Docker is a lot of fun and pretty easy to setup. I'm still working on getting OpenStack up and running.

Fun stuff for a Nagios replacement. Graphite Made up of Carbon, Whisper, and Graphite-Web packages and using Collectd for system stats shipping, and Grafana for beautiful interactive dashboards. It can make some pretty graphs, especially with Grafana, but it lacks notification. For that you have to add another project. Some people feed the graphite info back into Nagios. Not sure what we're going to use yet.

Changing the title will trigger a little notification alert on a tab in Firefox and Chrome.

My RTLSDR USB dongle finally arrived. It took about a month to order from China. It's about $50 if you order it in the US, but only $15 if you order from China, but you pay a time cost.

GNU Radio is building, but CocoaRadio is working well.

The plan is to get it up and running and use it to work with the wireless security system and monitors I already have. Eventually, I'd like to have temperature monitors all over the house and have an intelligent HVAC control that can take the temperatures into account.

In order to get ports working I had to update Xcode. "sudo xcode-select –install" then "sudo xcodebuild –license". (Which may not be necessary) Before running a "sudo port selfupdate" and "sudo port upgrades".

Taking a little bit of time to check out all the cool JavaScript based frameworks out there. It's a really cool area with real-time updates between the server and browser.

I started using NetBeans recently with PHP and have been very happy with it. It was a heck of a lot easier to setup than Eclipse and generally stays out of the way. It has a very easy to use interface for working with Git and uploading to servers. I've rearranged my workflow so that I work locally with Git, and upload tests to a development server, then commit the changes and pull them down on the production servers. It's actually not much different except I'm using some of the tools more and having NetBeans upload for me. I'm still missing a few autocomplete/lookup things in CakePHP in NetBeans, but most of it is there when I include the lib dir of cake. The big problem lately that I finally found a solution for has been preventing the autoredirect in CakePHP's Auth component. You can use your user login function, but the component always redirects to it's default. There is an option the docs don't directly mention called "autoRedirect". I found it while looking for something else, but that's the option you want if you want to add admin routing in and control the redirect.

It was actually a lot easier than I thought it might be to add encryption to a server's backup process.

I created a PGP GnuPG key, put the public key on the server, added it to the backup user's keyring, set the trust level, and added: gpg -r serveradmin@example.com -e backuptoencrypt.tgz && rm backuptoencrypt.tgz

Now the admins are the only ones with the private key, and anyone who gets ahold of the backups won't be able to do anything with them. Time to add this to more servers.

[[!tags backups encryption security gnupg pgp]]

The message queue for DBUS's org.freedesktop.Notifications filled up while I was testing it with notify-send. Evidently, it has a limit of 20 messages in the queue, and if the notification daemon happens to die and not remove itself from DBUS, the messages queue and aren't removed.

After looking into it, the notification interface doesn't have a way to clear the queue unless you happen to know the ID of the message. It doesn't even have a method to list current items in the queue!

I'm hoping that whenever I reboot the machine, it will clear that queue, but until then, I'm using the gnome-osd-client.

IMAPS is working again at work. I've been told that Exchange requires a mail-store restart when a cert is changed. I'm just glad to have access back.

I was pretty close to just forwarding all my mail to a zimbra server. Dealing with OWA/Outlook's limited email filtering was a real problem. I ended up sorting most of it by hand. Not fun.

Looking forward to the day we switch to a F/OSS email system, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope. The edu pricing on Exchange, and the resistance to change makes it hard.

We upgraded from PostgreSQL 7.4 to 9.0 at work over the winter break. I was much easier than the tests we did moving from 7.4 to 8.x Everything went fairly smoothly. The only trick has been with dblinks.

Evidently, PostgreSQL changed how they work, and we had to modify some things to get it working.

It's nice to be mostly rid of the unupgradable P3 733MHz single processor box that the 7.4 server was running on. Although, that box has been our main DB server for the website and the webapps we've written since before I started here in 2002!

That's a pretty good testament for Linux and PostgreSQL.