So, Colin Dean is going to talk about Nick's OS and how we've $60 second turn his laptop
in a cellular router, which sounds like a cool topic.
The stage is yours.
I have fun.
Thank you very much.
Great.
We're going to talk about running Nick's OS on a really cheap laptop.
My name is Colin Dean.
I have been a programmer for about 27 years, paid to do it for about 20 years this year.
And I really enjoy it.
I come from Pittsburgh in the United States, metropolitan area of about 2.5 million people,
and Northern Appalachia in an area of the US we call the Rust Belt.
So my accent slips a little bit, sorry.
We have our own accent.
This is not my first Faustin talk.
I first spoke at the 2021 Faustin that was online, and I've been coming out for, I think
this is my third year in person and my fifth Faustin overall.
You can generally find me hanging out at the Homebury table.
I've been a Homebury contributor for about 12 years, and I'm finishing my first term
on our Board of Directors a few.
So hello from a fellow packaging project, although I know Nick's is much more than just
packaging.
Please do save your questions to the end.
I'm going to be really blessed for time, and I want to try to get to everything.
Also, I'm a Nick's newbie.
I'm just learning Nick's, and there may be things in here that are a little bit strange
to you because you may be learning them a long time ago.
Me and Linux give back a long time.
I've used Linux in various forms since about 2001.
Started with Trostix Secure Linux, Long Dead Destro.
It's been about a decade using primarily Ubuntu before switching mostly to MacOS and Windows
for work.
Currently, I've split my time between elementary and Chrome OS, you can see I'm using
a Chromebook up here, but haven't had an unexplored interest in Nick's OS for quite a long
time.
Going back to about 2017, it was the first time that I heard about them.
About a year ago, I instantly picked up Nick's OS when I spotted a clear opportunity
to treat this shiny new Nick's OS installation as an appliance of sorts.
There's the use case that I was looking for.
So this talk, well, I'm not full of this talk, but this talk is about the system I threw
together that was supposed to be very temporary and ended up lost in several months.
It grabbed some unused hardware with a very specific advantage, LTE modem, to turn into a
gateway for a mining house.
I'm a huge fan of addressing problems through describing them as a problem a diagnosis
and a remedy.
If you search for my name, calling dean, and problem diagnosis remedy, you'll find a bunch
of stuff that I wrote on the internet about it.
So just talk, I'll be presenting in this style from the most part.
So in February of 2024, about a year ago, just a couple of weeks after falls done last
year, I finalized the purchase of a house, about a 10-minute drive from where I'd lived
for about 12 years.
I immediately started renovation on that house built in 1968 with a very high-end furnace.
The previous owners were very wealthy CEO of a local dairy company and had put in a spare
no expense in 1987.
You can imagine what a 40-year-old furnace in the United States is working with, especially
in a very cold area like Pittsburgh.
I was too really good though, because it could heat the whole about 105 square meter
house in about 40 minutes from 15 degrees Celsius to 20 degrees Celsius, I guess that's
pretty good.
I wanted to be able to control it remotely, because I also didn't want to pay to heat
two houses, and it would be a game changer for working there comfortably, because it could
get very cold.
February and March in Pittsburgh is around 0 to negative 10, sometimes negative 20 Celsius,
so you can get pretty chilly.
I also wanted to know when packages were coming.
We were going to have so much new stuff delivered to the house that we were renovating
that I wanted to know when it arrived so that I could know if I could go immediately
start working with something got here.
The cheapest reason about internet service that we could find was about $50 a month for
a 300-megabit line.
At that price, I also had another option that was a T-Mobile cellular service, but it's
10 gigabyte data cap was too little for the expected usage of the one webcam that I was
going to have running in there.
T-Mobile's data cap wasn't going to be good.
Verizon offered a one of our local fiber provider offered a 300-megabit plan with no
data cap, but I didn't need that much.
I only needed about 32 kilobytes per second in order to have the webcam running 24-7,
and I needed like a half a kilobite per second for the thermostat average to a month.
I didn't have a mobile hotspot device available to me, and everything that I saw that
I could get quickly was just kind of crap, throw away hardware.
I didn't have some extra unused Raspberry Pi's, but none of them had LTE modems.
Then I remembered that I had three laptops that I bought at the mech over electronics
in the US these days called MicroCenter.
I bought these laptops for only $60 a piece, new during the 2022 recession of the COVID pandemic
in the United States.
I remember that they had this strangely expensive feature in LTE modem.
Why would you put an LTE modem in such a cheap laptop, especially when that LTE modem
was $25 on the used market, and these laptops were $60.
How are they making any profit here?
Well, it turns out they probably weren't, and that's why the companies in the business anymore.
But these laptops were pretty low and spec.
I'll talk a little bit more about their specs later.
All they really needed was horsepower, storage, and compute.
Raspberry Pi's were kind of hard to find, come by, and I thought, hey,
when I buy these and just use them for a cluster, you know, I'll build a day off
cluster, I've always wanted it, I forgot about it.
It's not very ambitious project, just put in a box someplace.
After some searching, I found the laptops.
With some more research, I found another wireless provider mint mobile, could give me
a $15 a month for 10 gigabytes, which wasn't going to be enough, but if you read the
fine print for once, you'd find that they just reduced your speed, and they reduced your speed
120 kilobytes per second, 120 kilobytes per second, I only needed 32.
Okay, I'll take the free bandels.
But Nixon also was the thing that completed the idea.
I wanted to treat this like as an appliance, and Nixon was a pledge of a single configuration file
for a system, it was very attractive, so I decided to see what the prestige would deliver.
So turn into this.
Can I actually define an entire router in one file?
Having built a router distro for my college graduation project, I knew a thing or two about the
components that I'd need.
Need things like DACP, DNS, some stuff to control the firewall, and master it in
whatever, didn't need to be fancy, this was a network for a webcam, you know, that was it.
And shortly somebody else had done this in next OS.
And eventually it took me a lot, but I did find somebody else had done something similar.
Here's a somewhat picture of the actual beast in situ.
Evolved three is the name of the company.
Mystro is the name of the model.
It's got a 29 centimeter screen, keyboard, the track pad.
Our speakers are all step above garbage.
But for the elementary school students who were using these in schools in the U.S. during the pandemic,
it was just enough for what they needed, and that's what mattered.
Has two USB ports on the side, USB 2.0 over there, USB 3.0 over here,
and those would be able to work around all those limitations.
The Ethernet adapter would just plug into the switch.
And the USB Wi-Fi was used to connect to the internal network, so I could actually get packages.
Everybody loves a good board shot.
It's got an Intel cell-on quad core at 1.1 gigahertz, 4 gigs of RAM, 64 gigs storage.
I'm come to learn while setting up that the Wi-Fi card in this is rather ace of terror,
and the drivers are not already in the corner, not in the curl.
I gave about a 10-minute try to build a next package for those drivers.
Couldn't do it.
Move done.
Got the USB driver.
USB Wi-Fi adapter implaked it in.
I also love that it had a battery.
I mean, how many people's routers have a battery in it?
That was going to be really useful.
As we knew, we were going to be toggling the electricity in the house frequently.
Sometimes the whole house, maybe just a circuit, and this was going to move around,
based on what, where we were working on.
So I wanted to have the internet working, even if we had the electricity off for a couple of hours.
It also saved me the runny to buy a UPS.
So these are the values that I've decided.
I wanted an inexpensive hardware with two back-up devices available.
Great done.
We produced a book configuration, something went wrong.
I had the entire configuration on a flash drive.
And then minimal maintenance, I didn't really need to update it.
Yeah, okay, security could be a concern, but this is a network for a webcam.
And there's only going to live for three to four months.
So any big security updates, I wasn't going to be that worried about.
Most importantly, it had to be partner compatible.
It had to reboot cleanly and work immediately on reboot.
No human intervention, necessary.
No Linux administration, certainly no next administration,
just had to turn off and on again in order to be working again.
And this did happen several times where we left the electricity off too long and the battery
drained, and then as soon as it became back up, it came right back up and we had internet again.
So I'll show you the next configuration, just because it's so short.
This is the hardware configuration that next, when I installed, next OS through the installer,
I didn't have to touch anything.
It worked great. It's a very basic hardware, you know, off the shelf, nothing custom in here.
Again, nothing special, auto-detect for the win.
I did find that I needed to enable network manager to best play with the LTE modem while studying it up.
The one thing I couldn't figure out how to do in NYX was to set the network manager
cellular access point name. The only thing that I couldn't figure out how to do.
I also want to desktop environment because I was going to be setting this up on the machine itself.
So I wanted to be able to use Firefox and the tech senator on this 29 or 29 centimeter screen.
As a odd constraint in working in the system, you're going to be using.
User was an interesting basic stuff.
These are the packages that I found that I needed along the way.
Especially if tool and contract tools, just to see what was going over the network,
I wanted to see what the webcam was actually doing.
See if it was actually sending a 32 kilobytes per second reliably if it was bursty.
Now I don't remember.
I wanted SSH just in case I needed to manage it remotely.
There's nothing on this network of import to anybody.
I wanted to upgrade it manually.
Basic router configuration and then some serious stuff.
Setting static IP address on the wireless or on the wire network adapter and then setting the
LTE modem to use DECP.
I tried some more complicated firewall rules but ultimately just fell back to really basic stuff
and that worked a lot better than my 20-year-old memories of IP change.
And then lastly, let's give the land some DNS and DECP with DNS mask.
I tried a few different services for DECP.
Eventually just fell back to using DNS mask.
One of the use key, but couldn't.
And then to complete it, this was all the firewall that I actually ended up needing.
This is great.
In practice, I'm getting towards the end of things here.
The LTE coverage ended up being enough.
The new house is on a little bit of the hill.
I can see the tower that I'm pretty sure is the tower that's connecting to.
And it was enough for a webcam and a doorbell.
Really a doorbell camera and a webcam eventually and the thermostat.
Eventually we had some, I think I bought it over like a Google assistant so that I could
hear the doorbell ring, it was a Nest doorbell.
Three-plate. It was enough.
You know, the LTE connections in Pittsburgh are about 20 megabytes per second.
Certainly enough.
I had some concerns about using LTE for home service,
having had wired internet my entire life.
But this one.
And some takeaways, of course.
I'm impressed by how little work I had to do to make this work.
That was as a new to Nick's.
That was really cool.
No, I called it Svelte.
I was explaining to my partner what made it so Svelte.
And because it was thin, it was 95 lines.
Well, I showed you there, it was a distillation of it, but it was really
most of the configuration.
There's 95 lines.
For some reason, I also installed audio.
I don't know why. Maybe because at some point I had to watch them YouTube videos or something.
I remember some guard wheels keeping me from completely messing up.
If I had, you know, a misplaced circle one.
Some basics that we appreciate now.
And still took a lot of searching and experimentation to arrive at the final working configuration.
Some of my reference material was out of date only by about a year, but a year is a long time in Nick's.
One of my biggest mistakes, mostly user error, underestimating how much bandwidth running
I was at Nick's end of apply.
The application command I can't remember at the moment.
And pulling down a whole lot of packages, a couple gigabytes of package on a 10 gigabyte month with plan kind of hurt.
And I got burned by not enabling or not disabling automatic updates early on too.
What I also found was that I wanted more documentation, especially like in line documentation.
And I really wanted some kind of an editor for the next configuration that could give me the documentation
and the available options for every possible thing that I could set.
That would have made my life as Nick's new, a little bit easier.
It took about six hours in total to build this, including reading documentation and examples.
That's still really awesome. Having built that router gesture of myself from scratch.
Condensing approximately three months of work into six hours is really cool.
About three hours of maintenance over six months. That's pretty cool. That ticks the box on the minimum administration.
What's next? The old house. The one I just moved out of is going to get this set up quite literally when I get back from fondsdom.
And then the massive inspiration for this work is Matt Layer. If Matt, if you're in this room and you're seeing this presentation, thank you, you are a god.
That's it. Thanks, Yens.
Thank you very much. Are there any questions about this presentation?
Probably take one question.
I found that they told us about that. I guess this goes out there, or on this there are like a nice way to get a list of available options in Nick's illness or an ex-starvan.
It is repeat the question, do you?
Yes. If Domen's asking if there are ways to generate a list of the options that are available,
search through the options to see if, see what's available.
I don't know the question.
Yeah, that's searching through the documentation as about it and reading code.
So, we do have time for more questions. I have one question. Speak up for the next.
The second, like not the next talk, but the talk after that. Ramsey, he's just dressing here.
All right, you're back. I can see you. Thank you very much.
You already have some experience?
How's that any further questions? Thank you.
Mostly just running updates, like taking the machine to my other house, running updates, just to help it.
And just making sure the LTE not him was working. I'm actually looking at it.
Like looking at the motor, but looking at the machine is really minimal.
Yeah, I probably could have not done anything.
So the question was, what are you doing in those three hours?
Just repeat, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the question.
What is that? What are you doing in the three hours?
Just give a nice few feet to talk to the speaker after this talk. Thank you very much.
Another one. I have a glass for the ticket, please.
Thank you very much.