point name. The only thing that I couldn't figure out how to do. 12:50.840 --> 12:57.880 I also want to desktop environment because I was going to be setting this up on the machine itself. 12:57.880 --> 13:04.840 So I wanted to be able to use Firefox and the tech senator on this 29 or 29 centimeter screen. 13:06.680 --> 13:10.360 As a odd constraint in working in the system, you're going to be using. 13:10.680 --> 13:17.320 User was an interesting basic stuff. 13:18.840 --> 13:21.400 These are the packages that I found that I needed along the way. 13:23.160 --> 13:27.080 Especially if tool and contract tools, just to see what was going over the network, 13:27.080 --> 13:29.000 I wanted to see what the webcam was actually doing. 13:29.000 --> 13:34.200 See if it was actually sending a 32 kilobytes per second reliably if it was bursty. 13:34.920 --> 13:35.880 Now I don't remember. 13:38.520 --> 13:41.560 I wanted SSH just in case I needed to manage it remotely. 13:43.320 --> 13:46.360 There's nothing on this network of import to anybody. 13:48.520 --> 13:50.120 I wanted to upgrade it manually. 13:53.400 --> 14:00.760 Basic router configuration and then some serious stuff. 14:01.560 --> 14:07.480 Setting static IP address on the wireless or on the wire network adapter and then setting the 14:07.480 --> 14:09.000 LTE modem to use DECP. 14:10.360 --> 14:15.400 I tried some more complicated firewall rules but ultimately just fell back to really basic stuff 14:15.400 --> 14:19.400 and that worked a lot better than my 20-year-old memories of IP change. 14:21.160 --> 14:26.360 And then lastly, let's give the land some DNS and DECP with DNS mask. 14:27.080 --> 14:31.720 I tried a few different services for DECP. 14:31.720 --> 14:34.200 Eventually just fell back to using DNS mask. 14:34.200 --> 14:37.320 One of the use key, but couldn't. 14:39.320 --> 14:42.520 And then to complete it, this was all the firewall that I actually ended up needing. 14:43.320 --> 14:43.960 This is great. 14:48.840 --> 14:51.160 In practice, I'm getting towards the end of things here. 14:51.480 --> 14:56.200 The LTE coverage ended up being enough. 14:56.920 --> 14:58.920 The new house is on a little bit of the hill. 14:59.560 --> 15:03.400 I can see the tower that I'm pretty sure is the tower that's connecting to. 15:04.280 --> 15:08.600 And it was enough for a webcam and a doorbell. 15:09.240 --> 15:15.240 Really a doorbell camera and a webcam eventually and the thermostat. 15:15.560 --> 15:20.600 Eventually we had some, I think I bought it over like a Google assistant so that I could 15:20.600 --> 15:22.920 hear the doorbell ring, it was a Nest doorbell. 15:25.080 --> 15:27.560 Three-plate. It was enough. 15:27.560 --> 15:32.120 You know, the LTE connections in Pittsburgh are about 20 megabytes per second. 15:32.840 --> 15:33.640 Certainly enough. 15:35.480 --> 15:39.320 I had some concerns about using LTE for home service, 15:40.360 --> 15:42.520 having had wired internet my entire life. 15:43.560 --> 15:44.520 But this one. 15:46.600 --> 15:48.520 And some takeaways, of course. 15:49.080 --> 15:54.360 I'm impressed by how little work I had to do to make this work. 15:55.000 --> 15:57.400 That was as a new to Nick's. 15:58.280 --> 15:59.880 That was really cool. 15:59.880 --> 16:02.760 No, I called it Svelte. 16:02.760 --> 16:07.880 I was explaining to my partner what made it so Svelte. 16:08.520 --> 16:12.120 And because it was thin, it was 95 lines. 16:12.680 --> 16:15.560 Well, I showed you there, it was a distillation of it, but it was really 16:16.200 --> 16:17.240 most of the configuration. 16:19.160 --> 16:21.160 There's 95 lines. 16:25.160 --> 16:26.920 For some reason, I also installed audio. 16:26.920 --> 16:30.840 I don't know why. Maybe because at some point I had to watch them YouTube videos or something. 16:33.640 --> 16:37.720 I remember some guard wheels keeping me from completely messing up. 16:39.240 --> 16:43.480 If I had, you know, a misplaced circle one. 16:43.480 --> 16:45.320 Some basics that we appreciate now. 16:45.960 --> 16:51.560 And still took a lot of searching and experimentation to arrive at the final working configuration. 16:52.280 --> 16:57.720 Some of my reference material was out of date only by about a year, but a year is a long time in Nick's. 16:59.400 --> 17:07.160 One of my biggest mistakes, mostly user error, underestimating how much bandwidth running 17:07.160 --> 17:10.680 I was at Nick's end of apply. 17:11.560 --> 17:13.400 The application command I can't remember at the moment. 17:13.960 --> 17:21.800 And pulling down a whole lot of packages, a couple gigabytes of package on a 10 gigabyte month with plan kind of hurt. 17:23.800 --> 17:28.600 And I got burned by not enabling or not disabling automatic updates early on too. 17:32.120 --> 17:36.600 What I also found was that I wanted more documentation, especially like in line documentation. 17:37.000 --> 17:44.440 And I really wanted some kind of an editor for the next configuration that could give me the documentation 17:44.440 --> 17:48.840 and the available options for every possible thing that I could set. 17:48.840 --> 17:52.520 That would have made my life as Nick's new, a little bit easier. 17:54.520 --> 18:00.440 It took about six hours in total to build this, including reading documentation and examples. 18:00.440 --> 18:05.000 That's still really awesome. Having built that router gesture of myself from scratch. 18:06.600 --> 18:10.040 Condensing approximately three months of work into six hours is really cool. 18:14.440 --> 18:21.320 About three hours of maintenance over six months. That's pretty cool. That ticks the box on the minimum administration. 18:24.760 --> 18:31.160 What's next? The old house. The one I just moved out of is going to get this set up quite literally when I get back from fondsdom. 18:32.120 --> 18:41.000 And then the massive inspiration for this work is Matt Layer. If Matt, if you're in this room and you're seeing this presentation, thank you, you are a god. 18:43.800 --> 18:45.400 That's it. Thanks, Yens. 18:52.360 --> 18:55.880 Thank you very much. Are there any questions about this presentation? 18:56.680 --> 18:57.880 Probably take one question. 19:02.120 --> 19:11.000 I found that they told us about that. I guess this goes out there, or on this there are like a nice way to get a list of available options in Nick's illness or an ex-starvan. 19:13.000 --> 19:15.000 It is repeat the question, do you? 19:15.000 --> 19:23.000 Yes. If Domen's asking if there are ways to generate a list of the options that are available, 19:24.600 --> 19:27.800 search through the options to see if, see what's available. 19:28.680 --> 19:30.520 I don't know the question. 19:32.360 --> 19:36.600 Yeah, that's searching through the documentation as about it and reading code. 19:38.920 --> 19:45.960 So, we do have time for more questions. I have one question. Speak up for the next. 19:48.040 --> 19:52.280 The second, like not the next talk, but the talk after that. Ramsey, he's just dressing here. 19:52.840 --> 19:55.080 All right, you're back. I can see you. Thank you very much. 19:56.040 --> 19:58.040 You already have some experience? 20:02.360 --> 20:04.360 How's that any further questions? Thank you. 20:10.520 --> 20:18.920 Mostly just running updates, like taking the machine to my other house, running updates, just to help it. 20:19.880 --> 20:25.160 And just making sure the LTE not him was working. I'm actually looking at it. 20:26.440 --> 20:32.600 Like looking at the motor, but looking at the machine is really minimal. 20:32.600 --> 20:34.840 Yeah, I probably could have not done anything. 20:34.840 --> 20:38.600 So the question was, what are you doing in those three hours? 20:38.600 --> 20:41.160 Just repeat, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the question. 20:41.160 --> 20:42.840 What is that? What are you doing in the three hours? 20:42.840 --> 20:45.960 Just give a nice few feet to talk to the speaker after this talk. Thank you very much. 20:45.960 --> 20:47.560 Another one. I have a glass for the ticket, please. 20:48.920 --> 20:51.880 Thank you very much.