The Discussion:
We considered various ways that data can be lost from a hard drive. Spinwrite comes highly recommended as a diagnostic/repair tool. For open source fans, there is testdisk which Carl has used successfully on dozens of hard drives. For Windows fans, there is ValiDrive which can detect USB drives that incorrectly report their capacity, such as cheap 2 GB USB fobs that do not have that much space.
We remembered the days of the typewriter, when we were taught to add two spaces at the end of every sentence. Current style guides say this is not proper. And we talked about n-dashes and m-dashes, and the availability of many monospace fonts for the terminal. Carl did some searching and found that Liberation Mono is an excellent choice, since it displays the entire character set and it makes it easy to distinguish a comma from a period.
Dennis talked a bit about TCL which can be used to create simple GUI programs. This basic tutorial shows it to be a programming language of sorts, but doesn’t cover window creation. It appears that python is very capable of handling anything TCL can do.
Then the fireworks began. Gib mentioned how he has intermittent problems with his internet connection and expressed frustration about finding their source. Carl played a video showing how wireshark works and convinced Gib to get a packet capture. Since ping is not a reliable indicator of network problems, we focused on a tcp connection. We will follow up on this in the next meeting.
Chris Greer, who created the video, is a self-proclaimed “packet head” with a very extensive set of videos including a 4.5 hour course in wireshark. Carl recommends this video as a gentle starter for network troubleshooting.
Pat recommend using ntop aka ntopng for network monitoring and analysis. This is especially useful for intermittent problems that occur at random times. He will show us how to use it at the next meeting.