Author's posts
Sep 01
XenServer 6: An Easy Way to Apply Patches Manually
If you are setting up XenServer for the first time, or you have had an installation for a while but need to update it and aren’t paying for a license, you can’t apply updates via a pretty GUI in XenCenter. You can however do it manually in the command line. 1. Put the server into …
Jan 01
Bored? Stats!
Every year that you are signed up with Jetpack (with WordPress), you get a report at the end of the year with several interesting (to me) statistics about your site. Because of the various server hackings that went on in the year 2012, the last report didn’t go so well, this one however worked great! …
Dec 21
Electronics Projects: VFD Informatron 2000
After looking at various very cool and vary old display technologies on eBay, I ran across a 4 line dot matrix VFD display. It was one of 4 left, so I decided to order it and build a project similar to this one that an IRC friend linked me to: http://www.pyrofersprojects.com/blog/vfd-clock-with-snmp-and-ntp/. I originally was going …
Dec 21
Raspbian: Run a Program at Startup
There are many directions out there that don’t work on Raspbian. Specifically the “upstart” scripts, as Raspbian doesn’t come with upstart, and will mess things up greatly if you install it. Raspbian uses init.d. It’s fairly simple to get things going since a nice script was provided at the link below, mirrored here. Create script …
Dec 21
Raspbian: Wifi Going to Sleep
It seemed like I couldn’t contact my Pi after a while (and my SSH session would end seemingly for no reason). I would start a ping and it would time out for the first few times before it would start responding. At first I thought the Pi itself was, or the USB ports were going …
Dec 21
Python: Parsing Online XML The Easy Way
On my Raspberry Pi VFD project, I needed a way to download the XML feed from weather.gov to display the weather. After hours of searching Google and trying different things, I finally came across a way that actually works, using lxml and urllib2. I am still very new at Python, so I don’t completely understand …
Oct 12
Ubuntu Server 13: Nagios 4
Installing Nagios on Ubuntu (or any Debian) isn’t smooth or easy; and the instructions that are on Nagios’s site don’t work. Through much trial and error and Googling I have finally managed to get a good installation working. I had the same issues with Nagios 3.5, and while there are older packages you can install …
Sep 21
Ubuntu 14.04+: Changing to Static IP
Whenever you make an Ubuntu Server box, it’s standard to make it a static IP. There are many other pages out there that say different things on how to do this, but most of them miss the whole DNS part of it, or they have you go through extra steps that aren’t necessary anymore. First, …
Jul 28
SLAYRadio Widget
I decided to make a SLAYRadio widget on my site a while back, because well, the station is awesome and more people should listen! Anyway, I finally got around to making it. I was originally going to go with a custom WordPress widget, but I couldn’t quite put 2 and 2 together to make it …
Jun 30
Linux Mint 15: Software Manager (mintinstall) Hangs
I have run across an issue where Software Manager hangs at the spash screen after asking for a password. This seems to only happen if it had been previously closed abnormally. The fix that seems to work for me was: Open a terminal and run: ps -A There should be a line that lists “splash.py” …