All posts by danman

Black thursday

Hi all!

Yesterday I suffered a great loss. All my data from this server went away… Unfortunately, I didn’t have recent full-backup of my blog so I needed to recreate some posts from WayBackMachine. That’s why most of pictures in posts from 2016 and 2017 is missing. Sorry for that. If you are interested in some exact pictures contact me, I can try to find them in my files.

I wish you more luck with your backups.

Bye!

Multicast over “stupid” networks

IP multicast is an interesting technology. It’s main purpose is to
save network bandwidth as much as possible – traffic is sent to hosts
which asked for it only (as opposed to broadcast). On the other
hand, you need smarter (manageable) switches and specific
non-trivial configuration on both routers and switches. Even more
complicated it is when you try to make it work over VPN. Continue reading Multicast over “stupid” networks

Primitive webcam server using inetd and fswebcam

Hi all!

This weekend I was thinking how to make my webcam connected to
OrangePI send a picture “on demand”. There are daemons (e.g. motion or
webcam-mjpg) which do this but they capture images even when you are not
watching and I wanted to avoid this. There are also projects (fswebcam)
which are able to take single picture, save it to disk and end. I just
needed to run it after http request and send back the image. Installing
full webserver with some kind of interpreter (php, lua,…) seemed to me
like an overkill. So I came to an idea to use inetd.

And this is how I did.

Continue reading Primitive webcam server using inetd and fswebcam

Yet another IoT thermostat

Hi all,

this post will be about my homemade IoT thermostat.  The goal was to not install any cables (because I live in a rented flat), to go really cheap and to be able to set the temperature from anywhere. I’ll also give you some tips you should think about when building your own. Let’s get started.

Continue reading Yet another IoT thermostat

Example systemd unit config

/etc/systemd/system/my-service.service

[Unit]
Description=My super service
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/full/path
#Type=forking
#PIDFile=
Restart=always
RestartSec=2
User=root
Group=root
WorkingDirectory=/opt/service/
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=my-service
Environment=PATH=/bin

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable my-service

OrangePi: Installing Debian chroot into OpenELEC

Hi all,

I have an OrangePi running jernej’s OpenELEC build connected to my TV.  It works very well and stable, but on the other side, you can’t do much more with it because OE is very limited Linux distribution. This is a short guide how to run standard Debian services (nginx, samba, openvpn, … anything) in Debian chroot. Continue reading OrangePi: Installing Debian chroot into OpenELEC

CarWatch: My homemade car tracking platform

Hi all,cw-logo

few months ago, I was thinking about having my car tracked over GPS to make sure it is where I left it and to have some records how much I drive etc. There are commercial systems available for this but they cost some money and I wanted to have it customizable, under own control and to implement a few own ideas so I designed and implemented the system by myself. This is how CarWatch was born. Continue reading CarWatch: My homemade car tracking platform

Fixing non-working WiFi on RT5350

I have a favorite cheap chinese router based on RT5350 (running OpenWRT).

img_20160324_121441

Recently, I was wondering, why I can’t get WiFi on a few of them working. I have one piece running quite old (4xxx svn) OpenWRT where the WiFi works OK. So I tried to compile exactly the same version and install it on the non working piece. I also put the same wifi config there but nothing. It didn’t work. Continue reading Fixing non-working WiFi on RT5350