When something on my Linux servers needs to send email (WordPress, Nagios, cron scripts, etc), I use mailx. With the spam filters everyone has a lot of my automated emails haven't been reaching their destination. I've done the SPF rules and making sure my forward matches my reverse DNS lookups; even have done DKIM. Can't seem to find a reliable option with sending email from the command line without it getting flagged for spam. [Read More...]

I love Nagios and I love Raspberry Pi's. With my growing smart home and other projects, it only makes sense to monitor it all. To do that I use a Rapsberry Pi to run Nagios for low-cost reliable monitoring. I had Nagios running on a Virtual Machine but freeing up those resources and putting an old Pi to use is perfect. After you have Raspbian installed, update it using Then reboot the Pi so we have a fresh start. Once logged back in run During the installation it will prompt you for a password you want to use on the website. Enter it here, confirm it in the 2nd screen and remember it for later. [Read More...]

I'm a huge fan of Nagios. I've installed it at work and it provides us simple up/down information, as well as detailed service information. Being able to customize the level of monitoring detail has been a huge benefit. Nagios doesn't just stop at the workplace — I run it at home too. I'm monitoring my weather station, Raspberry Pis, SmartThings hub, IoT WiFi devices, my small lab Asterisk PBX and websites I've created for businesses, family and friends. It's important to me that I run a healthy environment — whether it's in my house or not. [Read More...]

I've setup my Raspberry Pi 3 to be a digital signage kiosk. I've installed the Adafruit 3.5″ PiTFT Plus touch screen, and am using it to show my weather station data in real time. This is done by having the Raspberry Pi auto log in and run Chromium to open a webpage. I've shared how I've setup a full digital signage system using Ubuntu and Chromium for Kiosk mode. This post will repeat a lot of the same in that article, but tailor it to the Raspberry Pi. Here's how I did it [Read More...]

Recently I've had the need to setup 2 kiosk stations to display an array of data on a digital signage screen which has no keyboard or mouse attached to it. The idea in this post is to explain how I did it. I installed Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, set some auto-login tasks and run Chromium in kiosk mode. Then using xdotool to cycle through the Chrome tabs at a set interval. Lastly, the unclutter package will remove the mouse cursor from the screen, giving a clean automated look. I also show how I've set this up for a Raspberry Pi. It's mostly the same, but a few things are different. [Read More...]