A cycling journey to Carnforth via the scenic Trough of Bowland, one of Lancashire’s most beautiful routes.

A scenic summer evening ride along the converted railway paths from Bury to Rawtenstall, taking in the beautiful Kirklees and Irwell trails.

A scenic summer evening ride along the converted railway paths from Bury to Rawtenstall, taking in the beautiful Kirklees and Irwell trails.

When plans change unexpectedly, sometimes the best adventures emerge - a beautiful cycling journey through the Yorkshire Dales from Bolton Abbey to Burnsall.

In my day job recently I’ve been rewriting AWS deployment infrastructure-as-code taking Serverless-Framework and raw Cloudformation transforming it into Terraform.

I’ve always set out with the best intentions for this site, to regularly write posts about things I’m up to, found out or whatever.

I’m proud to announce that I sat my AWS Security Speciality Certification exam yesterday and passed.

Since I setup the new version of this blog using Hugo, hosted on Cloudfront, I put together a Grafana instance to monitor traffic hitting the CDN.

Just a few days ago I wrote about renewing this site due to wanting to get rid of my hosted VM.

It’s been a while since I posted a new blog post, but I’ve recently decided to scale down my hosting (VM) in favour of attempting to make content a…

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.

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

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee.

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The day after the Tesla PowerWall install and I’ve configured the device in Home Assistant with some rudimentary additions to existing dashboards.

Today’s the day After being on the waiting list for some time, my PowerWall 2 + Gateway installation is finally happening today.

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer.

As part of my interest in aquaponics I’ve always intended to enable some kind of electronic monitoring, various thoughts on what to monitor and how have been in my head for a while.

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.

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.

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.

First off, happy new year to everyone

Hi all, been a while since I’ve posted anything, I’ve recently picked up myself a new camera.

As part of my interest in aquaponics I’ve always intended to enable some kind of electronic monitoring, various thoughts on what to monitor and how have been in my head for a while.

Thought I’d post a quick progress report on the aquaponics setup as the build pretty much complete and the growing has commenced.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were sharing YouTube videos around water harvesting, hydro electricity generation and the like.

weather station control unit weather station sensor pole A while ago I bought one of the Maplins weather stations, just for fun really no plans with it.

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.

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.

A valuable tool I have been using for many years is etckeeper, it works by essentially turning your /etc directory into a git repository.

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED

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.

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.

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A while ago I put together a post detailing the installation and configuration of 2 hosts running glusterfs, which was then presented as CIFS based…

I decided to try the upgrade process from EL 6 to 7 on the servers I used in my previous blog post “Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and C…”

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS.

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera.

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig.

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.

Whoa I’m getting a bit slow here

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 …

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

After one of my LUG colleagues mentioning about the BigV service from Bytemark I just had to try it.

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to.

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GlusterHere’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora.

While I was trying to copy a load of files from one server to another I found a problem I’ve seen time and time again, rsync with filenames that have spaces in them.

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night.

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really.

So I’m forever raving about how good Linux is to the guys at work, it seems that over the last 18 months or so my rants have been getting louder/stronger.

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box.

Here’s my two pence worth in the argument against government driven “adult” filtering on the internet I’ve sent a copy to the consultation team via…

What are my current favourite podcasts?