Category Archives: Tech

UPSalert – My solution to Graceful Server Shutdowns on Power Loss

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   UPS’s are truly great devices! They save your butt when you have a short power out, or grandma accidentally has her curling iron and hair dryer on at the same time. But with a known runtime, you need a way to gracefully shutdown your systems to prevent data loss. Well, with APC PowerChute not looking very friendly, I decided to just go out and make my own little tool, and here it is! May I present to you, UPSalert – My solution to graceful server shutdowns on power loss.

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PfSense, VLAN’s, and SSH Disconnects (and how to fix it)

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For the past month or so my storage box has been driving me insane. Whenever I SSH into the box, after about 30 seconds it would always disconnect me. I checked everything from routes, to firewall rules, and nothing was amiss. I spent weeks looking for the cause of these SSH Disconnects, but to no avail. That is, until recently. After some extreme googling, I was able to figure out the cause and I had to share it. Continue reading →

Observium, the Do-it-All Monitoring Application

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After searching the internet for a monitoring solution for my network, I can finally say I have found the best contender, and its worth sharing. Consider this a update/solution to my previous rant about monitoring software.

How does a painless, easy install sound? How about cross platform support? Would you like Graphing/Logging of network traffic and system resources? What if I said it was based on PHP/SNMP, and it is 100% free and open-source? Ladies and gents, let me introduce you to Observium!

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Check Samba Mount at Boot in Linux

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This is technically a continuation of my post Here, but I felt this deserved its own post. If you are like me, and have Samba mounts that HAVE to be in place and ready right after boot, you want a way to make sure the drive is mounted before the system fully starts up. Well, I made a nice little script that will check a samba mount at boot time.

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Install CoovaChilli + FreeRadius on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS i386

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    CoovaChilli is an open-source captive portal system for linux that I personally use to run a free wireless access system around my area. The reason I use coovachilli instead of, oh I don’t know, nocatspash, is that with CoovaChilli I can not only limit speed per each connection, but I am also able to log IP and MAC Address’s to prevent abuse. So, lets go install coovachilli.

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Proxmox and using Samba for shared storage

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    So I recently invested in a new storage server and set it up as a NFS server so I could set up HA to prevent downtime with my VM’s when I had maintenance to do on my Proxmox Hosts. The problem is that if I use iSCSI it sends the drive as a block device that a single VM can use and the problem with NFS for me is that it was extremely slow (need to do more research on this) but when the server was setup with samba, I was able to get 113MB/s both ways to the box from my desktop (8x 300GB SATA drives in raid 10). So why not just use samba with proxmox?

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Proxmox and using NAT with a Virtual Machine

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    So I finally decided to make the jump to virtualization. Sure the performance is 1-3% slower then running on raw hardware, but the features gained from this way outweigh the cons. Now I can do backups on the fly, snapshots, quickly move resources around machines, and its all free thanks to Proxmox! Proxmox is a Linux Debian based distro that utilizes a custom kernel with support for OpenVZ and KVM. I’l go more into depth on Proxmox later, but for now here is my situation.

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Securing PHP when using Virtualmin

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    Recently for a fun project, I decided to set up an automated shared web host to test my coding abilities. I decided to go with a simple name, similar to one of my other domains. I ended up with Chris Host It. Sure its cheesy and not very professional, but this is just a test project after all. The problem was the back end I went with didn’t secure PHP as well as I wanted it to by default, so I had to fix that up. So here is a quick guide on securing PHP when using Virtualmin.
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