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. I had a situation recently where the GFCI outlet that my air conditioner’s condensate pump was plugged into had popped it’s breaker and turned [Read More…]
Setup a Raspberry Pi Kiosk with Chromium
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: Setup Raspbian The first step is to get Raspbian Jesse installed, perform sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade and if you have the Adafruit 3.5″ touchscreen installed, run through their [Read More…]
Setup a Kiosk with Ubuntu and Chromium
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. Check it out if you have a Raspberry Pi [Read More…]
Using grep on live active log files
I had a need recently to where I needed to grep an Apache httpd log file to see if a certain web subfolder was accessed. I wanted to grep the access log file which has historical and live data coming into it, and found this to be a great solution. Sharing it here in case it helps someone in the future! In this example, dd87946d06c23e was the name of the folder I was looking to see was accessed. tail -f -n 5000 /var/log/httpd/access_log | grep –line-buffered dd87946d06c23e
Use GeoIP and htaccess to deny countries access to your website
I run about a dozen websites, and one of them switched over to the XenForo forum software. The problem with forums is once the spambots find it, they’re registering like crazy. My best efforts to use CAPTCHA didn’t work well. Then I added a question which uses AJAX to verify the answer against an external API. That helped but they were still able to figure out a valid answer. They then were manually verifying the registration via email. My best efforts to stop them really only slowed them down. I wanted it to end. Using a self-hosted Piwik analytics instance (I love Piwik) I was able to determine that most of the spammers came from India and China. I could have added those two countries known IPs [Read More…]
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The purpose of this site is for me to share my DIY technical experiences as a place to document them publicly. Hopefully somewhere along the way they are helpful for you.