Meetups/Infra/2025-06-16

Discussed tonight: backups, WASM, guix, microcode, and security & reversing tools.

Introductions

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

• Loren / adam -- kadamom, shared meeting web notes
• Zacchae (real name, to support tracking) -- bg: reluctantly AI, proudly data science, sesquipedalian (sesqui- one and a half, ped- foot, alian-), things that compile to WASM. (never touch a browser, run on an iphone)
• Jet -- fav word: quine (coined in GEB), bg: robotics, drones, a lot of coding
• Alex -- bg: ML & stuff, no p. fav word: flotsam -- on waves (see also, jetsam,
• Max -- bg: software engineer, word, topic:

(astrology for men -- etymology, or economics, or macro economics

• Daniel - bg: computers, fav w: triumverate, k9.sh
• Chris -- design
• Wolf -- he/him -- obstreperous (loud & unruly -- stuck in head for years) -- bg, building infra, curious to hear people's thoughts on backing up. (usb sticks, syncthing -- solution for people who can't maintain a solution. "back in time" - UI on top of rsync. restic, borg.)
• Greg -- self-host a bunch of stuff, fav word: shlep (lug something heavy somewhere). backups, back into urbit recently
• Bob - interested in reverse engineering, and reverse-reverse engineering -- want to make instruction set stuff -- want to talk to Xilinx people. Word: quint -- sequence of 5 cards in the same suit
• Robert -- obsessed with computers in the same way some people are obsessed with sports, root for linux distros. interested in code for ai, over large datasets. fav word: kitsugi
• Matt -- disappeared from here for a year, just back. learned word: dint, bg: coming here for a while, know loren, did sys admin stuff, looking for a job. Wrote an app based on LSM tree database, does event distribution. Moved on to compiler stuff. (Jet - web hooks)
• Manuch (sp) -- visiting SF for a week. Check out for a few minutes. Recent CS grad, at univ, XR developer in Unity, full stack, react/frontend, dotNet.
• Artem -- interested in, hw toothbrush -- meetup.

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!

• backups -- how to

who does it | who thinks they should | who has tried it | who has recovered backups for someone else (rober - pg autorestore)

greg - trueNAS 12 TB - early digital pictures --

zacchaeus -- photos I / friends have taken -- only things I care about.
syncthing, on bare git repository -- (wolf: can/have gotten unlucky)

was backing up to wasabi/S3. borg did not have support for writing to S3.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_programs#Chunk-based_increments https://leastauthority.com/community-matters/open-source-development/ !!

borg, restic
robert -- history of notes added in org-mode

wolf -- backups onto FAT, with rsync. self-taught, self-radicalized onto OpenBSD.
(the reason she switched to OpenBSD -- was the printer ran out of toner. Before that, Mac OS 7.1 ... .)  

https://eylenburg.github.io/os_familytree.htm

• WASM -- zacchae

https://spritelyproject.org/ -- social web, ActivityWeb Scheme-to-WASM compiler

goblins -- nice support for building distributed social web apps https://spritely.institute/hoot/

how should we get started, what should we know first? it's not fully featured yet. There is a live REPL demo, on the /hoot/ homepage, WASM.

How do I use a scheme repl on a flight. Web worker, refreshable.

Building a card game. p2p gaming

• guix -- compare to stage X. https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex

https://git.distrust.co/public/bootproof

microcode -- x86, is a lingua franca, microcode, handles translation to chip-specific instructions

"x86 bytecode is substantially more RISC than x86 appears."
microcode security / knowing what you're running
https://github.com/intel/Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-Files

this week -- AMD CVE this week.

how do you trade this off against -- e.g. Spectre 

https://rr-project.org/ -- reversible debugger

https://github.com/radareorg/radare2

https://binvis.io/#/

https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf (pdf page 10 Doc 18 -- "dependency hell")

radare2 demo -- looking at /bin/cat https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/blob/master/doc/intro.md

https://embeddedbits.org/reverse-engineering-my-routers-firmware-with-binwalk-embeddedbits/

https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk/tree/master?tab=readme-ov-file

https://github.com/LaurieWired/GhidraMCP?tab=readme-ov-file#ghidramcp
suggestion -- if you have a k8s cluster -- hook it up to an mcp -- use that, talk to it in english.

json-to-json agent -- most of my job, web server to db, or web server to web server
using llms, data migration is now a completely automated task for me

void editor -- cursor / windsurf alternative
zed, another editor

https://hypothesis.rtfd.io/

Takeaways

• free some firmware with binwalk and radare2
• one-way syncthing. (UI) -- see also, guix-conf available. also have encryption -- can save without viewing.
• setting up backups!
  • survive fire & theft

• copia

• check out void editor
• advice on hardening, softening discord bot, status watcher. SSH with a password.

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