Sean's projects, musings and general information
A few years ago I wrote a handy little tool to solve a simple problem: test automated ticketing & alerting based on syslog messages. The problem was presented to me while working for a large telecommunications provider who had outsourced their fault monitoring to an off-shore consulting company. This particular company had a habit of… Continue Reading Faking Syslog Messages
AWS held an IoT Contest July 13-17 2017, and this describes my entry (which won! Woohoo!). You can see a video description of this project here. You can also see the page on hackster.io here. This project provides integration between Home Assistant, AWS IoT, and low power devices running on the ESP8266. Â The ESP8266 has… Continue Reading AWS IoT Contest
We haven’t used cable / satellite since 2006. Unfortunately, some online streaming services have restrictions, so when we visit them we must appear to be in a different location. Until now, we have been successfully using our existing server and VPN intrastructure (where this site his hosted for example), to additionally have a Squid proxy… Continue Reading Beyond Proxies: Cheaply routing traffic to another country to avoid Geo Restrictions for ~$20/year
The McAfee Webgateway is officially supported on VMWare or on a McAfee Appliance.  In my test environment at home, i prefer to use libvirt running on a Debian system (qemu/kvm). When I first tried to install the webgateway, I got the error that this was not an appliance and the installer refused to go further. I… Continue Reading McAfee Webgateway on KVM
November 11 is the beginning of the Karneval Season, and on November 11 I was out with my wife enjoying the partying. I noticed a number of costumes with lights on them, but I was very disappointed in them. They were usually nothing more than a string of Christmas lights wrapped around a body or… Continue Reading Costume
This is a gripe I had written back in July 2007, but a recent case in 2014 has reminded me of this, and it’s interesting to see things haven’t really changed in 7 years. At work we have a very expensive contract with a vendor, to support their product. Every incident I have opened with… Continue Reading Open Source vs Vendor Support
My local radio station has a web stream, that you can play from their website (www.radiokoeln.de). Their site, in addition to having annoying ads that delay the start of the music, only runs on Adobe Flashplayer. I wanted to be able to play it on my Raspberry Pi from XBMC, which is running an arm… Continue Reading Breaking into your local radio station
This nifty little trick allows you to manually enter http requests over https: openssl s_client -connect www.pcfinancial.ca:443 -state This command takes place of telnet “www.google.ca 80” in that openssl negotiates all the key junk for you, and allow you to hack test https webservers.
I recently purchased an ExtremeView xv3300 from EFTA.us. I highly recommend their service: Shipping was fast and prices were great. To link it in with my current mythtv system, I needed to build/buy an irblaster, and hook it up to lirc to blink the codes to the set top box. Then I needed to configure… Continue Reading MythTV & Satellite TV
Block Brute Force with IP Tables