Sean's projects, musings and general information
A few years ago I wrote a handy little tool to solve a simple problem: test automated ticketing & alerting based on syslog messages. The problem was presented to me while working for a large telecommunications provider who had outsourced their fault monitoring to an off-shore consulting company. This particular company had a habit of… Continue Reading Faking Syslog Messages
AWS held an IoT Contest July 13-17 2017, and this describes my entry (which won! Woohoo!). You can see a video description of this project here. You can also see the page on hackster.io here. This project provides integration between Home Assistant, AWS IoT, and low power devices running on the ESP8266. Â The ESP8266 has… Continue Reading AWS IoT Contest
The story below about VoodooFood Restaurant is modelled after a firewall rule implementation procedure. All names, characters, processes and incidents portrayed in this story are fictitious. No identification with actual telecom providers or other large businesses is intended or should be inferred. Hi, Welcome to voodoo food restaurant what can I get for you? I… Continue Reading Starving in the Voodoo Restaurant
I setup home assistant around six months ago, and I have amassed a sqlite database around 700Mb. Today, the entire six months of history is in the Sqlite database which is causing home assistant to hang for minutes when I try to look at history, even if the requested history is only today. For other stuff,… Continue Reading Home Assistant migration from Sqlite3 to MariaDB (MySQL)
This describes from start to finish how to configure Gitlab’s continuous integration to build a docker image. I couldn’t find any simple documentation on what all needs to be setup to build a docker image, so I hope someone finds this useful. I run a rancher cluster, and all my services run on top of this cluster… Continue Reading Building WhaleSay with Docker and Gitlab-CI
I have a few old DNS-323 that I picked up for cheap. Although they are around 10 years old (as of 2016), thanks to some community firmware, they support drives larger than 2Tb. They’re not fast, but as a remote backup target they’re an excellent choice, since they can do OpenVPN, as well as rsync. One major limitation… Continue Reading DNS-323 Autostart after Power Failure
Tl;Dr: You can use these cheap Wifi RGB Modules from AliExpress/Ebay, and with a custom firmware they will speak MQTT and can be updated OTA as well as used for other features as desired. Download a copy of my custom firmware here, connect with the programming pads in the diagram here, configure Arduino to flash to… Continue Reading Hacked ESP8266 RGB LED Controller
We haven’t used cable / satellite since 2006. Unfortunately, some online streaming services have restrictions, so when we visit them we must appear to be in a different location. Until now, we have been successfully using our existing server and VPN intrastructure (where this site his hosted for example), to additionally have a Squid proxy… Continue Reading Beyond Proxies: Cheaply routing traffic to another country to avoid Geo Restrictions for ~$20/year
Amazon in the US has a deal, where you can get a small button for $5. The marketing behind the button is, you can press it and it connects to amazon, and orders you a new package of something you have pre-selected. As a geek, all I see is a gadget that is simple, has a… Continue Reading Amazon Dash + OpenHAB for mail delivery notifications
The McAfee Webgateway is officially supported on VMWare or on a McAfee Appliance.  In my test environment at home, i prefer to use libvirt running on a Debian system (qemu/kvm). When I first tried to install the webgateway, I got the error that this was not an appliance and the installer refused to go further. I… Continue Reading McAfee Webgateway on KVM