Today I decided to give OpenSnitch another try. I had installed it before in 2021, but never got around to testing it. At some point it started causing dependency problems in Gentoo, probably after a new Python version had been stabilized, so I've uninstalled it. After starting the service and opening the UI, I noticed there weren't any packets. The log file also threw a bunch of errors related to…
Recently I've been playing around with the Radxa ROCK 5B+. Turns out installing Gentoo on it is a rather involved process, especially if you want a bcachefs rootfs. For those of you wondering why on earth someone would want to do that: this post is not about the why, but about the how. I have my reasons. The ROCK 5B+ supports loading U-Boot from its SPI NOR flash chip. However, that chip is empty…
After running Frigate NVR with CPU inference for way too long, I decided it was finally time to start using an accelerator, and ordered a Google Coral USB Accelerator . When plugging in the device, it appeared in lsusb like this: Bus 002 Device 003: ID 1a6e:089a Global Unichip Corp. The Frigate docs mention that it needs to initialize the Coral USB first, before it can use it. Frigate will try to…
After moving my HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw from my Huawei S6720-32C-PWH-SI to a Ubiquiti Unifi Switch Flex running OpenWrt master, I noticed the printer randomly coming out of standby. Looking at the OpenWrt log, I noticed the DSA interface connected to the printer to be flapping.
On this page you can find an overview of projects I've created or contributed to that I find worth mentioning. Created by me auditd-forwarder : forward auditd events to an MQTT broker for centralized processing vallumd : centralize or distribute IPset blacklists Contributed to ESPHome Linux OpenWrt
Like many other people, I too started experiencing crashes since upgrading Thunderbird from 102 to 115. On my workstation and M2 MacBook Air, these crashes have become less frequent. However, on my old XPS13, which I'm still using because the Asahi kernel does not support DP-ALT mode on the M2 MacBook Air yet, Thunderbird would crash every time I tried to go to my companies' mailbox. Extremely…
Yesterday I picked up the Banana Pi BPI-F3 I ordered 2 weeks ago. It is joining the small army of RISC-V devices I already own: Espressif ESP32-C3 (20x) Espressif ESP32-C6 (20x) SiFive HiFive Unmatched StarFive VisionFive 2 After giving the Armbian Noble image a quick try and being unimpressed, I decided to try installing Gentoo on it. I'll be documenting the process here. The first step: compile…
After 14 years of using Drupal for my blog, I said goodbye to Drupal. This has been long overdue.
I guess better late than never... So we've got a failover IP, and a nice trick to be able to get the same WAN IP on both our routers. If you do stateless packet filtering, this is actually enough, and your redundant setup is already finished. However, if you do stateful packet filtering, the moment the failover IP moves to the backup router, your connection will be dropped because it doesn't have…
In part 1 I went over the basics of failover. The problem with such a setup is that TCP connections will not survive a failover from ar0 to ar1, or vice versa. The main issue is that both routers have a different WAN IP, and in this case, seamless failover will never work.
Many corporate networks implement router redundancy for obvious reasons. Most of them are probably using very expensive hardware with proprietary protocols, but in fact it is possible to build such a setup for less than EUR100 and use it at home. Just get a couple of cheap routers that are well supported by LEDE/OpenWrt.
This is something that has been bothering me for a long time. I use the same SSID for both my 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, so that clients can roam from one network to another. However, in this setup, the client decides what network it think will work best. And unfortunately, most clients just suck at making this decision.
Recently I finally bought some Z-Wave equipment: Aeon Labs Z-Stick Gen5 Aeon Labs Z-Wave LED Bulb with RGBW (2x) Fibaro Door/Window Sensor Fibaro Wall Plug (4x) I've looked at several Open Source Home Automation projects before, but so far the only one that is, in my opinion, lightweight enough to run on embedded hardware is Domoticz. It's also relatively easy to configure. Can't say the same of…
We all know them: brute force attacks. Be it SSH, SMTP, IMAP, your favorite web application, ... they happen. And they happen all the time .
Little over a year ago I ordered 2 Yubico U2F security keys, through the Github offer. When they arrrived, I was immediately annoyed by the fact that only Chrome (and Chromium) supported the U2F standard. At that time, my main browser, did not support U2F at all, and the feature request had been open for a year, with no real progress. Sigh.
While upgrading the Linux kernel on my XPS13, I noticed that I could no longer find the option to enable the ASoC driver that is needed when the sound card is running in I2S mode. The symbol (SND_SOC_INTEL_BROADWELL_MACH) was still there, but it didn't show up at the expected location. I also had all dependencies enabled, so I was a bit surprised it didn't show up. After looking again, I noticed…
It's not the first time I write about cgroups , but a lot has changed since I wrote that post.
Some time ago I noticed that I could no longer boot a remote machine via Wake-on-LAN. This annoyed me quite a bit, as the machine was 2100km away and there was nobody at that location who could boot it for me. I really had no clue why it stopped working. So when I recently arrived at the location again, I started looking into it. Everything I had previously configured was still in place. The BIOS…
Since I hate typing passwords all the time, I looked for a way to automatically unlock my SSH keys at login. This guide focuses on KDE Plasma 5 and SDDM, but it should be easy to implement it for KDE Plasma 4 and other display managers as well.
A few days ago, polkit version 0.113 was marked stable on Gentoo amd64. Since the update, I could no longer suspend my system without entering the root password. Quite annoying, especially for a laptop. When canceling the polkit dialog, this appeared in the journal (yes, I am using systemd): sep 10 05:22:52 sylvester.nomad.adlevio.net polkitd[18113]: Operator of unix-session:3 FAILED to…
While configuring my CalDAV accounts in Thunderbird on my new laptop, I ran into an issue. I have a few CalDAV accounts that are all on the same Zimbra server. Thunderbird only requested a login and password for the first account I added. It tried to open the next account I added with the credentials that were already stored for the first account, and that failed.
As I already mentioned in my previous post about the XPS 13, I had issues with the touchpad: it freezes rather frequently, because it looses sync a lot. After losing sync for a few times, the psmouse driver issues a reconnect request. And when that happens, the touchpad freezes. It looks like this in the kernel log: Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at…
Many people I know use a laptop for almost anything, anywhere. When they arrive at the office, they hook it up to an external monitor, and use an external keyboard and mouse or trackpad. I prefer to have a proper workstation, with powerful CPU and GPU, lots of RAM and multiple large monitors. As it's rather difficult to take this setup with me to meetings, or when travelling, I still require a…
In a previous post I explained how to configure syslog-ng to accept logs from other hosts on the network. Back then I used a filter to only write logs from a specific host to a specific destination.
When I first tried to add my two test nodes in the oVirt manager, this worked fine for the first node I added. However, when I tried to add the second node this always seems to fail. This is what I am seeing in /var/log/ovirt-engine/engine.log:
In my previous post on the subject I pointed you to the ovirt-dre repository. Today however, I found out that a CentOS dev is also working on packaging CentOS.
After getting my oVirt setup up and running, I wanted an easy way to open a Spice console to a VM on my Gentoo workstation. There are several ways to do this, as explained here . The easiest way is via the browser plugin, but I couldn't get that to compile yet. The next best option is using ovirt-shell, from the ovirt-engine-cli tools.
Recently I have been playing around with oVirt . Since oVirt is included in Fedora 18, I tried it on F18 first. Unfortunately, these packages lack the web GUI. Since this is one of the things I wanted to test, these packages are useless to me. So I started digging around, and found the ovirt-dre repository.
Might be a bit late to blog something about a bike I bought more than a year ago, but they always say "better late than never", so here goes ... Early 2011, I had an accident with the CBR. The costs to fix it were too high, so it was declared a total loss :-(
Since I keep finding posts that tell you to restart nscd to flush its caches, I'll tell you how to really do it. The nscd caches are saved to disk, On my Fedora system, they are located in /var/db/nscd:
It seems that Samba 3.5 has problems binding its socket when running on dual-stack Linux systems. This is what I am seeing in log.smbd, right after starting Samba:
Recently I came across this link in #xbmc-linux on Freenode: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html
Have you ever noticed that if you put cron jobs in /etc/cron.daily on a SLES machine, they seem to run at random times? I noticed it a few times, and I find it to be really annoying. Say, I rebooted a machine yesterday around 14:00, and today at 14:15, the machine starts rebuilding the man db, backing up the rpm db, cleaning /tmp, rotating logs, etc. Huh?! Looks like a bad idea to do such things…
In case you're annoyed by the fact that backspace doesn't work by default in vim on SLES, add this to /etc/vimrc or ~/.vimrc:
As you could read in one of my previous posts, I have been investigating my Sagem F@st 3464 modem a little, to see if it ran Linux (which it does). With the help of this topic, I was able to login into the modem with telnet. After entering the password and typing the "shell" command, I was presented an ash shell with BusyBox.
Recently some of the larger ISPs in Belgium decided to finally open their eyes and increase their ridiculously low traffic limits. They even announced to entirely drop these limits for the more expensive ones. About damn time they did that. Unfortunately, if you read the small letters, they still mention "$ISP maintains the right to lower the bandwidth for customers who have a higher traffic usage…
Somewhere in June 2009, I became self-employed. Since it involves sending invoices, I decided to create a template with OpenOffice. After creating a new invoice, I export it as PDF and email it to the customer. Saves me paper, ink, envelopes, stamps, trips to the post office, fuel, ... You get the picture. Unfortunately I still have to hand them in to my bookkeeping office on paper, so I still…
To be able to keep some log history of my OpenWRT based router, I want to send its output to a remote syslog server. Fortunately I have another machine that is running 24/7, so I don't have to send it over the WAN link to one of my servers in the datacenter. My HTPC is running Gentoo Linux, and I configured syslog-ng as syslog daemon.
After I got my Zimbra server up and running, and configured some domains and accounts, I started playing with the calendar sharing and syncing. What I want is simple: to access my Zimbra calendar with Lightning, a calender add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird, and with my iPhone.
Some time ago I started to experiment with Zimbra a little bit. I already installed it a few times, and I heard many good things about the new release. Because I ran into several issues with Debian and Ubuntu in the past, I decided to try Zimbra on CentOS. So I installed a clean CentOS 5.4 VM to test Zimbra on. I downloaded ZCS 6.0.3 for RHEL5, and then the fun started ...
After migrating my blog to Drupal, the old Wordpress style URL's were broken, as explained here . At that time, I was trying to fix them with mod_rewrite, but didn't succeed.
If you recently visited my website (let's say in the last two or three days), you might have noticed some performance issues. It seems I didn't pay that much attention to the MySQL binary logging configuration, when I enabled this feature so that I could do point-in-time recovery in case something goes wrong.
Some months ago, I ordered a Dommel SpeedConnect Plus connection. Since Dommel is using the network of the monopolist Belgacom in Belgium, I am forced to buy one specific type of VDSL2 router: Sagem F@st 3464. If you want to know why Belgacom forces this type of modem, you can find the report of the BIPT here , in English, Dutch or French.
So, recently I updated my iPhone to 3.1.2. Unfortunately, the custom firmware image I used contained both Cydia and Icy. I don't own an Apple computer myself, so I am unable to build my own custom IPSW, so I asked somebody else. And no, I will not use redsn0w because it sucks. It never worked for me on my iPhone 2G, it always came in recovery mode while it should go in DFU mode. Or was it the…
As you might have already noticed, I recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Drupal. I used the WP2Drupal to import all WordPress posts from my old blog into my new Drupal-based website. It worked pretty good, except for some images that were missing, and some stuff showed up that didn't belong in posts, like Captcha text.
Recently I got so tired of Windows, that I decided to throw it out completely. I stopped playing video games on my PC for about a year or so, since I bought a new Xbox 360 (the old one had a RROD, and was banned from Xbox Live anyway). So I installed Gentoo on my desktop, and with that, I no longer use iTunes.
Since Debian Lenny was finally released not so long ago, I started upgrading some machines. Unfortunately, aptitude dist-upgrade complained about a few packages:
I have always had a problem with Evolution being installed when emerging gnome on my Gentoo system. Even with "-evo -eds" use flags, it still wanted Evolution. Evolution is a BIG piece of CRAP, and I don't want it anywhere on my system
Because I always forget ... To update your Dell BIOS in Linux, download the .exe BIOS file from the Dell website. Extract the HDR file with "wine D630_A15.EXE -writehdrfile".