Tag: libreops

  1. Simple environment monitoring with spare parts.

    15 July 2020

    It's going on summer in the Bay Area, which means that it's warming up a bit both outside and inside (because air conditioning is Not A Thing out here).  That, coupled with the not inconsiderable research infrastructure I have at home has left me wondering and worrying about just how hot my office gets during the day while I'm working.  Now, I could just put a simple little thermometer on my shelf (and I did) but my concerns are a bit bigger than that.  What happens if my office temperature reaches a critical point and servers start melting down on …

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  2. Extending a wireless network with OpenWRT.

    16 June 2020

    One of my earliest covid-19 lockdown projects was doing a little work on my home wireless network.  I have a fairly nice wireless access point upstairs running OpenWRT, sitting behind the piece-of-shit DSL modem-slash-wireless access point our ISP makes us use.  All of our devices connect to that AP instead of the DSL modem.  Let's call it Upstairs.  However, the dodginess of the construction of our house being what it is (please don't ask), wireless coverage from upstairs isn't the greatest downstairs.  The fix for this, conveniently, is to set up another wireless access point downstairs and connect the two …

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  3. Faking a telnet server with netcat.

    25 May 2020

    Let's say that you need to be able to access a server somewhere on your network.  This is a pretty common thing to do if you've got a fair amount of infrastructure at home.  But let's say that your computer, for whatever reason, doesn't have the horsepower to run SSH because the crypto used requires math that older systems can't carry out in anything like reasonable time.  This is a not uncommon situation for retrocomputing enthusiasts.  In the days before SSH we used telnet for this, but pretty much the entire Net doesn't anymore because the traffic wasn't encrypted, so …

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  4. Tunneling across networks with Nebula.

    30 April 2020

    Longtime readers have no doubt observed that I plug a lot weird shit into my exocortex - from bookmark managers to card catalogues to just about anything that has an API.  Sometimes this is fairly straightforward; if it's on the public Net I can get to it (processing that data is a separate issue, of course).  But what about the stuff I have around the lab?  I'm always messing with new toys that are network connected and occasionally useful.  The question is, how do I get it out of the lab and out to my exocortex?  Sometimes I write bots to …

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  5. Migrating to Restic for offsite backups.

    15 April 2020

    20221229: UPDATE: Added what to do when you change your Backblaze application key.

    20201023: UPDATE: Added command to clean the local backup cache.

    20200426: UPDATE: Fixed the "pruned oldest snapshots" command.

    A couple of years back I did a how-to about using a data backup utility called Duplicity to make offsite backups of Leandra to Backblaze B2. (referer link) It worked just fine; it was stable, it was easy to script, you knew what it was doing.  But over time it started to show its warts, as everything does.  For starters, it was unusually slow when compared to the implementation …

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  6. Using Nginx to spoof HTTP Host headers.

    26 February 2020

    EDIT: s/alice.bob.com/alice.example.com/ to fix part of the backstory.

    Let's say that you have a server (like Prosody) that has one or more subsystems (like BOSH and Websockets).  You want to stick them behind a web server like Nginx so that they can be accessed via HTTP - let's say that you want a browser to be able to communicate with those subsystems for some reason.  Or more likely you have a web application that needs to communicate with them in the same way (because Javascript).  Assuming that the above features are already enabled in Prosody …

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  7. Integrating Huginn with a Matrix server.

    12 February 2020

    Throughout this series I've shown you how to set up a Matrix server and client using Synapse and Riot, and make it much more robust as a service by integrating a database server and a mechanism for making VoIP more reliable.  Now we'll wrap it up by doing something neat, building a simple agent network in Huginn to post what I'm listening to into a Matrix Room.  I have an account on libre.fm that my media players log to which we'll be using as our data source.  Of course, this is only a demonstration of the basic technique, you …

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  8. Making a Matrix server STUN-enabled.

    04 February 2020

    Previously in this series I showed you how to migrate a Matrix server to use Postgres, a database server designed for busy workloads, such as those of a busy chat server.  This time around I'll demonstrate how to integrate Synapse with a STUN/TURN server to make the voice and video conferencing features of the Matrix network more reliable.  It's remarkably easy to do but it does take a little planning.  Here's why I recommend doing this:

    If you are reading this, chances are you're behind a NATting firewall, which means that your device doesn't have a publically routable IP …

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  9. Converting a Matrix server to use Postgres.

    29 January 2020

    In my last post about the Matrix network I covered how to set up a public Synapse server as well as a web-based client called Riot.  In so doing I left out a part of the process for the sake of clarity (because it's a hefty procedure and there's no reason not to break it down into logical modules), which was using a database back-end that's designed for workloads above and beyond what SQLite was meant for.  I'll be the first to tell you, I'm not a database professional, I don't know a whole lot about how to use or …

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  10. Setting up a private Matrix server.

    21 January 2020

    EDIT - 20200804 - Updated the Nginx stanzas because the newer versions of Certbot do all the work of setting up SSL/TLS support for you, including the most basic Nginx settings.  If you have them there you'll run into trouble unless you delete them or comment them out.  Also, Certbot centralizes all of the appropriate SSL configuration and hardening settings into a single includable file (/etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf) for ease of maintenance.

    A couple of years ago I spent some time trying to set up Matrix, a self-hosted instant messaging and chat system that works a little like Jabber, a …

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