Over the past 12 months or so I’ve been looking to add various “Smart House” components to my home, rather than do this in the traditional sense of buying something off-the-shelf I’ve been experimenting and building my own. One of the real plus points in me doing this is that all the data that is passed around is in an open standard and format chosen by me, not some cludge to try and extract information in a format decided by a-n-other manufacturer.

I recently replaced a couple of servers within a friends business with an oVirt virtualisation setup, I’m really pleased with the whole configuration which consists of a single engine host and 2 hypervisor nodes, the storage is shared over the 2 hosts with glusterfs. The guests which run on the platform replace the services that ran separately on a couple of physical servers, LAMP stack for intranet, Asterisk PBX, postfix/dovecot mailserver, squid proxy cache, Bind DNS, and DHCP server.

I thought I’d finish off the year with a bit of reflection, overall it’s been a pretty good year in both camps of my life - the geek/tech and the family side. Obvious highs of the year include:

• Birth of my second child, Alfie.
• OggCamp 13
• LinuxCon Europe
• Barcamp Blackpool
• RossLUGs 3rd year - some fantastic meetings this year.

It certainly has been a full on year.

It’s been a really tech filled year, as since moving house last September I’ve had my own space for all my tech which is a real bonus. It’s allowed me to really get back into electronics with Arduino building the home automation system, the electric meter monitor (still to be finished) and more recently bringing a snowman christmas decoration back to life:

Whoa I’m getting a bit slow here!

After the full on weekend of OggCamp my marathon continued up in Edinburgh for LinuxCon Europe 2013. Unfortunately my plan of heading up straight from OggCamp was scuppered, but I set off first thing on Monday morning. I decided to stick with driving after toying with the idea of getting the train. Glad I did, the Edinburgh park and ride system is brilliant! Parked up at Sheriffhall which allowed me to stay up to 7 days, perfect.

Although it’s been over a week since I returned from both these events I thought I better put a little something up about them and the experiences I had there.

Unfortunately Oggcamp and LinuxCon followed each other directly this year, so it meant a lot of heaving about over the course of about a week. Here’s part 1 where I will detail my time at OggCamp.

The event I look forward to all year, took a little longer to arrive this year due to it being moved to October (Oggtober?), happened over the weekend of the 19th & 20th October and much fun was to be had. As being part of the crew last year was so much fun (and hard work) I couldn’t resist doing the same this year, although I was a part timer this year due to also running a Fedora stand and a stand for our LUG (RossLUG). I arrived on the Friday evening to the guffaw of an unexpected art exhibition going off in the lobby of the John Lennon Art and Design building at John Moores University, I say unexpected as it was exactly that. The exhibition, although the building was booked for over 6 months, was arranged the week previous and we couldn’t gain access to setup much on the Friday. Even when that finished the caretaker decided enough was enough and it was home time. So off I went to find Rita’s B&B at the other side of town. Lovely place, a bit dated but very homely and Rita was lovely, I described her to various folks as looking like the oracle from the Matrix (the first one not the second). Proper tea, coffee and biscuits on the bedside table too!

It’s been a while since I stayed up most of the night writing code, mainly down to having a young daughter but also down to the fact I haven’t found anything that needed a late night hack session to produce a result. This weekend changed all that, I’ve been playing around with home automation for a while but am now actually taking the plunge. I purchased a load of Arduino and electronics kit over the last few days to start prototyping the setup.

Recently I’ve been working on several new projects, all of which use either a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino.

Site-To-Site VPN

A friend of mine recently opened a new satellite office, and as part of his day to day work had a requirement to connect the two together so resources on either side could see each other. Site-to-site VPN I thought, and what better kit for the task than a couple of Raspberry Pi’s. Nice and small so they can be kept along side the routers. Each site had a simple ADSL broadband link, with a couple of PC’s connecting up.

So, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on here, mainly because I couldn’t find the time to do so.

Since I last wrote a lot has changed in my life, found out my wife was expecting our second child, visited Bletchley Park and the National museum of computing, got a new job and broke my toe just to name a few.

Back in May, the LUG I’m Group Appointed BDFL for, RossLUG, took a daytrip to Bletchley park. As most of you know Bletchley is

After one of my LUG colleagues mentioning about the BigV service from Bytemark I just had to try it. So today I prized open the wallet and set myself up an account.

For £10+VAT per month you get a VM, it comes with 25gb HD space, 1GiB RAM, 1CPU (2.2ghz AMD it seems)  and 200gb bandwidth per month. All seems pretty reasonable. Their software is a breeze to use, and being command line driven its my kind of thing. The underlying tech is KVM/QEMU, and I’m guessing some kind of openstack(y) type goodness, as you can spin up a VM from their selection of images or connect your own ISO.