Table of Contents
Technical notes on a variety of topics
Many of the following articles contain some of my opinions.
If you find you disagree with them, please feel free to publish your own.
Some of what follows is also incomplete (occasionally the term "work in progress" is appropriate). I try to mention this at the start of any such article. All articles also have a "last modified" date at the bottom - you may wish to check this in case some of what I have written becomes out of date, simply due to the inexorable passage of time.
General stuff
- How to show IP addresses in documentation, the right way
- A suggestion for hostnames
- Avoiding systemd on a Debian (Jessie or later) installation
- Devuan - a systemd-free replacement for Debian 8 and later
- What to do if your machine gives you a "grub rescue>" prompt
- Making the tab more visible in Konsole (KDE terminal application) when there is activity in the session
- Why KMail 2 is shit compared to KMail 1 (part of my experience upgrading Debian Wheezy to Devuan Jessie, documented above)
- Some of the weird things hosting providers do
- Some of the great things hosting providers do
- Topping up a Tesco pay-as-you-go SIM card when it's not in a telephone
- Notes on things to do to a Debian / Devuan server immediately after installation
- Some useful tools to install on a Debian / Devuan server which aren't there by default
- Setting up "screen" to run as soon as you log in to an account
- How to identify whether a bash script is being run locally, via SSH, or from cron
- How to keep LVM partitions almost, but not quite, full by automatically growing them as needed
- Shrinking ext2/3/4 partitions and file systems (and why you probably don't want to)
- An Asterisk-based alarm clock system
- How to find out which packages have been installed using a backup of a Debian/Devuan system
- Notes on what you need to install on a Debian / Devuan machine to be able to (re)build packages from source
- A script to scan your network for SNMP managed switches and find out what's connected to which port
- Writing a script which will either do something now, or run later, when you want it to
- A few notes on creating an "Instant VM" image which I use to make new virtual servers in under 2 minutes
- When will my Raid (re)build be ready? (This turned into a bit of an essay about Raid, backups and archives, but never mind…)
- Converting CSV to SQL without having to manually create DB tables
- Moving or copying Logical Volumes between Volume Groups (and optionally between servers)
- Checking lines of code for mismatched brackets
- Routing IPv6 to/from machines on your internal network (if you have a connectivity provider which does IPv6)
- Halting or rebooting a machine when it really doesn't want to
- Running a cron job on the last Friday of each month or something similarly out of the ordinary
- Recovering a file which has been deleted, but is still being held open by a running process
- Using Firefox cookies with wget
- Installing the same packages on a Debian/Devuan machine as are installed on another one
- A reminder of how to set printing options from the command line
- Saving STDERR into a variable whilst getting STDOUT on the screen
Applications
- The Icinga monitoring system
- Asterisk telephony
- A few comments about FreePBX
- Good luck with trying to use Kamailio
- Getting started with Foreman
- Using iSCSI under Debian
- Trying to get Vagrant running under Debian
- Using systemimager to
create virtual machines quickly and easilywaste a couple of hours finding out it doesn't work on Debian - Getting a Fritz!Box cable (or probably DSL too) modem talking SIP to an Asterisk server
- My experience of using TwinDB to recover a corrupted MySQL database system
- Recovering files deleted from an ext3 or ext4 file system extundelete
- Running zoneminder in a master-slave arrangement
- Grafana has one of the worst examples of a non-intuitive user interface I have come across
- It also has a very distracting flashing symbol in the top right of every display box on the dashboard
- Getting data into Grafana via Telegraf and InfluxDB
- Is Python stupid, or is it me?
- A few cryptic Kindle notes
- Some (probably not very useful for anyone else) notes on getting sound to work on my PC
- Using corosync and pacemaker to manage geo-diverse resources without booth
- How to install FreeSwitch under Devuan
- How to install FusionPBX under Devuan
- How to use FreeSwitch once you've installed it
- A reminder (for me, at least) about using taskjuggler
- Building Frotz under Devuan (and, very probably, Debian as well)
- Installing Homer under Devuan and getting it doing something useful
- Replicating a Galera cluster with no downtime
- Using ansible for configuration management
Hardware
- Notes about various VoIP phones
- What to do if your Lego NXT brick is ticking quietly with a blank display
- How to repair a Lego NXT brick whose display is blank, or flickering
- Getting a Dell 1250c (or Xerox 6010N; same hardware, different label) working under Debian
- Upgrading the firmware in an Itead Sonoff POW over wireless
- Getting data from a Withings wireless scale without letting it talk to the Internet
- Working with the Raspberry Pi Zero W, including mounting the root FS over NFS (wirelessly, of course)
- Installing extra applications on the Tolino Epos eBook reader
- Using a DVBSky T982 DVB-T / DVB-C receiver / decoder card under Linux
- Running a script when a particular USB device is plugged in
- Using a Reolink VLC 422 camera with zoneminder
- Installing Devuan on a PC Engines APU 4D4
- Using a Qualcomm Gobi 1000 GSM / UMTS modem under Linux (on the above APU 4D4)
- USB3 controllers
Useful information from elsewhere
- The Automatic Rule-Based Time Tracker looks very interesting for tracking time spent on customer projects
- A list and explanation of Grub modules
- Live migrating Qemu / KVM virtual machines
- Live migration / HA failover of KVM virtual machines using DRBD
- Pretty much more on the same topic (newer, I think)
- Using a Dymo LabelManager PC under Linux
- An interesting alternative Lego controller
- Using an IP camera as a video4linux2 device
- Another page about the same thing, not sure how different the approach is
- Yet another page with quite a detailed walkthrough
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