tech

Building an Irrigation Power Controller December 19, 2022 - To complement the Raspberry Pi based Garden Controller I’ve designed and built, I decided to separate the irrigation valve and pump control onto a separate project and circuit board in order to make it more generically applicable. My intent is … Continue reading
Outbound network traffic with multiple interfaces June 3, 2014 - Why does Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 invalidate / discard packets when the route for outbound traffic differs from the route of incoming traffic? Issue Description Why does Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 invalidate / discard packets when the route … Continue reading
Microsoft Shortcuts and Notes January 6, 2014 - Searching within Outlook 2010 Useful keyword searches: category:=”Red Category” read:no Items that have not been read. You can also use read:false to get the same results. category:business Items that are categorized as business. messagesize:enormous Items whose size is larger than … Continue reading
Make your own Reduce File Size presets for PDF export December 29, 2013 - Within Preview there is a filter that can be used to reduce the size of PDF files (think of PDF files that are 600 DPI high resolution).  Unfortunately it produces very poor quality images to the point of being unusable. … Continue reading
Apple Airport Utility 5.6 on Mountain Lion (10.8.4) September 3, 2013 - Apple has been continuously dumbing down the AirPort Utility to the point where their default AirPort Utility (version 6.x) is virtually useless.  Settings such as syslog destination, NTP settings, etc can only be set with AirPort Utility 5.6 – problem … Continue reading
Pixelmator to create iPhone Wallpaper January 8, 2013 - I’ve been using Pixelmator to create my iPhone wallpaper .. .. and storing at this path:
Seagate Disk Replacement and RAID1 mdadm Commands January 7, 2013 - So I’ve had to replace a Seagate disk yet again and spent a frustrating amount of time on their website looking for a link to their warrenty replacement page >> http://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements/ At least this time, I’m using Linux software RAID … Continue reading
How to reset the enable password on a Cisco ASA 5505 July 18, 2012 - How to reset the enable password on an ASA 5505: The following procedure worked for me to reset the enable password. Connect to serial port – typically 9600,8,N,1.  On my MacBook Pro, I use a Keyspan USB-Serial adapter, so my … Continue reading
Unix, Linux and Mac OS X Notes March 15, 2012 - Here’s some notable command syntax I use. You can also select the Notes category and you’ll get more specific topics such as Linux LVM and Mac OS X commands. rsyslog options Forward syslog events to external host via UDP: – … Continue reading
WordPress notes for pomeroy.us September 17, 2011 - Production site is www.pomeroy.us Development site is dev.pomeroy.us Assumptions: – webserver root directory is /var/web – production node is called prod – development node is called dev – WordPress database is called wpdb Procedure to copy production WordPress instance to … Continue reading
Building a new PVR February 23, 2011 - <Updated Aug 18, 2011 after a successful PVR rollout> Technology has evolved since the last MythTV PVR I built, as chronicled here.  Here’s the latest techniques and tech that I’ve used to (start) build(ing) my current PVR. I’ll update this … Continue reading
MySQL Notes November 19, 2010 - MySQL Command Line and Configuration Notes Drop tables with wildcard: There are multiple ways to specify MySQL credentials, this is not the best, but simply an example of how to drop tables using a wildcard pattern. In this case, command … Continue reading
Update WordPress home URL November 2, 2010 - There are times when moving or copying WordPress blogs from one server to another, the owner may want to update the URL associated with the specific site. A simple MySQL update can match the WordPress blog to a new site … Continue reading
Epitome of bad software June 8, 2010 - There is a reason many people loathe Microsoft software. Before you consider flaming me for that statement, I realize all software has flaws, bugs and eventually crashes. In my experience, even if it’s patched and up to date, the following … Continue reading
Resetting WordPress user passwords June 1, 2010 - Resetting WordPress 3.0 user passwords can be done directly within MySQL through the following procedure.  This assumes your installation of WordPress stores user passwords in the wp_users table as MD5 hashes and the unique site prefix for all WordPress tables … Continue reading
Apple Exemplifies Fine Software Engineering April 27, 2010 - So I’ve been a recent Apple user for a mere eight years, when I purchased my first iBook  running the new OS X (10.1). I’m a fan of the form engineering that goes several steps beyond the basic function engineering … Continue reading
Accessing Ubuntu desktop from Mac Snow Leopard February 7, 2010 - Accessing my Ubuntu 9.04 Gnome desktop from the built in Mac OS X 10.6.2 VNC viewer took a bit of tweaking on the Ubuntu Gnome side. I have an OpenVPN SSL tunnel between the Mac and the Ubuntu desktop, however … Continue reading
Linux and Mac OS X bash_history nuggets January 9, 2010 - This post’s contents have moved to here (Unix, Linux and Mac OS X Notes).
IMAP mailstore migration .. again November 16, 2009 - So last weekend, I discovered that Spamhaus decided it would be a good idea to place all of the public IP addresses for Slicehost (my Linux VPS hoster) into their Spamhaus block list (SBL). This covered both my slice in … Continue reading
FreeMind mind mapping tool November 3, 2009 - Have you ever had a daunting task that just seemed like a nightmare to get your head around how to organize it? If you’re like me, you try to find some patterns in all the individual elements that make up … Continue reading
Windows/AD Notes October 26, 2009 - Find all the AD groups a particular user belongs to: dsquery user -samid username | dsget user -memberof Find all members of an AD group: dsquery group -samid groupname | dsget group -members Find all inactive users: dsquery  user -disabled … Continue reading
Sifting through Checkpoint FW1 logs September 8, 2009 - Once the ASCII log files are available for processing, my fw1logsearch.pl script can be used to find complex patterns of interest. Continue reading
Mac OS X Command Line notes June 21, 2009 - Encrypted Filesystems with Sparse Bundles Mac OS X offers encrypted filesystems through sparse bundles.  To mount up a sparse bundle, given the password used to create the bundle, use the hdiutil: hdiutil attach -verbose -readonly /path/to/sparse.bundle.directory This will mount up … Continue reading
How to build a MythTV PVR on Fedora Core 7 May 27, 2009 - <Notes In Progress – many of these steps have been automated in scripts, I’m in the process of updating this doc to show those steps and include the scripts> Fresh install of OS and MythTV on n43 Created 2007/09/05 – … Continue reading
Synchronizing directories May 24, 2009 - Fast way to synchronize the content of your iTunes libraries – this doesn’t sync the playlists or any iTunes meta information (and you may need to perform an Add to Library .. to import any new content). This was just … Continue reading
Technology I want to investigate May 23, 2009 - Citrix XenServer vmware like virtual server software – free vmotion functionality http://www.xenserver5.com/landing/FreeXS_LM/ Property management, condo management, rental property management – sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/roomba/
RAM based filesystems in Linux May 18, 2009 - When doing I/O intensive processing on Linux systems, I’ve found that creating a RAM based filesystem can substantially improve processing times. Of course nothing but the transitory processing data should be written to the fake filesystem to avoid data loss … Continue reading
Soekris net5501 SBC Linux installation May 15, 2009 - Soekris Engineering net5501 SBC setup with Linux 2008/09/03 net5501 is a x86 SBC that I ordered with 4 10/100 ethernet ports, 512MB memory, 500MHz Geode LX CPU Serial console is used for setup of net5501 – BIOS writes to serial … Continue reading
Setup IMAPS on iPhone 3G with self-signed certificates May 15, 2009 - So setting up my shiny new iPhone 3G for IMAPS email was not entirely straight forward.  (-:  There are two complicating factors that I ran into.  For IMAP over SSL (IMAPS) connections to a mail server that is using a … Continue reading
MythTV FC7 LVM on RAID1 Configuration May 15, 2009 - MythTV PVR HDD Mirroring 2008/07/24 Host: n43 (mythtv) – Two SATA 500GB drives sda sdb – current production drive is sdb Problem: I’ve done migrations of LVM2 volumes from 320GB SATA to 500GB SATA and added a redundant 500GB SATA. … Continue reading
Windows SMB/CIFS shares May 14, 2009 - Map CIFS shares: NET USE \\1.2.3.4 /USER:DOMAIN\USERID NET USE NET USE \\1.2.3.4 /DELETE Alter boot time settings: MSCONFIG smbclient syntax: # mount -t smbfs -o username=user,password=pass //server/sharepoint /mnt/localmntpoint Escape admin shares: //wfsnt55/c\$
Linux RAID, LVM and crypto Filesystem Notes May 14, 2009 - LVM Notes I wanted to upgrade the disks in my Linux PVR to a 1TB pair and thus had to migrate from one existing disk (/dev/sda) to the new (/dev/sdb): 1. Add new physical disk to system 2. Partition disk … Continue reading
Using tr to emulate dos2unix May 14, 2009 - As pointed out in many postings and sites, one can use tr to remove octal 015 (^M or CR) tr -d '\015' < oldfile > newfile