The personal blog of Peter Hicks
For several years, Electromagnetic Field has operated its own internal telephone system. Attendees can set up one or more extensions which can terminate on a copper telephone line, a DECT phone, a SIP endpoint or a GSM phone. Two years ago, I set up BatFax on a Raspberry Pi. Call the number, it calls you Continue reading "Call Asterisk, Get MP3"
After running Proxmox 8.x in a lab environment for two years, this weekend was an appropriate time to upgrade. Backing up each machine was far more straightforward than I thought shut it down, back it up to a Synology NAS defined in Proxmox, and delete it from the host. Even with 2.5Gbps Ethernet, this Continue reading "Upgrading Proxmox 8 to 9"
Some years ago, I bought some APC Back-UPS Pro units to keep a few important but non-critical home items working. I m particularly invested in this because living in a large city, there are frequent short outages and I d rather not have all my network kit reboot each time the electricity supply sneezes. Recently, I had Continue reading "Replacing an APC Back-UPS battery with Linux"
With numerous devices on my network, it s useful to be able to see log files in one central place. There s software that can do this, but it s neither lightweight nor necessarily free. Here s the three magic lines to put in /etc/syslog-ng/conf.d/remote.conf: It s as straightforward as that. The s_net source will match any UDP traffic on Continue reading "Capturing syslog from a remote host"
I am a long-time user of Apache ActiveMQ. It s served me well, and the tight integration with Apache Camel means I can interface with so many systems with relative ease. In the past, I used to struggle with the concept of queues versus topics, persistent versus non-persistent messages, messages and expiry times. In some ways, Continue reading "ActiveMQ, Camel and Message Expiry"
Background Back when dial-up was 33.6k and HTML email was frowned upon, I ran my own mail server. This was a luxury that not many people had, but it gave me huge amounts of experience running a live service on the Internet. There are several problems to hosting your own email. The most significant is Continue reading "Migrating your email"
After leaving the networking industry in 2013, I decided to replace the Cisco network equipment at home with Mikrotik for reasons of cost and power. Twelve years later, I ve ditched Mikrotik and moved to Ubiquiti for some solid reasons. What attracted me to Mikrotik was the price/performance ratio. I was using a Cisco 1801 with Continue reading "Mikrotik to Ubiquiti"
After being inspired by Piotr Przybyl s talk about integration testing, I started off a new project with some thorough testing of a Spring Boot JAR. Software development is full of obscure problems, and when uploading an object to an emulated Amazon S3 service using LocalStack, I kept getting the error: Not the most helpful error Continue reading "Fixing host must not be null with LocalStack and…
macOS Ventura has been released. I use my Mac Mini far less than I do my MacBook Pro, so I decided to upgrade without a fresh install, something I very rarely do. Surprisingly, the only casualty of the upgrade was Microsoft Defender, which came up with a warning triangle and a suggestion I click Fix , Continue reading "Microsoft Defender and macOS Ventura"
In the past few weeks, I ve been actively looking at how I can manage all my smart (or ZigBee/WiFi connected) IoT devices in my home from a central place. I started with Home Assistant, but quickly found the user interface a bit too clunky for my appetite. Searching around, openHAB came up as a good Continue reading "Automating your home with openHAB"