Posts on nikdoof.com

Note: the issues outlined below are resolved, this was originally posted 2020-06-09 on another site.

Over the past two weeks i’ve been hit by somewhat of a nostalgia trip, after coming across a copy of my old blog on archive.org (archive.org) and not having a suitable backup of the content itself i’ve decided to try and preserve my posts in a useful form…

Initially I had setup dimension.sh (archive.org) to use Maildir for its user mail store, as this was a preference of mine for all my dedicated servers over the years.

While I was in the progress of setting up dimension.sh (archive.org) I slowly came to the realisation that the distribution I select (CentOS 8) didn’t have coverage for a lot of the popular utilities that are required on a pubnix system.

A few days ago VMWare released vSphere 6.5, and in it came a raft of improvements to vCenter and other fluffy features that everyone loves.

For many years Google has produced a range of “Search Appliances”, the idea is that you have a miniature Google search engine within your business that is able to index all your internal files and make them available in a nice interface that everyone is u…

In an attempt to try and improve monitoring on my ESX system, i’ve started to poke around with a few Munin plugins which look interesting.

As it turns out, the “new” switch i’ve acquired was very out of date in regards to firmware.

Another day, another switch.

After finally taking the time to get tunneled IPv6 into the homelab via Hurricane Electric (archive.org) I thought it would be nice to extend out the routing to my VPN clients, after all they connect in an appear like local devices to the rest of the netw…

Since the demise of Google Reader a lot of new tools and sites have tried to take over the mantle as the de-facto RSS reader for the masses.

It might sound like using a nuclear weapon to swat a fly, but when you’re working with Puppet in your day job it can be really useful to have a test bench to fiddle with new ideas at home.

A few years ago I took the risk and installed an SSD into my father’s PC, At the time his 300GB Seagate drive had failed in his stock Dell PC, just a touch outside of the warranty period, and in an attempt to keep the costs low I ended up picking a cheap…

One thing that has always frustrated me on Mac OS X is the impossible slow directory listing and browsing speeds on CIFS/SMB shares, Apple’s devices, such as the Time Capsule and OS X shares work perfectly, but anything running Samba has this amazingly sl…

Driven by some techie mental disability and the thirst to understand more i’ve slowly expanded out my home network into a “homelab”.

In the hunt to introduce VLANs across all segments of my home network I managed to pick-up a L2 managed switch for a lot cheaper than I expected, the TL-SG3210 only offers the bare basics but its enough to get some control to the last remnant of the unman…

I spotted a Youtube video (archive.org) the other day that talked quickly about SDRs (Software Defined Radios) and how you can pick up one for $20, which is a massive difference from the £300-400 devices I spotted a few years ago.

A while ago it was announced that Heroku (archive.org) would be changing its price structure, after a few minutes with a calculator I worked out that it’ll be essentially better for my bigger apps, and not so much for the small stuff I run.

Recently, another EVE related web-app idea popped into my mind and due to the generally low impact nature of the application I didn’t require a backend data store.

Over a year ago now I stepped back from being a system administrator and developer for the EVE Online alliance Test Alliance Please Ignore, part of my role there I spent hundreds of hours developing their internal authentication system and other small app…

Last night I spent an hour or so packaging up some Python I made to scratch an itch into a distributable module.

On the 31st of Jan, my NAS stopped responding, no idea what was going on and with zero response to the power button I did a hard reset, I spent the next few hours double checking all my config to find out what the hell had happened.

Finding a new project is hard.

After a short, frustrating time, i’ve finally got the Deluge (archive.org) WebUI to proxy through Nginx without any errors.

A few days ago I picked up a Brother QL-570 (archive.org) cheap on Amazon for the other half, as shes about to setup her own online shop and needs to throw out a few address labels.

One of the key components of Auth is the ability to communicate with numerous other systems and manage their user authentication systems in situations were we can’t modify the application to use our authentication API.

$ sudo apt-get install bzr Reading package lists...

Nearly two weeks ago I replied to a email offering up some old hardware on the Manchester Linux Users list, Tim was offering up a few SPARC machines amongst other things, and due to my interest in different CPU architectures I bit his hand off.

Its been a while since I’ve done a good hack article. so again I’m back onto my favourite topic of 3G modems.

Last week I finally got round to ordering a T-Mobile G1 and I got accepted, and to be honest I was expecting my contract application to bounce like a rubber ball.

A while ago I spotted a post about a new Ubuntu based distribution that had been released, called CrunchBang Linux (archive.org), as i’m not a great fan of Ubuntu distros anymore I passed this one up and never look at it again.

So, I finally got around to giving a talk at LivLUG (archive.org), anyone who knows me will know i’m not the best public speaker in the world and I get quite nervous at the thought.

This weekend (25th to 26th of October) CloudMade (archive.org) will be hosting a Open Street Map (archive.org) mapping party in Manchester at the Marbella Cafe (archive.org).

People who use their Huawei E160G on Three (archive.org) will know that in the Windows client you can send and receive SMS, this will come at some minor cost of £0.10 per SMS, and you can add bundles onto your mobile broadband account to make this cheaper.

My grand idea of experimenting with various distributions for the EeePC went wrong, by quite a bit as well.

I’ve been using Debian on my EeePC 701 since I got it, I think the original Xandros lasted a whole two hours or so.

While writing a new report today I’ve been driven mad while creating a dynamic query that selects the last full week.

Dropbox (archive.org) is out of closed beta and is open for the public, but what is more interesting is that they now have a client for Linux (archive.org).

I posted a few days ago about the creation of an administration list for all those who are interested in putting a helping hand into the LUG.

The eee-acpi module, hacked by Asus from the asus-laptop (archive.org) module, currently manages the kill switches for the various extra hardware (wifi, cardreader, webcam) and also handles the extra Fn keys via ACPI events.

After initally setting up my EeePC (archive.org) to run Debian (archive.org) Lenny I quickly encountered a issue were the madwifi drivers wouldn’t resume correctly.

With the launch of BBC iPlayer for iPhones it seems they’ve let slip a little extra “feature”.

Finally, i’ve got round to moving the /misc folder off onto Amazon S3.

As part of a new year resolution (of a sort), I’ve decided to become more involved in the Linux community and one of the big stepping stones is the local LUGs.

So I finally rebooted my laptop after the 10.4.10 update, fine a few months late but what the hell.

I’d been mulling over getting a N95 for a few weeks, and I was quite hyped up with moving to a intelligent handset (compaired my Nokia 3 Series mobile).

Ever since I got my N95 (archive.org) I’ve been doing some small mapping for the Open Street Map (archive.org) project.