Tag Archives

29 Articles
Posted by Dave on

Event Monitoring

Event Monitoring

My recent problem with the Raspberry Pi is an event monitoring and notification problem. It’s one, that over my career, I have spent a lot of time considering, but today, I only have one server. I don’t think I need or want to afford something like Zabbix, which comes with a series of event monitors and reporting and dashboard functionality. I have however adopted the habit of attempting to dovetail with host OS’s logging and reporting schemes. At the moment, I have written two event monitors which report to the desk top. Can I do better? Here are my notes.

Posted by Dave on

Using my Mac remotely

Using my Mac remotely

I needed to go looking for something I lost on my Mac using my w10 laptop, and have forgotten how I did it before. I wanted to get RDP working and failed. Here are my notes on what I tried to do and eventually did; it involved using 3rd party apps.

Posted by Dave on

DaaS

DaaS

I was thinking about DaaS and how to use RDP to access a modern desktop from my Tablet and my thoughts moved to Azure although I have not given up on AWS. In fact, I will be faster with AWS and actually have an account. Here’s the links and reading …

Posted by Dave on

File Transfer & Windows 8.1

I want and need a better, faster interface for ftp and my blog server. Obvs needs to be encrypted. It seems that Windows 8.1 does not offer sftp natively but recommends WEBDAV. On my various clients I have multiple operating systems, but mainly Windows.

I had a quick poke around to see how to do this. Firstly I have an RTU for WISE-FTP through 1&1 which has great windows desktop integration but I usually use filezilla. (1and1 have moved away from WISE-FTP)

MS offer a One Drive cloud service as do Dropbox, but I want to use my 1and1 file system. (Perhaps the answer is wise ftp since that’s what they offer). Have Microsoft left this gap to enable third party products to fill it as part of non monopolistic behaviour, but surely doing the desktop integration requires the licensing of engineering rights and documentation.

Anyway Google doesn’t seem much help. Odd

I have for the moment decided to use filezilla with the –site-manager command line item. NB the — is what is used on windows as well as shell based command lines. I can find ways to go straight to my site but these require placing the password inside the shortcut.

ooOOOOoo

I have made this icon –

filezilla menuThis is a .png version, I used convertico to make a .ico

Posted by Dave on

Ruggedising the Internet

Ruggedising the Internet

Mike Masnick writes a little article forecasting the engineers re-writing the single points of failure out of the internet. He entitles his article, Building A More Decentralized Internet: It’s Happening Faster Than People Realize. He cross references to two articles written by himself back in 2010, Operation Payback And Wikileaks Show The Battle Lines Are About Distributed & Open vs. Centralized & Closed and The Revolution Will Be Distributed: Wikileaks, Anonymous And How Little The Old Guard Realizes What’s Going On in which he, more accurately, recognises the current and future power of distributed and private networks. It should be remembered that these predictions all occurred before the Arab spring and the recent protests in Turkey and the state responses to the use of networks. This article was written in 2014, and I inserted the excerpt line five years later. Fore more, see below or overleaf. … 

Posted by Dave on

P2P DNS

Looking at DNS and the attempt to P2P it.

Peter Sunde launched a project, reported at Computer World in an article called “P2P DNS to take on ICANN after US domain seizures”

It seems to have got stuck. This article dated 18 Oct 2011 and called Continuing the Distributed DNS System on Slashdot has some pointers. See also P2P-DNS taking control of the Internet  at memeburn.com.

The nearest successor seems to be namecoin, see http://namecoin.info/ , https://bit.namecoin.org & its wikipedia page

While researching this in 2013 I came across a page on alternate roots at Wikipedia.

In 2020, I had another look, and came across https://www.namecoin.org/, here’s a query on Bruce Schneier’s site. Other’s imply that the only answer is to move to broadcast protocols, why not? It’s what ethernet is/was.

Posted by Dave on

Configuring NTP

Configuring NTP

I want to configure NTP on this box, i.e. the Cobalt Qube as its losing time. Badly. This was written in 2011 or earlier, and should probably therefore not be used any more.

Posted by Dave on

Municipal WiFi

In Jan 2012, the Telegraph ran a story on how Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea boroughs have agreed with O2 to build the world’s biggest free wifi network, this is mirrored at this thread at South East Central.

  • Municipal Urban WiFi at Wikipedia, includes a list of Cities with fee Citywide WiFi, in the UK, Bristol and Norwich. (Liverpool has a paid service and the funding status for Newcastle in County Down is unstated.)

San Francisco

San Francisco famously experimented with free city wide WiFi. It was started with quite a splash and I was visiting it on a frequent basis. It seems they have suspended municipal investment in the programme in 2007 and invest in more directed programme to resolve the digital divide.