On the last day of 2015 On this day, the last day of 2015, I am planning to relax with friends and family, have a few quiet moments of reflection and to raise a glass in toast to all those who should be here, but, for one reason or another, are not here or not …
Category: Technology
Nov 08
Back in business
Hi All. http://tmciolek.id.au – aka this site is back from the ColdSleep(TM) chmaber, which was a necessary thing due to death of our previous hardware. Lessons learnt – backups fixed, redudnt disks sourced, monitoring enabled and logged. More about the setup and other juicy details later
Sep 12
Data connections for travel in Europe
The Need If, like me, you are travelling across Europe with your tablet, smart phone or laptop you too probably also want to be able to tap into the extensive and relatively fast mobile network. After all, Europe is a relatively small place, and getting a pre-paid 1 or 2 GB Data SIM, that can …
Sep 07
Technolgy is wonderful. Until it is not.
Technology is such a wonderful thing, until it it not. As some of you might know, I am overseas. Travelling across Europe. Taking a lot of pictures, and generally enjoying myself. The problem arose a few days ago, in a small German town called Deggendorf. The older, smallish 250GB HDD in my laptop started misbehaving …
Feb 03
Note to self: configuring extra IP routes on a BiPAC 5200S RD ADSL2+ modem
This post is a sort of a “memo to self”, so I don’t have to look too far for a solution next time I need to do this. Sometimes one needs to add extra routes to the modem via the command line. The Billion modems have a relatively arcane command line interface built into them. …
Feb 01
mysql backup script goodness
The VRL bolg server now has a new backup script that does: dump of all of the databases from a mysql instance sha256 checksumming of db backups sha256 checksumming tarballs of multiple db backups gpg encryption of the tarballs once they are assembled deletion of backup files and other files older than 14 days
Aug 25
converting music file formats
Today I needed to convert a whole pile of flac and MP3 files to ogg, and to rename them to match a certain naming convention. 2 small shell scripts and about an hour or runtime later, it is done. I will post the scripts here in the next few days
Apr 11
Research – for the win.
A spot of research can help to solve any number of problems. In this particular instance the new AAF website was having issues with the newsletter generator. It seems to be crashing when it was trying to manage the subscriber list. However a quick bug report and a spot of reading of the bug history …
Apr 07
The new plugin
In order to make my life easier, I have decided that automation is the best solution is to automate the process of exporting blog posts from my private WordPress and into my LiveJournal and eventually, I think, also to the (evil) facebook. Well, lets see how well this works… and if people can comment…
Nov 26
Sysadmin: authenticated email submission
Recently I had the need to configure secure authenticated email submission on one of the systems I look after. Currently I look after a number of email servers that follow the standard configuration pattern of: postfix with TLS virtual email acocunts postfixadmin database courier imap with SSL. What was needed is that clients be able …