lathama.net

A little walk-through of setting up an Arduino to control electronic devices with a keypad. This little project was done for under $50USD and could be done cheaper if needed.

A work in progress inspired by Stefan Schlesinger's write up "A Systems Policy" this write up will express some industry practices.

OpenERP or also known as OpenObject is Open Source Software written in Python starting over 13 years ago by Fabien Pinckaers (pinky) for his father and later his uncle's businesses. Today OpenERP provides the infrastructure for huge swaths of the manufacturing, hospitality, and other industries.

Super Easy install...

To reset a DNS SOA serial number, there is a hack that is barely documented.

Quick DIG guide showing simple usage for auditing DNS information.

Simple Forward Name lookup for the dyn.com.

dig dyn.com

This little hack updates the SOA serial number in all DNS zone files with the file name ending in .zone. There are various things that can be added to this script. This type of script would be best used on a hidden master server.

#!/bin/sh
clear
echo
echo
echo "Updating SOA in all zones"
echo "Note: max serial is 4294967295"
sed -i 's/[0-9]\{10\}/'`date +%Y%m%d%H`'/g' /etc/bind/*.zone
echo
echo "Reload BIND9"
rndc reload
echo
echo "Check for failures if any"
grep failed /var/log/syslog
echo
echo "Check for errors if any"
grep errors /var/log/syslog
echo
echo "All done..."

Fingerprinting vs Configured Monitoring

Developing a project to handle deployments and monitoring in a new way requires a lot of thinking. Configured Monitoring is the old fashioned method of setting up a monitoring system like Nagios to check a few preconfigured services from a given host. In a preconfigured scenario a webserver might be monitored for ICMP, HTTP, and HTTPS. While working on an auditing solution for devices this topic was revisited and investigated. Running audits with a NMAP like scan of a network subnet created a nice summary of the network, its hosts and the services on each host. These scans consumed some resources so scheduling and paralleled processes helped out. The audits turned into fingerprints that identified what existed on the network. These fingerprints showed additional services that were lacking in the preconfigured monitoring and gave rise to some security audits.

Layout Changes with Mediawiki

Good documentation sometimes needs good style. Mediawiki (what powers wikipedia.org) is a great solution. Along with private SSL you can have a secure but fast documentation system anywhere in the world. By default Mediawiki will load CSS enteries from the Mediawiki: namespace. You can add overrides to these files to change the look or even add your own classes.

Example PHP code for accessing http://www.linode.com/api/dns to list your domains. This builds a simple table of domains. Try to use this to access deeper into the API to get RR and SOA data.

If you travel or you prefer your searches in English in a non-English country you would use http://google.com/ncr. The "ncr" is for "no content redirection" and many people refer to it as "no country redirect". If you want to set the address bar search to go to google.com and search in English, its easy. In Google Chrome or Chromium open the settings. Select "Basics > Search > Manage Search Engines. At the bottom create a new entry as follows: