SSL Certificates

So it is is a more dangerous world out there. You can start securing web sites using self signed certificates. Another option is to: Use CloudFlare. This will use a CF certificate from the CF CDN to the web site, while using a self-signed certificate between the CF CDN to your web server. Use startssl ...

Raspberry Pi - Low cost CCTV

A good tutorial on creating a low cost surveillance camera using the raspberry Pi camera module and one of thos fake surveillance camera things. Instructables has a good tutorial on creating a low cost surveillance camera. Essentially makes use of a Pi, the Camera module and fitted into one of those inexpensive fake surveillance cameras. ...

Resizing a Linux RAID

It is possible to migrate the whole array to larger drives (e.g. 250 GB to 1 TB) by replacing one by one. In the end the number of devices will be the same, the data will remain intact, and you will have more space available to you. Extending an existing RAID array In order to increase the usable size of the array, you must increase ...

Wi-Fi Sd Cards

My latest weekend project. Making a normal digital camera WIFI enabled. With the Transcend Wi-Fi SD Card you can convert any digital camera into a Wi-Fi enable camera. What I did here is to set it up so that it would automatically upload photos whenever I turn the camera on while at home. The nice thing about this camera is that it runs a fully functional Linux environment within the card. The manufacturer was also nice enough to give you the opportunity to customize the card by running arbitrary shell scripts from the SD card itself. My code is in github. ...

Raspberry Pi Weekend project

So finally took the time to try out a Raspberry Pi. For this weekend project wanted to do something relatively simple. Essentially, I wanted to recreate/enhance the functionality of a TL-WR702N. The TL-WR702N Nano Router is a neat device but being closed, can not be customized to what I wanted. It can be used in the following modes: ...

DVD archiving

This is my simple procedure for backing up my DVD movies: Examine the DVD: dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -I Create a full backup: dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -o ~ -M Creating an ISO: ...

Private vs. Personal

In Microsoft Outlook has the option to tag e-mails with a sensitivity tag. Technically this is fairly meaningless. However sometimes I like to use them. The confidential tag is quite self explanatory. I always confuse what is the difference between private and personal. So here is one possibility... Personal information are things like preferences, political association, likes and dislikes. Private information are things like bank account numbers. Stuff that you probably would like to keep secret. ...

Cleaning-up Outlook Calendar

This is a procedure I go through at the end of the year to clean-up my Outlook Calendar. Usually the Outlook Calendar gets full of junk over time. So this is something worth doing on a regular basis. Procedure for Outlook 2007 ...

Chrome Kerberos Authentication

To config chrome to use kerberos authentication you need to start the application the following parameter: auth-server-whitelist - Allowed FQDN - Set the FQDN of the IdP Server. Example: chrome --auth-server-whitelist="*aai-logon.domain-a.com" auth-negotiate-delegate-whitelist - For which FQDN credential delegation will be allowed. ...

Deploying Chrome Extensions

The following links outline how to deploy Chrome extensions in a enterprise manner: Installing Chrome Extensions Other Deployment Options Force Installing Extensions ...

wp-cron and cron

Normal WordPress operation has a cron like functionality that runs scheduled tasks as users visit the blog. It is possible to replace this with a standalone cron (like UNIX cron). To disable the "webcron" (i.e. trigerring tasks as URLs are visited) add to your wp-config.php the following: define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); Then call this from cron: ...

Using wget with given IP/vhost

This is one neat trick. For vhosts you can connect with an IP yet provide the right host name with the following: wget http://1.1.1.1/ --header 'Host: www.example.com' ...

Using a NAS200 as a Print server

Last weekend I had a small weekend project to move my All-In-One Printer/Scanner from my Xen host server to a spare NAS200 I had lying around. Since the NAS200 has a i486 compatible CPU, and I had been able to run a CentOS 5 distro before, I figure it would make a good server with low power consumption. For that I updated my NASCC firmware so that it would boot a USB key, and update my CentOS image creation script. This worked well, I was able to boot CentOS without that much effort altogether. I myself have an Epson Stylus CX5500 which unfortunately only comes with binary drivers. This was not much of a problem since the NAS200 has a i486 compatible CPU. I find this is relatively unique among different NAS models. Alas, the performance was quite disappointing. I should be used to the NAS200 underperforming. But really, this was truly sad. I did not bother to test the printing, but I did try scanning with it. Running scanimage to scan a single page was taking over 15 minutes before I hit Ctrl+C. It was an idea, but the results were so sub par. The only take-aways of this are: ...

UNIX find with dates

-atime/-ctime/-mtime the last time a files's access time, file status and modification time, measured in days or minutes. Time interval in options -ctime, -mtime and -atime is an integer with optional sign. n: If the integer n does not have sign this means exactly n days ago, 0 means today. +n: if it has plus sing, then it means more then n days ago, or older then n, -n: if it has the minus sign, then it means less than n days ago (-n), or younger then n. It's evident that -1 and 0 are the same and both mean today. ...

Enable local file caching for NFS share on Linux

In Linux, there is a caching filesystem called FS-Cache which enables file caching for network file systems such as NFS. FS-Cache is built into the Linux kernel 2.6.30 and higher. In order for FS-Cache to operate, it needs cache back-end which provides actual storage for caching. One such cache back-end is cachefiles. Therefore, once you set up cachefiles, it will automatically enable file caching for NFS shares. ...