hardware network technology tplink linux saltstack server work debian backup iscsi backuppc automation luks cryptsetup jekyll wordpress git webhook apt packages development docker singularity video laptop thinkpad lenovo graphics firefox containers ad osx apple security authenticator sudo web javascript react react_native testing jest time_machine windows dell xps_9370 dvd broadband plex sky tplink_omada rawlplugs diy gpg playstation ps3 usb ppp pppoe plusnet bonding lacp nas netgear powershell scripting ssh microsoft teams debain hp hpe ilo kvm virtualisation vmware

Hardware

Network

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

  • 23 May 2020 Adding bonded connection to Netgear ReadyNAS 214

    My Netgear ReadyNAS 214 has two Ethernet ports. It is used as a safe place to store my data as well has hosting an iSCSI target that all my backups are done to (with regular off-site copies made to mitigate against failure or physical damage/loss of the NAS) so some extra bandwidth would not hurt and the web user-interface provides the option to bond them. Since my managed switch also supports bonding, I have decided to do this.

  • 22 May 2020 updating broadband PPPoE configuration

    For a very long time I have been running my own Linux-based routers as gateways to the internet. The configuration was setup a very long time ago and it has not been revisited, other than to update logins etc., since. I discovered today that there is now a kernel-mode PPPoE module (since 2.4, from what I can gather) that I have missed the arrival of and a more performant driver for it. As I was monitoring the route due to line-speed problems, I noted that I could see the process pppoe appear in top hovering around the 12% CPU mark and wondered if that was expected or not. Googling this lead to these changes.

  • 19 Apr 2020 Return of the WAPs

    Setting up the final piece of the new network puzzle, the wireless access points…

  • 18 Apr 2020 The VLANs Strike Back

    Continuing from yesterday’s work on my new network kit, today I’m starting with configuring the new switch.

  • 17 Apr 2020 A New Switch

    This post documents the re-introduction of VLANs to our home network, removed in 2018 to solve problems with 4-year old WAP and power-line adapters their replacement means we can move back to more secure and flexible networking set-up.

  • 21 Nov 2019 Time Machine backup to network share

    I had been using my own external hard disk for backing up my work computer, however (despite being 256GB) Time Machine kept complaining it didn't have enough space. Fortunately I also have access to a 3TB network share at work, so here's how I changed my Mac to backup to there instead.

  • 16 Dec 2018 Backups with at-rest encryption, BackupPC, iSCSI and offsite DR backup

    For many, many years (at least since 2008) I’ve been using BackupPC to provide backups of my machines, at home and in the cloud. I recently replaces my NAS with one that has a larger capacity (as part of a project to turn my DVD collection into something more convenient to browse and watch) and that NAS has iSCSI support so I moved my backup solution from a USB attached disk to an iSCSI target and introduced off-site replication of the backup pool for DR purposes.

  • 26 Aug 2015 TP-Link TL-SG3210 JetStream 8-Port Gigabit L2 Managed Switch

    I have one TP-LINK TL-SG3210 JetStream 8-Port Gigabit L2 Managed Switch with 2 SFP Slots. Initially I had to connect via serial cable as it defaults to a static ip address of 192.168.0.1 which conflicts.

Technology

Tplink

Linux

Saltstack

  • 21 May 2020 Dockerised salt-ssh

    For some systems that I have user accounts on but do not administer, I use Salt SSH (agent-less salt minion) to manage the common user-local files that are managed on the systems I do administer on these systems. I have previously made notes about it.

  • 19 Apr 2020 Return of the WAPs

    Setting up the final piece of the new network puzzle, the wireless access points…

  • 18 Apr 2020 The VLANs Strike Back

    Continuing from yesterday’s work on my new network kit, today I’m starting with configuring the new switch.

  • 27 Jul 2018 Salt SSH

    salt-ssh provides a way to run salt remotely without it being installed on the destination system. ​ This means, for example, that I can use it to manage my user’s dotfiles on the BlueBEAR HPC cluster.

  • 25 Jun 2018 Masterless Salt Minion

    A master-less Salt minion can be used to manage a standalone machine (e.g. my work Linux desktop) or bootstrap any master-controlled minion (or even the master itself) as the salt states will take over management of the minion’s configuration and reconfigure it appropriately on first run.

  • 27 Aug 2015 Salt

    Salt is a remote execution and configuration management tool that I have been using to manage the many Linux servers and desktops I have. Its state system also replaces some of my notes as a self-documenting machine-readable description of how each item is configured.

Server

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

  • 24 Dec 2019 Backups with BackupPC and offsite DR backup - automation

    Shortly before this time last year I revolutionised my backup infrastructure. This year I finally got around to scripting updating the off-site version.

  • 16 Dec 2018 Backups with at-rest encryption, BackupPC, iSCSI and offsite DR backup

    For many, many years (at least since 2008) I’ve been using BackupPC to provide backups of my machines, at home and in the cloud. I recently replaces my NAS with one that has a larger capacity (as part of a project to turn my DVD collection into something more convenient to browse and watch) and that NAS has iSCSI support so I moved my backup solution from a USB attached disk to an iSCSI target and introduced off-site replication of the backup pool for DR purposes.

  • 27 Aug 2015 Salt

    Salt is a remote execution and configuration management tool that I have been using to manage the many Linux servers and desktops I have. Its state system also replaces some of my notes as a self-documenting machine-readable description of how each item is configured.

Work

  • 28 May 2020 Teams backgrounds

    To use your own custom backgrounds, drop the background file(s) in $Env:APPDATA\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads (PowerShell, %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads in cmd). They must be PNG files and will just show up in the list of backgrounds to choose from in the user interface.

  • 21 May 2020 Dockerised salt-ssh

    For some systems that I have user accounts on but do not administer, I use Salt SSH (agent-less salt minion) to manage the common user-local files that are managed on the systems I do administer on these systems. I have previously made notes about it.

  • 22 Apr 2020 Keysigning party post-party signing

    On 1st & 2nd February I was fortunate to attend FOSDEM 2020 in at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels. While I was there I took part in the event’s keysigning party and now need to sign the keys I verified (only 8 days before the deadline of 30th April!).

  • 21 Nov 2019 Time Machine backup to network share

    I had been using my own external hard disk for backing up my work computer, however (despite being 256GB) Time Machine kept complaining it didn't have enough space. Fortunately I also have access to a 3TB network share at work, so here's how I changed my Mac to backup to there instead.

  • 16 Sep 2019 Testing React Native with Jest

    I've started a Mobile App at work using React Native. Obviously this needs testing. This post is about getting started on that process.

  • 08 Aug 2019 HTML linter

    Trying to debug a missing close paragraph tag somewhere in a 300 line web page, I came across Tidy which helped with it's -e flag to report errors and warnings.

  • 08 Jul 2019 Changing Active Directory password on non-bound Mac

    To change an Microsoft Active Directory password on your (non-bound) Mac: 

    $ kinit working_username@AD.DOMAIN
$ kpasswd username_to_change@AD.DOMAIN

  • 27 Jul 2018 Salt SSH

    salt-ssh provides a way to run salt remotely without it being installed on the destination system. ​ This means, for example, that I can use it to manage my user’s dotfiles on the BlueBEAR HPC cluster.

  • 25 Jun 2018 Masterless Salt Minion

    A master-less Salt minion can be used to manage a standalone machine (e.g. my work Linux desktop) or bootstrap any master-controlled minion (or even the master itself) as the salt states will take over management of the minion’s configuration and reconfigure it appropriately on first run.

Debian

Backup

Iscsi

  • 16 Dec 2018 Backups with at-rest encryption, BackupPC, iSCSI and offsite DR backup

    For many, many years (at least since 2008) I’ve been using BackupPC to provide backups of my machines, at home and in the cloud. I recently replaces my NAS with one that has a larger capacity (as part of a project to turn my DVD collection into something more convenient to browse and watch) and that NAS has iSCSI support so I moved my backup solution from a USB attached disk to an iSCSI target and introduced off-site replication of the backup pool for DR purposes.

Backuppc

Automation

Luks

  • 16 Dec 2018 Backups with at-rest encryption, BackupPC, iSCSI and offsite DR backup

    For many, many years (at least since 2008) I’ve been using BackupPC to provide backups of my machines, at home and in the cloud. I recently replaces my NAS with one that has a larger capacity (as part of a project to turn my DVD collection into something more convenient to browse and watch) and that NAS has iSCSI support so I moved my backup solution from a USB attached disk to an iSCSI target and introduced off-site replication of the backup pool for DR purposes.

Cryptsetup

  • 16 Dec 2018 Backups with at-rest encryption, BackupPC, iSCSI and offsite DR backup

    For many, many years (at least since 2008) I’ve been using BackupPC to provide backups of my machines, at home and in the cloud. I recently replaces my NAS with one that has a larger capacity (as part of a project to turn my DVD collection into something more convenient to browse and watch) and that NAS has iSCSI support so I moved my backup solution from a USB attached disk to an iSCSI target and introduced off-site replication of the backup pool for DR purposes.

Jekyll

Wordpress

Git

Webhook

Apt

  • 28 May 2020 Debian system updates

    I have automated monitoring (via Icinga2) of the update status of my various servers, all of which currently run Debian. To date I’ve been using cron to run a daily apt-get update, to my mind the obvious solution to “I need it to update daily”, which updates the local package cache and then the monitoring picks up whether there’s anything to update. While investigating a problem with another cron-job yesterday, I noticed messages from apt-daily and apt-daily-upgrade services and a quick Google revealed that there is a Debian way to do this.

  • 13 Sep 2019 Upgrading Debian systems

    Based on notes from my old wiki, refreshed as I remotely upgraded our home router from Debian 9 (stretch) to Debian 10 (buster).

  • 12 Jun 2019 Unmarking Debian packages as manually installed

    I sometimes manually install a Debian package, whilst trying to figure out dependencies for something else, and then discover I should have installed a different "parent" package that will pull it in.

Packages

Development

Docker

Singularity

  • 14 Jun 2019 Installing Docker on Debian

    I've been using virtual machines (via VirtualBox) for Linux-based testing and development for sometime but I've been persuaded that it's high-time I joined everyone else and started using containerisation.

Video

  • 14 Jun 2019 Making video indexes with FFmpeg

    I'm working on digitising some of my DVD collection at the moment, which means creating some pretty large files. Trying to view these over the network to discover what they are is pretty tedious (lots of buffering!), so I've been working on dumping an "index" image file that will helpfully give me enough information to determine what it is without actually loading/playing the file.

Laptop

Thinkpad

Lenovo

Graphics

Firefox

Containers

Osx

Apple

Security

Authenticator

Sudo

Web

  • 08 Aug 2019 HTML linter

    Trying to debug a missing close paragraph tag somewhere in a 300 line web page, I came across Tidy which helped with it's -e flag to report errors and warnings.

Javascript

React

React native

Testing

Jest

Time machine

  • 21 Nov 2019 Time Machine backup to network share

    I had been using my own external hard disk for backing up my work computer, however (despite being 256GB) Time Machine kept complaining it didn't have enough space. Fortunately I also have access to a 3TB network share at work, so here's how I changed my Mac to backup to there instead.

Windows

Dell

Xps 9370

Dvd

Broadband

  • 22 May 2020 updating broadband PPPoE configuration

    For a very long time I have been running my own Linux-based routers as gateways to the internet. The configuration was setup a very long time ago and it has not been revisited, other than to update logins etc., since. I discovered today that there is now a kernel-mode PPPoE module (since 2.4, from what I can gather) that I have missed the arrival of and a more performant driver for it. As I was monitoring the route due to line-speed problems, I noted that I could see the process pppoe appear in top hovering around the 12% CPU mark and wondered if that was expected or not. Googling this lead to these changes.

  • 17 Apr 2020 A New Switch

    This post documents the re-introduction of VLANs to our home network, removed in 2018 to solve problems with 4-year old WAP and power-line adapters their replacement means we can move back to more secure and flexible networking set-up.

Plex

  • 17 Apr 2020 A New Switch

    This post documents the re-introduction of VLANs to our home network, removed in 2018 to solve problems with 4-year old WAP and power-line adapters their replacement means we can move back to more secure and flexible networking set-up.

Sky

  • 17 Apr 2020 A New Switch

    This post documents the re-introduction of VLANs to our home network, removed in 2018 to solve problems with 4-year old WAP and power-line adapters their replacement means we can move back to more secure and flexible networking set-up.

Tplink omada

Rawlplugs

  • 20 Apr 2020 Rawlplug UNO sizes technical data

    Rawlplug’s UNO range are currently my favourite wall plug, reliable and I’m yet to have any problems with the installation of one. I struggle to find this information, particularly supported screw sizes, when I want to refer to it to here it is:

Diy

  • 20 Apr 2020 Rawlplug UNO sizes technical data

    Rawlplug’s UNO range are currently my favourite wall plug, reliable and I’m yet to have any problems with the installation of one. I struggle to find this information, particularly supported screw sizes, when I want to refer to it to here it is:

Gpg

Playstation

Ps3

Usb

Ppp

  • 22 May 2020 updating broadband PPPoE configuration

    For a very long time I have been running my own Linux-based routers as gateways to the internet. The configuration was setup a very long time ago and it has not been revisited, other than to update logins etc., since. I discovered today that there is now a kernel-mode PPPoE module (since 2.4, from what I can gather) that I have missed the arrival of and a more performant driver for it. As I was monitoring the route due to line-speed problems, I noted that I could see the process pppoe appear in top hovering around the 12% CPU mark and wondered if that was expected or not. Googling this lead to these changes.

Pppoe

  • 22 May 2020 updating broadband PPPoE configuration

    For a very long time I have been running my own Linux-based routers as gateways to the internet. The configuration was setup a very long time ago and it has not been revisited, other than to update logins etc., since. I discovered today that there is now a kernel-mode PPPoE module (since 2.4, from what I can gather) that I have missed the arrival of and a more performant driver for it. As I was monitoring the route due to line-speed problems, I noted that I could see the process pppoe appear in top hovering around the 12% CPU mark and wondered if that was expected or not. Googling this lead to these changes.

Plusnet

  • 22 May 2020 updating broadband PPPoE configuration

    For a very long time I have been running my own Linux-based routers as gateways to the internet. The configuration was setup a very long time ago and it has not been revisited, other than to update logins etc., since. I discovered today that there is now a kernel-mode PPPoE module (since 2.4, from what I can gather) that I have missed the arrival of and a more performant driver for it. As I was monitoring the route due to line-speed problems, I noted that I could see the process pppoe appear in top hovering around the 12% CPU mark and wondered if that was expected or not. Googling this lead to these changes.

Bonding

Lacp

Nas

Netgear

Powershell

Scripting

Ssh

  • 25 May 2020 Getting to grips with PowerShell

    Over the past 6-12 months I have started using a more Microsoft-y environment on Windows, both on my own laptop and work’s. It started with using the bundled Windows OpenSSH client, removing the need for me to launch a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) environment just to ssh to another system. I also been trying out Microsoft Terminal(yes, it is open source), which was released on Tuesday, and it is a really slick tool - a vast improvement on the old command-line windows and/or PuTTY. Yesterday I switched my default session from (WSL) Debian to PowerShell and have started using it as my main shell environment on Windows.

Microsoft

  • 28 May 2020 Teams backgrounds

    To use your own custom backgrounds, drop the background file(s) in $Env:APPDATA\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads (PowerShell, %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads in cmd). They must be PNG files and will just show up in the list of backgrounds to choose from in the user interface.

Teams

  • 28 May 2020 Teams backgrounds

    To use your own custom backgrounds, drop the background file(s) in $Env:APPDATA\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads (PowerShell, %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads in cmd). They must be PNG files and will just show up in the list of backgrounds to choose from in the user interface.

Debain

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

Hp

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

Hpe

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

Ilo

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

Kvm

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

Virtualisation

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.

Vmware

  • 02 Jun 2020 HP Microservers

    Over the weekend I bought and collected 2 8th generation HPE Microservers. The two I have bought have been upgraded to 16GB of ECC memory and have had their stock processors replaced with E3-1240 v2 processors. They also came with 10GbE cards fitted, although currently I have no infrastructure to make use of these.