Meetups/Infra/2026-06-29

(Preamble:

   = Meetup - Infra =
   https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra
   https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra/2026-..-.. )

2026-06-29 m Meetups/Infra

(TODO summary)

Introductions

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

• Zacchae - going to germany to give a lightning talk - impt-ly: it's motivating me to build the thing to give a talk about it
• Null - might have some stuff to talk about, will come up
• Heather - full stack developer, have worked there professionaly, might shift into something less AI-senstive. As a linux gal, often

• Doug - about to enter work prison, like touching computer

• Frank - here to talk about computers
• Renaud - here to learn
• Fidget / Max - I'm doing self-hosting, and I want to do more of it - I know of a Noise Garden, and I would love to help out, can't promise too much
• Erik - we have 2 new NoiseGarden members (nodes) - dual xeon, 40 cores, and a NAS - has 20TB online - currently attempted to download USPTO dataset (11TB) - 2
• Elan - backend engineer - recently dabbling in "cloud" engineering, cute
• Loren - backend - cloud engineer - dabbling in the NoiseGarden cluster

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!

• DJB (https://cr.yp.to/) -

ietf process - concerns raised by DJB & others about 

PQC IETF TLS working group has contention Security advocates request using two signatures to cover if a cryptograph break occurs, NSA opposes the design with no argument of how a single signature increases security leaving only exploitation as a surmised motivation

   https://x.com/vpnet_official/status/2071650601188897084  
   https://action.cr.yp.to    https://nsa.2026.action.cr.yp.to/  
   https://blog.cr.yp.to/20260221-structure.html  

https://secretgeek.github.io/html_wysiwyg/html.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine%27s_paradox

Quine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupper%27s_self-referential_formula

Simple example: x='x=%q;printf "$x\n" "$x"';printf "$x\n" "$x"

• nix

DOING Understand nix https://yunz-dev.medium.com/stop-using-homebrew-use-nix-instead-b8a5077637e7 https://www.youtube.com/@vimjoyer https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

Write prompt to understand nix vs brew Write nix notes flake.nix # the entry point: inputs + outputs flake.lock # cryptographic pin of every input (rev + hash) hosts/laptop.nix # nix-darwin/NixOS system declaration home/you.nix # home-manager: dotfiles, user packages modules/*.nix # reusable, composable fragments /nix/store/-name/** # immutable, content-addressed realizations nix https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix-installer nix on macos https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin https://nixos.org/download/ https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.28/installation/installing-binary#macos-installation

Package managers https://nesbitt.io/2025/11/15/package-manager-timeline.html

Tools that grew from bash scripts from Claude:

Actual language/runtime grew out of shell glue

Perl. Larry Wall built it explicitly to replace the awk/sed/shell pipelines he was maintaining for Unix system reports — he's said outright that Perl 1 (1987) was "a better sh" for the report-generation glue he was hand-rolling. The whole language's DNA (regex-first, implicit $_, line-by-line processing) is shell/awk habits formalized into a real grammar. Tcl. John Ousterhout built it because he was tired of every tool at Berkeley inventing its own ad-hoc shell-script-like config/command language. Tcl is the "let's stop writing bespoke shell dialects and have one embeddable command language" project — same motivating itch as Perl, different solution shape. Make. Stuart Feldman wrote it at Bell Labs in 1976 after watching a colleague's build break because a shell script forgot to recompile a changed file — the precursor was a hand-maintained shell script doing the rebuild logic, and Make formalized "check timestamps, run shell commands" into a declarative dependency grammar. This is maybe the purest example in the entire list: the thing Make replaced was a literal shell script that didn't scale. Expect (Don Libes, 1990) — grew directly out of people writing fragile shell scripts trying to wrangle interactive programs (passwd, ftp, telnet) with here-docs and sleep hacks. Expect formalized that into a real Tcl-based control language with spawn/expect/send.

Build/release tooling that calcified the same way

autoconf/automake/libtool — exactly the pattern, still half-living in it. ./configure scripts were originally bespoke, hand-written shell per project; autoconf is M4 macros that generate shell scripts, so it's a formalization layer sitting directly on top of the original ad-hoc shell, never fully escaping it. rpm/dpkg packaging scripts — %post, %pre in RPM spec files and postinst/prerm in Debian control files are still literally shell scripts today, but the surrounding spec/control file format is the "formalized" layer that grew up around what used to be undifferentiated install-shell-script blobs in early Unix package management. Docker/Dockerfile — worth including even though it's recent: early "build a container" workflows in 2013 were people hand-writing shell scripts that ran inside chroot or LXC to set up a filesystem, and Dockerfile syntax (RUN, COPY, etc.) is a thin declarative wrapper where most instructions still just shell out. It didn't fully escape its shell-script ancestry the way Make eventually built its own execution model.

 (who be ye?)

https://git.noisegarden.nexus/

https://nb.wtf/w/zulip

https://noisebridge.zulipchat.com

Elan NoiseGarden cluster -- 1. get on auth. (loren: we working on making that self-service from the wiki's auth), 2. check out git.noisegarden.nexus, 3. we're working on making vm's self-provisioning, 4. you can also get your own k8s namespace to run pods

CHERI - low-risk security enclave engineering

Null - is everyone familiar with secure enclaves, enclave engineering? No.

So, you want to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_architecture_family

Loren: I really like -- my network diagnosis scripts

Where do/have people successfully used scripts, to avoid thinking? Use cpu cycles instead of brain cells?

Doug: I recently had to review my code repos

open source licenses on all the repos

(Loren: gotchas?) certifi has a weak copyleft license, so if you modify it, you have to repost.

(Loren: do you have opinions on licenses now) yes, I like the open licenses

TempleOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constants

annoucements - fun invites

• FPGA group (Loren):
• SF Walking compute group (Loren): check primarily in zulip, vr glasses, a computer you can walk with or phone, and keyboard input
• OpenCloud (open) (from OwnCloud 2 - go) -- NextCloud (open) (from OwnCloud 1 - php)
• BitMagnet -- crawls the DHT for torrents,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table Catalog DHT torrents via Bitmagnet

     https://bitmagnet.io/setup/installation.html    

docker pull ghcr.io/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet:v0.10.1-beta.1

     https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet    
     https://bitmagnet.io/    

Outros

• Zacchae - too busy hacking
• Null - might pass along some FPGA gear to the meetup
• Doug - going to read up about the feigenbaum constants - null: book "Chaos: Making a new Science"
• Robert - interested in the walkable computing group
• We-z - rustnet -- running it, might nix-shell rust net -- will check out OpenCloud
• Frank - pay a visit to SudoRoom FPGA folks

 * Loren - https://tinytapeout.com/

• Kevin - found the Feigenbaum constant interesting, working on speech models
• Renaud - found the quine pretty cool,
• Erik - interested in NAS -- hosting OwnCloud OpenCloud
  • Loren: some concerns about hosting - data, implicit uptime promise, push for domain and use of "email", and official self-rep, and ...concerned about file sharing, and org being about to be blamed
• Max - IETF, rustnet, opencloud, bitmagnet
• Loren - great

• Loren
  • tinytapeout - talk through ideas
  • walking comupte - updates
  • noisegarden - auth

after

• erik - voxcii - voxel-ascii
• elan -

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