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A collection of 14 posts

Merge git forked repo with upstream changes

I forked Phlow’s excellent “Feeling Responsive” repository about a month ago, to create this website. I hacked away at config files, added posts, and deleted demo data. Since I’d starred Phlow’s repo on GitHub, I noticed that he was continuing to commit fixes and improvements (after I’

Perform L3 adoption with UniFi Controller v4 (Dockerized)

Having recently deployed a “dockerized” Ubiquity UniFi Controller, I was forced to reset my UniFi AP so that I could re-adopt it and bring it back under management. This shouldn’t have been a big deal, but a number of systems didn’t work as the should have. 1. Using

Addons to improve Thunderbird (and make it less annoying)

My organization standardizes on Mozilla Thunderbird as our mail client of choice (partly because Mail.app is so deficient on OSX). It’s a bit crusty since Mozilla halted further development in 2012, but better the devil you know, right…? I recently had some downtime while waiting for gingerbread houses

Automatically reboot multiple Cisco 79xx phones

We’re upgrading our Asterisk PABX at the office soon, as as part of the preparation, I needed a way to automatically reboot about 20 Cisco 79xx IP phones. I found a reference to a ‘reboot.pl’ script at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+phone+cisco+79xx, but

Using a Foscam Pro and FI8909W as an iOS baby monitor

A friend who’s just joined the #dadops team asked me what baby monitor solution we use for our 2-year-old. According to my wife, this is one of the best tech investments I’ve made… The hardware (Foscam FI8909W) I bought a Foscam FI8909W off eBay (the easiest and cheapest

Sending tasks to Things.app via email

I stumbled across this useful hint on the Things forums which adds a feature to my workflow which I felt important enough to record here. Most of my digital inputs come via email. It’s hugely useful to be able to (with a single keystroke) forward an email to my

Monitoring OSX with Icinga / Nagios using NRPE

I have a fairly comprehensive Icinga monitoring platform monitoring my various linux hosts, but one area which has been lacking until now is the monitoring of the OSX Mavericks Mac Mini that I use for a home media center. Considering this is used by my family to watch TV/Movies,

Monitoring Veeam Backup and Replication 7 with Icinga / Nagios

We’ve recently deployed a Veeam Backup and Replication 7 platform, and needed to monitor the ongoing success of the backup / replication jobs. I identified a plugin which does most of what’s required, but seems to have 2 current shortcomings: 1. In-progress jobs trigger false warnings 2. Date calculation

How to setup a Tor Relay (and why you should)

I just jumped in at the end of a conversation on App.net about the latest NSA revelation, the undermining of worldwide encryption standards for the benefit of the self-appointed world-police. @isaiah pointed out that we (geekdom in general) don’t get as excited about civilian casualties in Iraq, or

April Fools Pranks with a Squid Proxy Server

Use Squid to turn the internet upside-down, change Google to Klingon For this year’s April Fools Day, I went with the classic “turn the internet upside-down” squid trick, with a few tweaks. I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I avoided changing images on the majority of

Convert (liberate) Audible AAC files to MP3

I was an Audible subscriber for over 2 years, and although I’m no longer active on a plan, I still have 50+ books that I’ve legitimately purchased. Each of them, however, is locked to my Audible username and password. I don’t tolerate DRM where possible, and I’

Convert a .BIN file to .TRX for OpenWRT / DD-WRT

I recently had reason to convert the latest DD-WRT firmware .bin file to .trx format, so that I could manually flash my WRT54GL. Not wanting to risk it, I first converted the .bin image with the following command: dd if=firmware.bin of=firmware.trx bs=32 skip=1 Which

Generate logs from your jabberd2 server using Bandersnatch

This tutorial attempts to guide the reader through the process of installing Bandersnatch for use with an existing Jabberd2 server. Get the sources We need the following: * Bandersnatch * Perl 5.8.x * Perl POE * Perl module: XML::Stream * Perl module: Net::Jabber 2.x * Perl module: DBI (mysql) * Perl module:

Protect your website with htaccess

Today we had the need to setup a htauth-secured WordPress blog for internal development purposes. We duly protected our web application with the vanilla .htaccess directives: {% highlight conf %} AuthName “Secured” AuthUserFile /path/to/secret/location/.htpasswd AuthType Basic Require valid-user {% endhighlight %} We were using WordPress to generate RSS data feeds,