Actually the domain name got its start because a colleague of mine, one day sent me a bit silly email — he forged the address as manager@pointyhair.com, which gave me a good idea. I immediately checked if pointyhair.com was available (it was!) I registered the domain immediately, pointed it to my servers, created the name…
Robocallers be gone — Simple Asterisk/FreePBX phone system to deter all spam callers
Setup a simple Asterisk/FreePBX phone system, and you will reduce spam callers dramatically, and robocallers down to zero. Setting an asterisk server can seem like a daunting task. But using a freePBX as a controller system will make it much simpler. FreePBX is a system that sits on top of an asterisk server. Asterisk is…
How to make Sound effects with a small window with buttons on it
Here are the scripts (Bash, Python and Tcl/Tk) to get this done First the Python3 & packages… sudo apt install python3-pipsudo apt install python3-tksudo apt install python3-pygame Then we need the sound-effects, let’s put them in Share/Audio-Samples Now for the bash script to launch the app ( sound-effects.sh ) Remember to change the script to…
Wiring a rental apartment for CAT5e (1Gbps, or even 10Gbps) without rewiring
Pictures and procedures of my wife rewiring the apartment to CAT5e with zero cost. All it’s going to cost you is a bunch of cat5 plugs, possibly a cable crimping tool, and a cable tester (optional). NOTE: remember to get permission before doing the work from apartment managers — best approach: “Hey I want to…
Managing a number of NUCs for web/email/LLM servers for fun, I like to automate as much as reasonable, but all in Linux (Ubuntu, Jetson Nano & CentOS).
More to come as time permits — I have a number of posts in the queue. Jetson Nano — got it bumped to Jetpack 6 recently, amazing speed increase, as iGPU took over…
KVMs
KVMs (PiKVM and JetKVM) so I don’t have to crawl into the server closet (comparison) I recently got two types of KVMs: Given the usage, the PiKVM with the 12 hosts, is obviously more suitable for the server closet, whereas the JetKVM is perfect for the one machine in my office. More to come, like…
Using LVM2 for a resilient scalable drive array, with script to re-initialize array
63 terabytes of storage built from 8 USB drives in “RAID 1” configuration — I.e. you don’t lose data even if one drive goes dead. A bit of background: I started a (multi-domain) web service ten years ago. I wanted some extra storage as backups. To start with… this is a completely safe, benign operation…
I Like the NUCs (fanless tiny servers, except when the heatwave happens)
I have a tower built on NUCs built to serve email/web/VPN/wifi/etc Only after the California Heatwave did I realize that you can’t just stash the whole system in a closet without some FANs for cooling — The Manufacturer suggested Amazon Infinity Fans, which have now worked beautifully. smartctl -ax /dev/nvme0