A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were sharing YouTube videos around water harvesting, hydro electricity generation and the like. As the usual YouTube journey does, I ended up going off on a tangent and watching a video on aquaponics. I found it really fascinating so started looking deeper and deeper, and finally decided to give it a go. I’d always planned on getting a greenhouse for our new garden and a couple of planter boxes and growing veg but this looked great.

A while ago I bought one of the Maplins weather stations, just for fun really no plans with it. The device came with a pole to which several sensors could be attached: temperature, humitidy, wind speed, wind direction and rain level. The other important bit in the box was the control station, which is a large LCD screen based output for the information which is gathered in the sensors, it also gives an attempt at forecasting.

I wrote a post a while ago covering the use of Monit to monitor services running and the use case I covered was to ensure these services restarted on failure. While a useful feature of Monit, it seems to be now a little redundant with SystemD having a built in restart feature. Same use case where MySQL (or MariaDB in this case) is being killed by Apache’s oom killer. I first copied the original systemd file associated with Mariadb from /usr/lib/systemd/system/mariadb.

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is look into the possibility of using 2 factor authentication, or 2FA, with SSH connections. This would add a much needed level of security to servers I host out in the wild. Here’s how I did it: The Google Authenticator mobile app used to be an open source project, it isn’t any more but the project has been kindly forked and looked after by Red Hat under the guise of the FreeOTP project.

A valuable tool I have been using for many years is etckeeper, it works by essentially turning your /etc directory into a git repository. This is a fantasticly useful set of tools as any configuration changes can be logged and also reverted quite easily. Install and setup is exeptionally easy too! Packages are available for most distributions, but my scenario (Fedora,CentOS,RHEL) was: yum install etckeeper Once the package was installed an initialisation must be performed:

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! Those who regularly build and rebuild machines or virtual machines on a dhcp network will probably be faced with this quite often, this is due to the known fingerprint for the previous host being different to a new one which has aquired the same IP address. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!

The recent release of the Raspberry Pi 2 uses a newer version of the ARM architecture spec, the ARM Cortex-A7 uses ARMv7 whereas the previous model ARM11 uses ARMv6. The great thing about this is the majority of Linux distros already provide an Image for this architecture. More importantly, Fedora already have images. There is a slight caveat to the above statement however, that being they won’t just work with the Pi 2.

Monit is an application I’ve been meaning to setup for a while, I was first made aware of it from a chap I had the pleasure of talking to at OggCamp this year, he seemed to use it to the n’th degree to monitor files and services within docker containers to ensure a development environment was as it should be. This was far more than I really needed, but the monitoring of services definitely caught my attention so I set about installing and configuring.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time, but things have been a little hectic recently. That said I really wanted to write something, even if it is a little short, about Barcamp Manchester. The event took place over the weekend of 18th & 19th October and was just a fantastic weekend. After a fairly decent break from the Barcamp scene, Manchester really came back and did it justice.