Presentations Wanted

Suggested Topics

This section has topics that have been requested for presentation in 2019. We'd like you help. If you prepare one of these presentations, you can four options for presentation.

1. come to Warpstock in Orlando and present
2. Present remotely using Skype
3. Pre-record a video to be shown at the meeting
4. have one of us make your presentation

VPN

There are many VPN services available for those who might need to use public WiFi or who have other reasons to want a VPN. None that I've seen has an OS/2 client, although many work on Linux. Is there a way to use a VPN service with OS/2 and if so, how could one do so? I recall David asking me about VPN services which were OS/2 compatible a couple of years ago. He may use one (whether or not it came from my recommendation, I have no idea).

InJoy might be a possibility (IPSec). If they run SSL, then OpenVPN build which is publicly available (Hobbes) - as we know from our own building experience at WS 2008 - uses the half-functional TAP/TUN driver (where only TAP works), and is less than suitable. AFAIK, most of the third-party VPNs use SSL.

Having an OS/2, Windows, or Linux system available at home as a VPN endpoint and using InJoy's VPN would work without having to subscribe to a third party service. Of course, this requires a second system to be available, solid broadband, and perhaps a DDNS provider. Maybe one of the Bitwise guys might like to touch on this. Yuri maintains the InJoy product for them, and is familiar with how it works across all platforms. The main drawbacks to IPSec, of course, are the need for a dedicated port for the tunnel, and difficulties with NAT traversal in some situations, vs SSL, which travels over the standard 443 and traverses NATs quite well.

USB Cables

or, USB Cables and You

I've been through a multi-hour remote troubleshooting session with a client using several USB -> Parallel adapters for his invoice printer (Oki Microline 391) and label printer (Zebra). Today, it dawned on me that we have daisy-chained USB cables and the system board, now aging, may not be putting out the voltage it once did. There are length limits for USB cables described in the spec. Length, quality, type of connector, type of device, whether there is a hub in the middle (and its type), a gender changer, and finally whether the device is FS, HS, etc., all play a role in whether the signal will get from point A to point B. There are some interesting USB multimeters available, too, on the cheap.

We get tickets for ArcaOS where printers do not get signal ("but it worked with eCS! - before I moved the printer across the room..."). Too often, people take cable length and quality for granted, and we are relying more and more on USB-attached devices. The problem will get worse with USB 3, simply due to the higher bandwidths available and greater sensitivity to overall cable quality (noise level and impedance).

RPM/Yum

We could do a session on ANPM and yum and how to handle the unexpected, including the nuclear option (how to blow away an entire yum/rpm environment, even when libc and friends are already installed under \usr\lib, and reinstall the bootstrap), how to handle broken yum databases, error messages, empty package windows, broken repository URIs, other python fun...).

OS/2 Memory

Sometimes with modern programs, OS/2 runs short of shared memory, or has fragmentation issues. Discuss how this happens and how to avoid it.

OS/2 Demos

Video Wizard (Moving from SNAP to Panorama and back again)

making a new printer work when no drivers are currently available

Last Updated Saturday, August 17 2019 @ 04:27 PM; 16,765 Hits