TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

I had an issue recently where I wanted some data to get to all machines, all at the same time. The data would not be requested – I needed the data as it came in – from my CurrentCost meter – for purposes of testing around the house on the laptop. The solution was to [...]

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Babies, and babies and more babies. I’m actually referring to Linux and my continual abuse of root for tasks that don’t belong to root. Recently, at work I’ve been working on a few minor tasks, however, because the system is locked down, I’ve ran into issues – for example, recently, I hit an issue with [...]

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I spent much of yesterday afternoon and night trying to locate a RS232 or RS485 to bluetooth circuit that needed to be, cheaper than $50 (the cost of running the cable myself), could be powered by a 9V battery or a combination of AA batteries, and the result at the other end had to be [...]

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I decided to use some of today to resolve an issue with MySQL Slave setup, where statements fail for various reasons. I could ignore the statements that fail – but that could be potentially dangerous – leaving with no slave backup at all. The next best option to ensure the database is up to date [...]

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I use “Twinkle” on my Ubuntu PC, for receiving and making VoIP calls. After testing Linphone, Wengo, and several others, Twinkle seemed to be the one which seemed to be pretty robust. I like to have music going when I’m not on the phone, but that proves to be quiet the distraction during a voice [...]

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A boo-boo! (See the end, I found a solution). I was testing an upgrade for MySQL, from 5.0 to 5.1, to gain Row Based Replication instead of Statement based replication (as statements are a cause of SBR breaking, and it doesn’t proceed til I tell it to). So, in my usual lazy, just do it, [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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”. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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