Taking the Contribution Plunge | DLN Xtend 94

On this episode of DLN Xtend we discuss some open source projects to which we have personally contributed.

Welcome to episode 94 of DLN Xtend. DLN Xtend is a community powered podcast. We take conversations from the DLN Community from places like the DLN Discourse Forums, Telegram group, Discord server and more. We also take topics from other shows around the network to give our takes.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:09 Co-op Classes
00:10:20 iPad Troubles
00:15:25 Multimedia Codec on openSUSE
00:19:28 Taking the Contribution Plunge
00:47:57 Game of the Week
00:52:35 Camera Corner Feedback
00:56:36 HP Down
01:02:41 Time to Vote
01:02:56 Close
01:03:43 Extra

Matt

Wendy

Nate

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Contact info
Matt (Twitter @MattDLN)
Wendy (Mastodon @WendyDLN)
Nate (Website CubicleNate.com)

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Awesome, glad to hear Wendy is going to do a Camera Corner podcast! I hope it gets a lot of support.

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@TheWendyPower

Was just listening to you talk about your problems with networking and the classes.

Perhaps someone has already suggested this, but one solution that would greatly simplify things for you would be to take along a OpenWRT router than connect to the public wifi and relays the laptops to the internet. The advantage of this is you can then put your own devices onto that network like a Raspberry Pi NAS running Samba, meaning all the laptops can see it and use it to save files to. You could also use user authentication, so users will get their own folder on the NAS.

There is another added advantage of this, and that is being able to filter the internet traffic, so kids can not go to ‘undesirable sites’ and give you some piece of mind.

OpenWRT has all of these features and it is relatively simple to either convert an existing router you have to it or but one and convert it so long as pick some Supported Hardware.

I have not idea how into networking and sysadmining you are but it should not take more than a few days to set up and test and as you provide the laptop you can pre seed them with credentials for the wifi and run a script that will prompt a user for their credentials and automagically mount the NAS where it is supposed to be so that can save files to it.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Oh forgot, you can’t do anything about the wifi toggle, but if you control the wifi network you can use either OpenWRT or you can scan for machine that wifi has not been enabled. Personally I would put a big sticker on the laptop screen (so it looks the right way up when is it open) with the unique identifier for that machine either a hostname so some sort of id number. If you name the laptops LAPTOP01 LAPTOP02 etc, then when you sort by hostname you can easily see who is missing and visually see which laptop that is. You can either then toggle the switch yourself or tell the kid to.

EDIT2:

Thinking about it a little more, you might not even need to manually see if the host is online. This script should work

#!/bin/bash
declare -a StringArray=("LAPTOP01" "LAPTOP2" "LAPTOP3")

for host in "${StringArray[@]}"

do 

fping -c1 -t300 $host 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
       if [ "$?" = 0 ]
         then
          echo "$host online"
         else
          echo "$host offline"
       fi
done

Good luck

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