Been a while since I’ve posted. Haven’t done anything that isn’t already documented somewhere in a long time. But, I’m back. I’m a big proponent of owning your own data and self-hosting where possible. I self-host my calendars on a CalDAV server at my house (with public IPs). But most if not all clients assume you’re using Google Calendar at this point or Microsoft’s equivalent. So, they tend to miss features. In this case, they were missing the ability to set a calendar’s color.
Continue readingAsterisk CDR logging to Splunk as JSON
Asterisk call logs are created by default as CSV files. These CSV files are incredibly hard to parse in Splunk via search time extractions. It would be nice to be able to get the data to Splunk and extract them in an easier way… Lets do it in JSON.
Continue readingGetting ansible-vault command to scale
The ansible-vault command provided by Ansible normally runs inside a vi window. This makes it easy for users to edit a single file. However, what happens when a user wants to change multiple files the same way at once. Well, the vi editor makes this extremely difficult. You normally can’t put ansible-vault edits in a loop. But we have a solution for it now using “ed”…
Continue readingGetting Photoshop Express to open CR2 files in Explorer
In Windows 10, you cannot open CR2 files in Photoshop Elements in Explorer. Instead you have to open Photoshop and then open the CR2 from inside Photoshop. Its a royal pain.
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The applet that broke BU’s web statistics
In college I was a bit lazy. In order to not do work during the school year, I tried to do it during the summer instead. The result of my laziness was the first game of Solitaire on the Internet. It was so popular that at 500 hits per day it became the most popular site in the entire Computer Science department.
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My first web page
The Internet Wayback Machine is an incredible resource for looking at what the Internet looked like years ago. I’ve wanted to dig up one of my old projects for a while and I decided to look at Archive.org to see if they might have a copy (they did). But in researching that project, I came across my first website from the early 90’s in high school.
Syslog-ng Scalability
Normally my posts are about the things I’ve done at home on personal projects, but here is one I did for a client recently.
Syslog is a protocol used by network gear, appliances, and most Unix distributions to handle their logs. Most importantly (for this discussion) the protocol is used by these devices to send their logs to a central server. The client is a very large organization and was sending data from 100’s of devices configured with high verbosity so that they can see any security events more clearly. They also had a lot of filters configured in Syslog-ng so that they can sort the events so their SEIM can consume them properly. Syslog-ng couldn’t keep up with all the events coming in.
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Faxing in the 21st Century
So, people have been using fax machines for decades. But being the 21st century I’ve actually gotten rid of mine. To my surprise one of the vendors I work with required me to fax them my credit card information. They wouldn’t accept it in email form (I wouldn’t either) or over the phone. So, I needed a way to get faxing working with my Asterisk setup.
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IPv6: Getting two hosts on same subnet to talk
This is the first part of a multi step project in getting IPv6 to work on my network. The top level post is here. The first step in getting things working is to get two hosts on the same network talking. This is the simplest configuration… No routers, no DNS, no DHCP, just two hosts and a switch. We’ll add the rest of the bits in a later post.
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Getting IPv6 up and running on my network
So, IANA ran out of IPv4 addresses this year. I want to use that as an opportunity to play with IPv6 and get it working in my network. I think we have a long time before IPv4 truly disappears, but it would be nice to say I’m ready. The goal is the get both my DMZ and my insecure network to only use IPv6 and my main LAN to be dual stack.
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