timkennedy.net

I've been working with Windows and VMware for a while now, and have really enjoyed learning PowerShell and PowerCLI. I've always preffered CLI tools to GUI tools. Possibly just because I'm old enough that the computers I started with didn't have Windows (or even X-Windows). The more I use PowerShell, the more I like PowerShell, so I've decided to start managing the Linux servers I have at home with it, just for funsies. The first step is to install PowerShell. PowerShell for Linux/Mac/Etc is v6, and still in beta at the time of this writing. I use Ubuntu Linux at home, and fortunately for my lazy self, there is a Apt Repo for PowerShell for Ubuntu 16. curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add - curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/prod.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y powershell These steps were blantantly ripped off from the actual Ubunt...

Big news this week, as the Republicans in Congress decided to scrap an FCC rule known as the Broadband Consumer Privacy Proposal which required broadband providers to get permission from subscribers before collecting and selling data collected about their users. Since I am very interested in my online privacy, or at least, I like to have the option to choose when to share my information for myself, and since I recently upgraded my home router to a Unifi Security Gateway from Ubiquiti Networks, I wanted to know if the VPN client would be compatible with the Private Internet Access VPN that I use to protect my privacy, thereby putting my entire house behind the VPN all the time. Posts in the UBNT Community Forums seem to have a lot of confusion, or are just outdated. It turns out the setup for a PIA VPN configuration is very easy. The only thing that posed any challenge was calculating all the routes for all the subnets outside my house, to route that traffic over the VPN. ...

We (my wife and I) have been using LIFX lights in our bedroom to simulate a sunrise.  They come on at sunrise, and slowly increase brightness for 30 minutes, allowing us to get used to the light, and wake up pretty gently, as opposed to being jarred out of a deep sleep by a more traditional alarm clock. My wife asked if there was any way we could do the same with Sonos.  Specifically, she wants to pick a Sirius XM channel like "15 - The Pulse" to wake up to.  Have the volume start at 0, and over the same 30 minute period as the lights, ramp the volume up slowly until it's a reasonable level coinciding with the maximum brightness of our lights. Her ideal solution would have the following features: Pick any Sirius, Pandora, or Calm Radio station that Sonos can regularly access. Choose a maximum volume for the alarm Choose a length of time over which to go from 0 to Max volume Orchestrate the details via an iOS app on iPhone or iPad. For Extra Credit: Do the sa...

I recently had a desire to get OpenVPN working on Solaris 11.2, to allow me to connect to a Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN . For more information on using a VPN for general internet access, as well as some insight into why you might want to look into it for yourself, see: The Best VPN Services Updated for 2017 http://lifehacker.com/5940565/why-you-should-start-using-a-vpn-and-how-to-choose-the-best-one-for-your-needs A bit outdated for 2017: http://lifehacker.com/5935863/five-best-vpn-service-providers A quick Google turned up a blog post from Stefan Reuter detailing how to set up OpenVPN on OpenSolaris 2008.11. For Solaris 11.2 the basic steps are still pretty much the same, but some of the minor details have changed. We still need the TAP driver for solaris , and we obviously need to download and build OpenVPN, but we don't need to edit the TUN/TAP Makefile anymore, and we don't need any patches for OpenVPN. One step I added was to download and compile the LZO co...

We are a TiVo household, so a quest has been underway to build a suitable place for long term storage of the family's favorite TV shows and movies. One indisputable requirement is that the shows and movies have to be visible via the TiVo menu. pyTivo (the William McBrine fork) is the logical tool to do this (in my house). William McBrine has been maintaining his fork of pyTivo more regularly than the original package (sourceforge) . To get pyTivo working on Solaris 11.2, only 2 dependencies needed to be resolved. I needed to build ffmpeg to support on-the-fly video transcoding. and, ffmpeg wanted yasm (an open source rewrite of the nasm assembler) or nasm itself. This is what happened when I tried to build ffmpeg without yasm: bash-[121]$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local yasm/nasm not found or too old. Use --disable-yasm for a crippled build. If you think configure made a mistake, make sure you are using the latest version from Git. If the latest version fails, report the...

Having problems building the Perl DBD::mysql modules on Solaris 10 Sparc 64-bit? The Perl 5.8.4 binary that ships with Solaris 10 is a 32-bit application.  You are probably running the 64-bit version of MySQL and trying to build DBD::mysql against that db version. What you actually need to do is download the 32-bit version of MySQL, for linking the Perl DBD::mysql libraries against.   I run the 64-bit MySQL database in /opt/mysql/mysql, so I unpacked the 32-bit MySQL as /opt/mysql/mysql32. Then, run a CPAN shell, look DBD::mysql, and build the module. /usr/perl5/5.8.4/bin/perlgcc Makefile.PL --libs '-R/usr/sfw/lib \ -R/opt/mysql/mysql32/lib -L/usr/sfw/lib -L/opt/mysql/mysql32/lib \ -lmysqlclient -lz -lposix4 -lcrypt -lgen -lsocket -lnsl -lm' \ --cflags '-I/usr/sfw/include -I/usr/include -I/opt/mysql/mysql32/include' Then gmake install UNINST=1 and you're done.