AASullivan

Category: Technology

  • Overly complicated ideas: IRC command of servers!

    A little background: I get these ideas once in a while that eventually come to fruition after a couple months of brainstorming and tinkering. I’ve had the idea for a while of having a central way to maintain my fleet of Linux servers I host along with Windows if possible. In the past, I used ssh keys to login and run updates. It worked pretty well but I’d like a way to remotely run and/or monitor these. Enter IRC…

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  • Most complicated home network ever…ever.

    A little background:

    I’ve been building and tinkering with computers since I was about 12, when I got my own laptop and desktop both from garage sales and began swapping parts, doing OS upgrades from floppy disks and doing whatever I could to tinker with them. Fast forward almost two decades, and I’m still at but on a much larger scale.

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  • Offsite backups 101

    I’ve learned some hard lessons in the couple decades of tinkering with computers. One of the biggest is data loss. Like everyone else, I didn’t worry as much as I should have and it cost me…

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  • New Year, New Car? Or DDoS Fun?

    Started off 30 minutes into the new year by hitting black ice and completely annihilating my favorite car. Thankfully safe but Eris didn’t make it.

    Now for the DDoS fun…

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  • Arduino Wireless Logging, Post Three: Mysql, PHP, and a little networking

    Here’s where things started to get a little more complex. At this point, I have a wireless system to transmit data from multiple nodes to a central hub (node0) which collects and shows the data via serial connection.

    The general idea/goal is this:

    • Arduino Nodes send data to central node
    • Central node is connected to home network and sends this data to a LAMP server (Linux-Apache-Mysql-PHP)
    • The server takes this data, breaks it into a mysql statement, and pushes it into the database to log

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  • Arduino Wireless Logging, Post One: The Idea

    I’ve had a number Arduino systems for some time now along with a large number of RF24 wireless modules and DHT11 humidity/temperature sensors. The idea I’ve had for some time is this:

    1. Arduino with a DHT11 sensor and RF24 wireless device pull then transmit data.
    2. Data goes to secondary hub/master Arduino using an RF24 module along with an Ethernet adapter (Wiznet 5100)
    3. This master hub then pushes the data to a web server containing a mysql database to log and store the information

    Simple right? Wrong.

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  • Arduino Home Monitoring

    Lately I’ve been engrossed in a project to add some monitoring to my home. This includes temperature and humidity readings, along with monitoring for windows and doors eventually. This will be built almost entirely using Arduinos wherever possible.

    The Goal:
    To have a remotely viewable home dashboard to monitoring the house

    The Plan:
    Use Arduinos and cheap parts from Amazon to build this and code myself

    At this point, I’ve built some of the systems but greatly need to expand upon this. More updates to (hopefully) come!

  • Latest Computer build: RAID fileserver and media center

    Had the idea in my head for a while now about doing a fileserver build to put all my media in one place. This includes years of movies, music and TV shows along with about 100GB of music rips. The goals of this were pretty simple:

    • Have some form of redundancy, most likely in a RAID 1 or RAID 5 format
    • Have enough horsepower to stream movies/videos on the fly, including conversions
    • Have enough storage for all my current collection (~1.5TB) and future

    At this point, I had some extra components lying around and got a sweet deal on an ASUS 990X motherboard and a set of 6 hard drives. Let’s get to the specs:

    • ASUS 990X Sabertooth motherboard
    • Corsaid 500W PSU
    • Mushkin 240GB SSD
    • (6) 750GB WD Black hard drives
    • AMD 3.5GHz 8-Core CPU
    • Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler
    • AMD 7770 GPU card with 2GB GDDR5 RAM
    • Rosewill Stealth tower
    • (2) Inline SATA power cords
    • (6) 90 Degree SATA cables

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  • Monitoring System: Update 1

    So I’ve been working with this project off and on, mainly off due to time constraints with a new work shift/promotion. I’ve split the logs and dashboard readouts to allow for easier pulling of individual data. What this allowed me to do was to couple this with WordPress using iFrame to load the individual pieces. I then set up multiple pages for each PHP document to allow the refreshes to work normally. I’ve build and gotten a working version of a single ping test, so that’s off the checklist. My next goal is to build a queue of sorts to pull information from for a polling cycle depending on type of test, then run the tests I want. I’m starting with ICMP, but hope to go for basic SNMP once this works out. Stay tuned as always!

  • Little side project: Monitoring System

    Been debating on how to keep an eye on my home network and decided to take a swing at getting a monitoring system built from scratch to build my coding skills more. General idea:

    • Have a list of devices stored in a database with information such as IPs and names
    • Pull this device list, and run a ping sweep on all devices to test for activity/status
    • Log this into the database for reference
    • Build a lightweight front end to show this information at a glance

    At this point, I’ve gotten a basic running version of this on a dedicated Linux system (Ubuntu 12.04LTS with a LAMP install). It’s extremely fast and runs every 5 minutes out of a cron entry. I’ve gotten most of the items done:

    • Database has multiple devices which can be added through front end GUI based off PHP
    • GUI (webpage) refreshes every 60 seconds and shows the last pull status along with logs from recent pulls to look for trends
    • Cron entry kicks off Perl poller that pulls information from DB and pings each device; 10 devices in less than a second total
    • Stable and has been working without issue for a few days now

    I’ve also gone and tested a few of the devices, unplugging them and what not and still show up without issue. Mind you, this is a dirty way to show this information and needs cleaning, but it works. Next goals are to clean up the dashboard a bit, maybe add a search tool in the near future and some color logging to note the bad devices. Who knows, maybe a ticket system in the future? Stay tuned as always!