For a long time our company used hybrid mail setup, with regular developers having mailboxes on linux mail server (postfix) and manager types - on office365. As they share same domain, Office365 connectors are used. This setup enabled significant cost savings as only users requiring shared calendar or Microsoft Office license had to be put on office365. Recently, the company decided to rebrand and…
Here is business idea on how to multiply amount of EV chargers Many homeowners are in position to provide EV charging points (power connection, parking places), even if they are not interested in EV vehicle at the moment. Some of them are willing to monetize the possibility, but don't want to deal with clearinghouse headaches and the necessary initial investment in expensive charger. Lack of the…
====== Daeb ====== Daeb - pronounced "deb" - nothing special, I just like the short name, similarly to "cab" :) Motto: Carpooling-first robotaxi driven highly efficient transportation solution. ===== intro ===== Bus, metro and cars transport are obsolete. People want to have the best features of the three, like comfort and speed of car, lack of parking headache and cost of bus or metro, Robotaxi…
doPon is short from "Drop Off People and ONboard" symbol “↙️P↗️” DoPon is system to enumerate places where people drop off and onboard, near socially popular places, such as wedding halls, malls, stadiums, cemeteries, etc. It is designed to be used in robotaxi, carpooling or taxi settings, when user is on the go and needs to enter pickup or drop off location. Scheme doPon system is global, thus it…
By definition devops role requires 24/7 on-demand attention. With separate NOC team to execute SOPs and track incidents. Single devops is nonsense. A company that has single devops is a recipe for disaster as there is no redundancy for that fragile and pesky human resource. With more than one devops, knowledge sharing becomes the issue. And without further ado, let me introduce F1x - how we handle…
It is finally happened: Google Talk is surprisingly still operational, but that ends on Thursday Took 12 years to die: O GTalk team, where were thou? (part III) (AKA: The other shoe dropped). (2017) O GTalk team, where were thou? (part II) (2014) O GTalk team, where were thou? (2010)
It is a very bad idea to run database (especially production one with lots of I/O) on BTRFS because the filesystem at any random time might become readonly: Oct 24 12:30:22 db02 kernel: BTRFS: error (device nvme0n1) in btrfs_run_delayed_refs:2936: errno=-28 No space left Oct 24 12:30:22 db02 kernel: BTRFS info (device nvme0n1): forced readonly And then you find that you need to do rebalance. You…
Today it happened for the first time. GTalk team, silently, without telling anyone, stopped messages sent using XMPP to be delivered to Android Hangouts clients. This caused me to miss important alert message from my monitoring system. Good bye GTalk/Hangouts, it was nice to know you. Hello telegram, the only popular and opensource API system out there! See you on tg://resolve?domain=skliarie
With huge USB flash drives of today it is sad that one can't easily put several bootable ISO images on it and have nice on-boot selection menu. GRUB to the rescue! Historically GRUB is being used for hard disks and syslinux for floppies and flash drives. But nothing prevents using GRUB for flash drives as well. Here are instructions for creating bootable GRUB-based USB flash drive (disk on key):…
Four full years passed since my last post on GTalk . Unfortunately I can't say much good about Google Instant Messenger efforts. It looks they would like everybody to switch from XMPP-based GTalk to proprietary protocol of Hangouts. We saw stop of XMPP federation , wholesale upgrade of GTalk clients to Hangouts, last GTalk for Windows have been released 15 months ago . Next logical step is to stop…
Being the "family geek" I am often asked for laptop recommendations. More often than not, functionality requirements are so low that even chromebook will be sufficient. Actually I already recommended two chromebooks and so far both continue to please their owners. Sometimes the requirements list Skype or greater autonomy as mandatory items. For such users an Android tablet should be enough.…
Ensure emails are accounted for Sysadmins often set up scripts that send back "OK" or "Error" emails, but there is no mechanism to send alert if *no* email was received for certain time period. Lack of such emails might indicate serious system failure somewhere, that becomes obvious when it is too late to do anything. There are many stories on internet about backups that were set up properly, but…
Someone asked me for a howto on setting up multiple mysql engines on the same linux server. There are many articles on the topic, but none provides an ready-to-use set of files which one can simply grab and go. Thus I created multiple_mysql.tar.gz file that includes all files to run four mysql engines. The configuration assumes per-database directories /opt/db-330[4567] with bin_log, mysql and…
Recently, after reboot, my ssh sessions to remote servers started behaving sluggishly, sometimes taking several seconds for typed characters to appear. The lag was especially noticeable with last character that got typed. Nature of ssh sessions it to type several characters and checking the output. You can imagine the frustration seeing most of keypresses delivered, but getting feedback after some…
There are several popular playlists used for internet radio streaming: asx, m3u, smil, asf, pls... The playlist extension is not always visible in the URL that an ipradio station returns. Furthermore, the MIME type is not always correct. Sometimes one has no choice but to guess the playlist type by looking for the presence of certain markers. After fruitless searches on the internet, I wrote an…
One big advantage of using amazon's EC2 servce is its deceptively easy way to create new servers - it is just API call or mouseclick away. The actual physical machine allocation, OS image copying, hostname, IP, dns, firewall and routing setup are done transparently in the background. You are only required to setup the payment ;) . Big enterprise virtualization technology providers already have a…
While several xls2csv converters exist, on a recent assignment none of them were able to convert a multi-sheet, 300+MB Excel file into CSV format. While searching for possible solutions, I found this (dated) blog entry on using python-uno. After assembling it into a single script and updating for changed LibreOffice arguments, I made it available here . You can check the script using the sample…
Long ago, my xkb-based keyboard switcher method stopped working. I then moved over to using gnome-keyboard-properties to set up the keyboard switching. This worked for another several years until recent ubuntu changes in oneiric that removed the stand-alone gnome-keyboard-properties. Worse yet, the gnome-control-center crashes on me if not running from gnome-session. Being loyal user of FVWM2…
In our company developers deal with massive datasets that needs to be easy to copy, modify a fraction of it and scrape. Snapshotting is an ideal solution here. Each developer has a personal vserver (LXC container). The missing piece here is to provide them with a way to manipulate partitions and snapshots from inside of their vservers. To enable users manipulate partitions from inside of the…
Nowadays everybody around me have digital cameras. Photos that I am interested to look at are everywhere - on facebook, flickr, picasa, people's harddisks, some photo management system, etc. Rarely someone is kind enough to send me the photos. Let's analyze the situation. The situation There are mainly two distinct categories of users of a photos management system - producers and consumers. Each…
Recently I installed fb2pdf on ubuntu maverick amd64. As there is no installation instructions anywhere, I decided to write down my notes I took during the installation: cd /var/www svn checkout FB2PDF mkdir /var/www/fb2pdf-read-only/logs chown -R www-data: /var/www/fb2pdf-read-only/logs # Edit etc/apache.conf, register with /etc/apache2/sites-enabled apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 a2enmod…
Recently I solved an very nasty problem in the Intel RAID controller. The problem took me and my colleagues many hours and hairs, so I decided to describe it here in hope it will help someone. The Intel RAID controller was configured from the BIOS to have two disks in RAID1 configuration and all was good. 00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 SATA RAID Controller Some time ago we…
A colleague of mine (web developer) recently undertook effort to move from Windows to Ubuntu. One last obstacle was lack of adequate analogs of program " Fiddler ". Wireshark is too general to work with and does not allow http-specific operations (for example - change values in a request and replay it). It's cumbersome interface was also hard to work with. Enter burp proxy suite. I know, I know,…
Инструкция по эксплуатации "шпионского фотоаппарата/камеры" MP10 (DV-003) на русском: http://skliarie.meshanet.com/skliarie_blog/mp10_russian.odt
Instant messaging (IM) penetrates our lives deeper and deeper, whether we like it or not. Most people start using whatever their peers so to be able to network with them. For that reason, switching default IM is tremendously hard thing to do, especially if one already accumulated number of contacts in previous network. This is called " Network Effect" . There are several factors that can make one…