TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

After travelling 460KM today, I’ve discovered how annoying a hardware failure can be.
My colocation box is a HP DL360, G3, so it’s not exactly bleeding edge, but it’s a fantastic server, does it’s job and does it reliably.
Last night, we had a planned outage for just a short time to move the box to a [...]

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I was bored this weekend, so after finding some YouTube traffic occurring from one of the PCs on the network, I decided that I’d play with Squid, which is a very powerful, and flexible proxy server.
It has many different methods of operation, and can be used in different ways, such as a simple proxy, where [...]

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I usually state the importance of backup, and reply to those who lose something ’should have backed up’.
Since the change from Windows to Ubuntu, my email backup has been pretty lax – as in, it’s not a job for cron. I’ll have to work on this soon.
I find the subject to be somewhat true. I’ll [...]

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Ooops.. Apache was configured wrong.
You can resume spamming now, apologies for the misconfiguration.
(Comments are fixed now).

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It’s a bit late – but, hopefully everyone had a Merry Christmas, and also is enjoying the new year.
For years I was glued to it, and couldn’t find enough drive to get rid of a really bad problem of mine. But, just as last year was coming to an end, I managed to get rid [...]

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I was working on an issue being experienced by someone remotely attached to my asterisk machine, and found an abnormality.
I use a realtime implementation to allow for easy addition of users and to have the data I want in MySQL (makes it easier to monitor activity in CDR, etc). The problem recently was as a [...]

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Looking into the docs for Asterisk 1.6.0 for a solution to a NAT issue, you can find that asterisk reinvite has improved significantly in the later versions.
Previously, you had to turn it off for peers stuck behind NAT, this is resolved in newer versions of Asterisk which attempt to determine if a peer is behind [...]

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Recently, I have been toying with Asterisk 1.6.0 to work in some new internal features that I want to leverage.
One of the key features I took advantage of is the context option for each SIP peer. It is possible to exclude one group of users from calling another group by using contexts.
Let’s say I want [...]

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I fixed my virtual hard drive . Now has a brillant (yet imaginary) 116GB of Free Space. Fantastic.
The fix was to simply run resize2fs with it mounted in read/write mode, I kept assuming it’d need them not mounted, so was trying to resize it, when it wasn’t existing.
I got some sweet speeds on the Exetel [...]

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I’m in the process of resizing a virtual machines hard drive to get some updates on it (hasn’t been updated in oh… several months), the issue is when I set many virtual machines up, I used to enter a limit for its dynamically expanding disk.
Not considering the consequences of doing so, I figure it’ll be [...]

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Virtual Machines are a great way at hosting multiple services, and keeping your overall costs low.
Computers have become very much so beefed up that the grunt they have spends a lot of time idle, and only peak loads when you are doing intensive tasks, even then, they generally keep within 50% of the processors full [...]

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This morning I woke up intent on a lot more progress with my work on a server.
And, it happened. I set out to complete something, and for the most part, it is completed.
I started today from yesterday, working on fattening a linux partition.
The process was pretty much where my thoughts were yesterday.
dd the drive (so [...]

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There’s a few ways to do things.
The first is the right way, the second is the wrong way, and the third, is perhaps a combination of both in a more interesting combination.
When the right way doesn’t (or can’t) work, and the wrong way is not an option, you then need to figure out a way [...]

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I spent a bit of today RAIDing through the internets and digging for RAID info.
Specifically what I want to do is upgrade the physical disks on my RAID array.
Unfortunately, I can only have 2 physical disks, and both are used by my RAID setup, which mirrors data.
So I sorted through some Google posts on RAID. [...]

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That was a question put to me today. Well not exactly that, but a version of it.
I got thinking.
Do I code simply because its ’something to do’? Nah. Not really. There’s plenty of other stuff I could do. Locally, I could do more and earn more, surely.
So it’s not “something to do”.
Maybe it’s because I [...]

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The excellent part of having identical (or near identical) hardware is when something cops a nice drink of Sprite, you can simply swap the components over, and power it up and your good to go again.
You can’t generally do that when swapping between say an Intel 865PE chipset, and an Intel P35 chipset, simply because [...]

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Unfortunately (and its very unfortunate), the update I planned to release tonight isn’t going to go ahead as planned due to an issue with a particular provider.
The particular provider issue wasn’t determined until just recently, but has been fixed.
The reason for the delay? Well, I was investigating that issue and the time it took to [...]

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Recently, we had a item of hardware fail in my internal server (my in house server).
Essentially that was just my older 2 year old machine, which unfortunately, had an accident. It wasn’t the servers fault however.
Unfortunately, a Pop Top bottle filled with a bit of Sprite came into contact with the Zalman fan after being [...]

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It’s not every so often you go shopping for higher priced items, such as new servers, or cars, but well, both of our new purchases are both coming together at around the same time!
1. A new machine
I’ve got myself my new machine up and running in the last 2 weeks, and I’m still loving it!
It [...]

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I was working with someone else on a system today that had an issue with a lack of disk space.
This machine was loaded with a fair bit of software, and I don’t think the user was keen on dropping all the software to save on space, and I imagine rightly so too. You install items [...]

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I was recently tackling a spam issue today.
A domain I have (no, its not this one, and its not the other popular one), has been getting spam sent to it at a not so low rate.
The domain doesn’t have a link in the search engines, and hasn’t been published anywhere.
But the spammers still have a [...]

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I’ve recently moved server (again).
I’ve had to move between servers for a little while now because of a few issues that were causing software issues.
Those issues have been focused on and solved, however, each time I move server, and begin reconfiguring, I always consider each one could be done a little differently.
Each different software item [...]

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This is part four of the series on setting up ChilliSpot with FreeRadius, using MySQL, on Tomato.
The final part is to get ChilliSpot running on the Tomato router, which includes modifying its firewall to block packets.
The first step tonight is to modify the firewall script. Tomato is a bit different in how the firewall is [...]

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With the previous two completed, that is, setting up FreeRadius, MySQL, and sourcing the ChilliSpot package, and having this on your now setup CIFS network share.
What we need to do now is look at the configuration, and make it suit our requirements.
Open your network share, and edit the file ‘chilli.conf’ in your favourite (or not) [...]

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This is the continuation of last nights entry on how to set up ChilliSpot with FreeRadius, on a Tomato firmware based router.
With the mysql database created, and setup, and the configuration done for FreeRadius, we must of course, test that FreeRadius is working as expected.
First, we need to create a shared secret for us to [...]

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I’ve decided to share how to setup Chillispot with Free Radius, using MySQL for the user database, and running ChilliSpot on the tomato firmware.
I don’t want to make this too long, but also want to be detailed, so don’t be surprised if this spreads over a few posts.
The first step in setting up is to [...]

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As many might know already, CentOS 5 has been released (for some time).
However, the issue for some (or many) will likely be the huge, mammoth, overly large upgrade to CentOS 4.4’s replacement, CentOS 5.
The good news is, its done, and you don’t need to reformat, you can simply put yum to even more yummy goodness [...]

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Today, we upgraded the crash server to a new BIOS version.
This new BIOS version quotes that it Improves Memory Compatibility. And so far, the results seem to be promising.
We moved (backwards) from Fedora Development to Trixbox 2.0.
The previous server we know would crash when any interaction with yum, or any compilation was done, on MOST [...]

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Before I start, Now We Are Talking have censored every post I have made in response to any other post, even when I go with a simple reply with facts, pointing out where someone else, or the editor, has got it wrong. For example, claiming the G9 would see all our infrastructure foreign owned, which [...]

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I’ve spent a few hours working on editing the QoS this afternoon for the DD-WRT.
I tried a few different tricks to getting the script edited, but you can’t do that in read only firmware, and I don’t really feel OK with editing firmware and loading it on right now. I could do it, and I [...]

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