Blogs

Terraforming Serverless

In my day job recently I’ve been rewriting AWS deployment infrastructure-as-code taking Serverless-Framework and raw Cloudformation transforming it into Terraform. While I’ve used Terraform to deploy infrastructure for many years, this particular task was rather interesting as I had to replicate what Serverless-Framework did with regard to building the bundles and deploying them. For obvious reasons I’m not going to use exact examples of code bundles here, but the Hello sample code from a freshly created Lambda function.

Blogs

New Site Part 3

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. I noticed quite a number of errors and realised these would be dead links out in the wild. I wondered if I might figure a way of replicating the path structure I had with WordPress over here on Hugo. Initially I looked at the behaviours on the CloudFront distribution and figured quite quickly that it needed to be a Lambda@Edge.

Blogs

Terraforming Serverless

In my day job recently I’ve been rewriting AWS deployment infrastructure-as-code taking Serverless-Framework and raw Cloudformation transforming it into Terraform. While I’ve used Terraform to deploy infrastructure for many years, this particular task was rather interesting as I had to replicate what Serverless-Framework did with regard to building the bundles and deploying them. For obvious reasons I’m not going to use exact examples of code bundles here, but the Hello sample code from a freshly created Lambda function.

Blogs

Terraforming Serverless

In my day job recently I’ve been rewriting AWS deployment infrastructure-as-code taking Serverless-Framework and raw Cloudformation transforming it into Terraform. While I’ve used Terraform to deploy infrastructure for many years, this particular task was rather interesting as I had to replicate what Serverless-Framework did with regard to building the bundles and deploying them. For obvious reasons I’m not going to use exact examples of code bundles here, but the Hello sample code from a freshly created Lambda function.

Blogs

Terraforming Serverless

In my day job recently I’ve been rewriting AWS deployment infrastructure-as-code taking Serverless-Framework and raw Cloudformation transforming it into Terraform. While I’ve used Terraform to deploy infrastructure for many years, this particular task was rather interesting as I had to replicate what Serverless-Framework did with regard to building the bundles and deploying them. For obvious reasons I’m not going to use exact examples of code bundles here, but the Hello sample code from a freshly created Lambda function.

Blogs

New Site Part 3

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. I noticed quite a number of errors and realised these would be dead links out in the wild. I wondered if I might figure a way of replicating the path structure I had with WordPress over here on Hugo. Initially I looked at the behaviours on the CloudFront distribution and figured quite quickly that it needed to be a Lambda@Edge.

Blogs

New Site Part 3

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. I noticed quite a number of errors and realised these would be dead links out in the wild. I wondered if I might figure a way of replicating the path structure I had with WordPress over here on Hugo. Initially I looked at the behaviours on the CloudFront distribution and figured quite quickly that it needed to be a Lambda@Edge.

Blogs

New Site Part 3

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. I noticed quite a number of errors and realised these would be dead links out in the wild. I wondered if I might figure a way of replicating the path structure I had with WordPress over here on Hugo. Initially I looked at the behaviours on the CloudFront distribution and figured quite quickly that it needed to be a Lambda@Edge.

Blogs

New Site Part 3

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. I noticed quite a number of errors and realised these would be dead links out in the wild. I wondered if I might figure a way of replicating the path structure I had with WordPress over here on Hugo. Initially I looked at the behaviours on the CloudFront distribution and figured quite quickly that it needed to be a Lambda@Edge.

Blogs

New Site Part 3

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. I noticed quite a number of errors and realised these would be dead links out in the wild. I wondered if I might figure a way of replicating the path structure I had with WordPress over here on Hugo. Initially I looked at the behaviours on the CloudFront distribution and figured quite quickly that it needed to be a Lambda@Edge.

Blogs

Recipe: Garlic & Lemon Marinade for Chicken

First off, happy new year to everyone! This new year led to me cooking for several which I always enjoy, don’t often get to cook but when I do I always cook everything from scratch. This year I decided on chicken kebabs with a variety of marinades. One especially went down a storm, Garlic and Lemon, so I thought I’d share. Other marinades I made were Souvlaki and Chilli tomato

Blogs

Recipe: Garlic & Lemon Marinade for Chicken

First off, happy new year to everyone! This new year led to me cooking for several which I always enjoy, don’t often get to cook but when I do I always cook everything from scratch. This year I decided on chicken kebabs with a variety of marinades. One especially went down a storm, Garlic and Lemon, so I thought I’d share. Other marinades I made were Souvlaki and Chilli tomato

Blogs

Recipe: Garlic & Lemon Marinade for Chicken

First off, happy new year to everyone! This new year led to me cooking for several which I always enjoy, don’t often get to cook but when I do I always cook everything from scratch. This year I decided on chicken kebabs with a variety of marinades. One especially went down a storm, Garlic and Lemon, so I thought I’d share. Other marinades I made were Souvlaki and Chilli tomato

Blogs

Aquaponics and growing update, late summer.

Hi all, been a while since I’ve posted anything, I’ve recently picked up myself a new camera. Got a pre-owned Canon EOS 700D, its been a while since I’ve had an SLR but I quite fancy another go. So, having a play I thought I’d do a little video showing the greenhouse and aquaponics. 2nd proper year of the aquaponics in its current location, its doing well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIQq6H6sceg

Blogs

Sensoring Aquaponics

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. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start. An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit.

Blogs

Aquaponics update

Thought I’d post a quick progress report on the aquaponics setup as the build pretty much complete and the growing has commenced. I left the last post where I had a lovely clean tank and had just introduced 20 goldfish. About a week later I introduced a further 20 and I’m happy to say that around 3 weeks on the fish are thriving, initially they seemed to cower in a corner but are making full use of the space.

Blogs

My foray into aquaponics

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.

Blogs

Aquaponics and growing update, late summer.

Hi all, been a while since I’ve posted anything, I’ve recently picked up myself a new camera. Got a pre-owned Canon EOS 700D, its been a while since I’ve had an SLR but I quite fancy another go. So, having a play I thought I’d do a little video showing the greenhouse and aquaponics. 2nd proper year of the aquaponics in its current location, its doing well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIQq6H6sceg

Blogs

Aquaponics update

Thought I’d post a quick progress report on the aquaponics setup as the build pretty much complete and the growing has commenced. I left the last post where I had a lovely clean tank and had just introduced 20 goldfish. About a week later I introduced a further 20 and I’m happy to say that around 3 weeks on the fish are thriving, initially they seemed to cower in a corner but are making full use of the space.

Blogs

My foray into aquaponics

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.

Blogs

Aquaponics and growing update, late summer.

Hi all, been a while since I’ve posted anything, I’ve recently picked up myself a new camera. Got a pre-owned Canon EOS 700D, its been a while since I’ve had an SLR but I quite fancy another go. So, having a play I thought I’d do a little video showing the greenhouse and aquaponics. 2nd proper year of the aquaponics in its current location, its doing well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIQq6H6sceg

Blogs

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

Blogs

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

Blogs

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

Blogs

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

Blogs

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

Blogs

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

Blogs

Sensoring Aquaponics

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. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start. An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit.

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

Light control with MQTT on Arduino

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.

Blogs

New projects: Pi's and Arduinos

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.

Blogs

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

Blogs

Getting Fedora 21 on the Raspberry Pi 2

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.

Blogs

Raspberry Pi Wildlife Camera

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera. Normally I cover most of my projects on here but this one has been a little different as it was featured in this months Linux Voice magazine. For this very reason I won’t feature a write-up here, just a few images and videos captured using it and a couple of pointers to the software used in the project.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

New projects: Pi's and Arduinos

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.

Blogs

Post Raspberry Jamboree Event

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee. The day started as most of these type of events do, runnning slightly late, I was a little worried at first as I thought I was the one running late (even though I was bang on time), but then I remembered who I was waiting for :). Eventually bumping into familiar faces everything started to fall into place.

Blogs

Raspberry Jamboree Event

This coming Saturday, 9th March, I’ll be helping out as crew member at what could be the most exciting Raspbery Pi event since its launch. CPC are sponsoring the jamboree, with talks from plenty of familiar, and some not so, faces at the exhibition centre in Manchester. Much looking forward to it. Full writeup will follow after the event, I am expecting an announcement or two though, not sure what though.

Blogs

Sensoring Aquaponics

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. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start. An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit.

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

Light control with MQTT on Arduino

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.

Blogs

New projects: Pi's and Arduinos

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.

Blogs

Sensoring Aquaponics

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. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start. An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit.

Blogs

Sensoring Aquaponics

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. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start. An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit.

Blogs

Aquaponics update

Thought I’d post a quick progress report on the aquaponics setup as the build pretty much complete and the growing has commenced. I left the last post where I had a lovely clean tank and had just introduced 20 goldfish. About a week later I introduced a further 20 and I’m happy to say that around 3 weeks on the fish are thriving, initially they seemed to cower in a corner but are making full use of the space.

Blogs

My foray into aquaponics

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.

Blogs

My foray into aquaponics

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.

Blogs

My foray into aquaponics

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.

Blogs

My foray into aquaponics

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.

Blogs

Maplins weather station fun

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.

Blogs

Maplins weather station fun

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.

Blogs

Ensure systemd services restart on failure

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.

Blogs

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

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.

Blogs

Etckeeper - config version control

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:

Blogs

SSH known hosts verification failure one liner

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!

Blogs

Getting Fedora 21 on the Raspberry Pi 2

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.

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Raspberry Pi Wildlife Camera

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera. Normally I cover most of my projects on here but this one has been a little different as it was featured in this months Linux Voice magazine. For this very reason I won’t feature a write-up here, just a few images and videos captured using it and a couple of pointers to the software used in the project.

Blogs

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious. [root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils Will do the trick, now how to use it? [root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 1 OggCamp

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?

Blogs

Light control with MQTT on Arduino

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.

Blogs

New hosting for my blog

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.

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

Post Raspberry Jamboree Event

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee. The day started as most of these type of events do, runnning slightly late, I was a little worried at first as I thought I was the one running late (even though I was bang on time), but then I remembered who I was waiting for :). Eventually bumping into familiar faces everything started to fall into place.

Blogs

Raspberry Jamboree Event

This coming Saturday, 9th March, I’ll be helping out as crew member at what could be the most exciting Raspbery Pi event since its launch. CPC are sponsoring the jamboree, with talks from plenty of familiar, and some not so, faces at the exhibition centre in Manchester. Much looking forward to it. Full writeup will follow after the event, I am expecting an announcement or two though, not sure what though.

Blogs

Linux Outlaws Live in Liverpool

There are a number of events in my geek calendar I really look forward to throughout the year, most of them centre around a particular group of people too. This year an extra event has turned up early in the list, Linux Outlaws Live, or LOL as it seems to be more affectionately known. The live show, celebrating the 300th episode of Linux Outlaws, was held at Leaf on Bold st, Liverpool.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

rsync with spaces in filenames fun

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. While normally this can be easily fixed via number of methods: rsync ‘jon@example.com:/remote/path/filename with spaces.txt’ /local/path/ Notice the quotes around the remote path, you can also use the -s (or –protect-args) which will send the command as-is to the remote.

Blogs

Post Virtualisation Talk

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night. The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though. The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Maplins weather station fun

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.

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

Maplins weather station fun

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.

Blogs

Maplins weather station fun

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.

Blogs

Maplins weather station fun

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.

Blogs

Ensure systemd services restart on failure

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.

Blogs

Ensure systemd services restart on failure

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.

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

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.

Blogs

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

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.

Blogs

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

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.

Blogs

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

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.

Blogs

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

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.

Blogs

SSH known hosts verification failure one liner

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!

Blogs

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

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.

Blogs

Etckeeper - config version control

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:

Blogs

Etckeeper - config version control

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:

Blogs

SSH known hosts verification failure one liner

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!

Blogs

rsync with spaces in filenames fun

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. While normally this can be easily fixed via number of methods: rsync ‘jon@example.com:/remote/path/filename with spaces.txt’ /local/path/ Notice the quotes around the remote path, you can also use the -s (or –protect-args) which will send the command as-is to the remote.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

SSH known hosts verification failure one liner

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!

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious. [root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils Will do the trick, now how to use it? [root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

SSH known hosts verification failure one liner

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!

Blogs

Getting Fedora 21 on the Raspberry Pi 2

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.

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Barcamp Manchester

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 1 OggCamp

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?

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

Getting Fedora 21 on the Raspberry Pi 2

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.

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

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.

Blogs

Barcamp Manchester

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.

Blogs

Barcamp Manchester

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.

Blogs

Barcamp Manchester

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.

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

Post Virtualisation Talk

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night. The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though. The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early.

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

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 storage. http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/ This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting).

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious. [root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils Will do the trick, now how to use it? [root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

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 CTDB for Highly available data” Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here. The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB.

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality. Prerequisites: 2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

Blogs

Raspberry Pi Wildlife Camera

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera. Normally I cover most of my projects on here but this one has been a little different as it was featured in this months Linux Voice magazine. For this very reason I won’t feature a write-up here, just a few images and videos captured using it and a couple of pointers to the software used in the project.

Blogs

Raspberry Pi Wildlife Camera

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera. Normally I cover most of my projects on here but this one has been a little different as it was featured in this months Linux Voice magazine. For this very reason I won’t feature a write-up here, just a few images and videos captured using it and a couple of pointers to the software used in the project.

Blogs

Raspberry Pi Wildlife Camera

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera. Normally I cover most of my projects on here but this one has been a little different as it was featured in this months Linux Voice magazine. For this very reason I won’t feature a write-up here, just a few images and videos captured using it and a couple of pointers to the software used in the project.

Blogs

New projects: Pi's and Arduinos

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.

Blogs

Raspberry Pi Wildlife Camera

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera. Normally I cover most of my projects on here but this one has been a little different as it was featured in this months Linux Voice magazine. For this very reason I won’t feature a write-up here, just a few images and videos captured using it and a couple of pointers to the software used in the project.

Blogs

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious. [root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils Will do the trick, now how to use it? [root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Blogs

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious. [root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils Will do the trick, now how to use it? [root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Blogs

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious. [root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils Will do the trick, now how to use it? [root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Blogs

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious. [root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils Will do the trick, now how to use it? [root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

Arduino based Electricity monitor

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.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

New hosting for my blog

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.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

Post Virtualisation Talk

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night. The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though. The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

New hosting for my blog

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.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

Post Virtualisation Talk

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night. The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though. The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 1 OggCamp

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?

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

2013 - A good year

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 1 OggCamp

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?

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

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.

Blogs

Light control with MQTT on Arduino

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.

Blogs

Light control with MQTT on Arduino

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.

Blogs

New projects: Pi's and Arduinos

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.

Blogs

Light control with MQTT on Arduino

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.

Blogs

New projects: Pi's and Arduinos

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.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

Bletchley Park, Little People, Job Change and broken bones.

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.

Blogs

Bletchley Park, Little People, Job Change and broken bones.

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.

Blogs

Bletchley Park, Little People, Job Change and broken bones.

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.

Blogs

Bletchley Park, Little People, Job Change and broken bones.

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.

Blogs

Bletchley Park, Little People, Job Change and broken bones.

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.

Blogs

New hosting for my blog

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.

Blogs

New hosting for my blog

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.

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

Post Virtualisation Talk

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night. The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though. The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Blogs

Post Raspberry Jamboree Event

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee. The day started as most of these type of events do, runnning slightly late, I was a little worried at first as I thought I was the one running late (even though I was bang on time), but then I remembered who I was waiting for :). Eventually bumping into familiar faces everything started to fall into place.

Blogs

Post Raspberry Jamboree Event

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee. The day started as most of these type of events do, runnning slightly late, I was a little worried at first as I thought I was the one running late (even though I was bang on time), but then I remembered who I was waiting for :). Eventually bumping into familiar faces everything started to fall into place.

Blogs

Raspberry Jamboree Event

This coming Saturday, 9th March, I’ll be helping out as crew member at what could be the most exciting Raspbery Pi event since its launch. CPC are sponsoring the jamboree, with talks from plenty of familiar, and some not so, faces at the exhibition centre in Manchester. Much looking forward to it. Full writeup will follow after the event, I am expecting an announcement or two though, not sure what though.

Blogs

Post Raspberry Jamboree Event

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee. The day started as most of these type of events do, runnning slightly late, I was a little worried at first as I thought I was the one running late (even though I was bang on time), but then I remembered who I was waiting for :). Eventually bumping into familiar faces everything started to fall into place.

Blogs

Post Raspberry Jamboree Event

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee. The day started as most of these type of events do, runnning slightly late, I was a little worried at first as I thought I was the one running late (even though I was bang on time), but then I remembered who I was waiting for :). Eventually bumping into familiar faces everything started to fall into place.

Blogs

Raspberry Jamboree Event

This coming Saturday, 9th March, I’ll be helping out as crew member at what could be the most exciting Raspbery Pi event since its launch. CPC are sponsoring the jamboree, with talks from plenty of familiar, and some not so, faces at the exhibition centre in Manchester. Much looking forward to it. Full writeup will follow after the event, I am expecting an announcement or two though, not sure what though.

Blogs

Linux Outlaws Live in Liverpool

There are a number of events in my geek calendar I really look forward to throughout the year, most of them centre around a particular group of people too. This year an extra event has turned up early in the list, Linux Outlaws Live, or LOL as it seems to be more affectionately known. The live show, celebrating the 300th episode of Linux Outlaws, was held at Leaf on Bold st, Liverpool.

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Linux Outlaws Live in Liverpool

There are a number of events in my geek calendar I really look forward to throughout the year, most of them centre around a particular group of people too. This year an extra event has turned up early in the list, Linux Outlaws Live, or LOL as it seems to be more affectionately known. The live show, celebrating the 300th episode of Linux Outlaws, was held at Leaf on Bold st, Liverpool.

Blogs

Linux Outlaws Live in Liverpool

There are a number of events in my geek calendar I really look forward to throughout the year, most of them centre around a particular group of people too. This year an extra event has turned up early in the list, Linux Outlaws Live, or LOL as it seems to be more affectionately known. The live show, celebrating the 300th episode of Linux Outlaws, was held at Leaf on Bold st, Liverpool.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

Blogs

rsync with spaces in filenames fun

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. While normally this can be easily fixed via number of methods: rsync ‘jon@example.com:/remote/path/filename with spaces.txt’ /local/path/ Notice the quotes around the remote path, you can also use the -s (or –protect-args) which will send the command as-is to the remote.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Blogs

My contribution to the consultation team/my MP regarding government "adult" filtering

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 the open rights group and also to my local MP. I am raising my concerns about the proposal for network filtering of adult content and default blocking. I believe that filtering should be an opt in feature offered by ISP’s, this feature should have a vetting process and be request driven using open standards and lists viewable by the userbase.

Blogs

My contribution to the consultation team/my MP regarding government "adult" filtering

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 the open rights group and also to my local MP. I am raising my concerns about the proposal for network filtering of adult content and default blocking. I believe that filtering should be an opt in feature offered by ISP’s, this feature should have a vetting process and be request driven using open standards and lists viewable by the userbase.

Blogs

My contribution to the consultation team/my MP regarding government "adult" filtering

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 the open rights group and also to my local MP. I am raising my concerns about the proposal for network filtering of adult content and default blocking. I believe that filtering should be an opt in feature offered by ISP’s, this feature should have a vetting process and be request driven using open standards and lists viewable by the userbase.

Blogs

My contribution to the consultation team/my MP regarding government "adult" filtering

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 the open rights group and also to my local MP. I am raising my concerns about the proposal for network filtering of adult content and default blocking. I believe that filtering should be an opt in feature offered by ISP’s, this feature should have a vetting process and be request driven using open standards and lists viewable by the userbase.

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Hourly Backup Script for Email

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.

Blogs

Whats on my Podcatcher?

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.