Tiernans Comms Closet

About a month ago, while i was recovering from surgery, i attended a Webinar on
Cisco Meraki devices. After the webinar, i was contacted by Maraki and given a MR18 with a 3 year license, to play with and evaluate. So, i set it up in the house and all was good.

Thing is, the wifi in the house was grand previously. I have a Routerboard RB951G which does the job and has no issues. And because i am mostly offsite in the office i work, and because i need to remotely manage the network, the MR18 is going into the office from tomorrow morning. I may talk about the MR18 and the rest of the Meraki gear later on, but this is not that post. This post is about something the MR18 did, and i wanted to do on the RB951.

so, earlier on today, i was talking about using Git with a DNS service called LuaDNS to update your DNS records. Well, thing is, i have 30+ domains registered, and of them about 25 are hosted on Amazon’s Route53. So, moving ALL of them seems, well at the moment, excessive… So, i went digging…

there is a tool called cli53 which will allow you to manage route53 objects from the command line. It can also export your zones to BIND format and then re-import them if you have made changes… This all came out of a blog post by the guys and gals at netguru who showed how they integrate their DNS records with their Continuous Integration… Now, i have not gotten to that stage, just yet, but its only 1 step more down the road… but I don’t have my zones in bind format… So, how do i do that?

There are now a lot of services that have “git push” options available… you can build websites with
Azure and Github, books using ShareLaTeX and now, DNS using LuaDNS. I have one zone
running at the moment (tiernanotoole.net) and you can see the DNS records on github here. I am
tempted at moving other records over soon… but i am currently on Amazon Route53 and 1: its works, so
dont break it, and 2, not sure how to bulk export records from Route53 to Bind or Lua format.

Now that all my sites are running Jekyll I am trying to get them optimized for SPEED which meant
looking at all the stuff that takes time to download… There are more tweaks (and possibly posts) coming down
the road, but to start, I needed to look at images.

First things first. I’m running this on a Sabayon Linux box, so some of the install commands will be different… (Also, i do need to explain why I moved from Windows to Linux on the GodboxV2, but that’s a different post…)

Well, its finally happened. All my blogs, Tiernan’s Comms Closet, GeekPhotographer and the Podcast have been
moved to Jekyll. I wrote up a long and complicated post explaining how I did it… Now, i dont have to worry
about WordPress security issues on my home sites! Happy Days!

I mentioned HubiC in my last post, and in it i said that you could use Duplicity for backups. Well, this is how you get it to work…

First, i am using Ubuntu 14.04 (i think…). I use Ubuntu in house for a few things:

• its running Tiernan’s Comms Closet, GeekPhotographer and Tiernan’s Podcast all in house, aswell as being used to build this site. The Web Server and MySQL Server are seperated, MySQL running on Windows, web on Ubuntu… but thats a different story…
• I have a couple of proxy servers running Ubuntu also
• Other general servers running Ubuntu… dont ask, cause i cant remember what they do half the time…

So, Duplicity is a backup application. From their website:

HubiC is an online storage site, built by the guys at OVH. They are currently offering 30Gb free (if you use the link above) or if you pay, you get 110Gb (insted of the usual 100Gb) for EUR1 a month, or 10.5TB (yup… TERABYTES!) for EUR5 a month… Thats a crazy amount of storage for a not crazy amount of money!

So, while playing around with different things, I found they have an API, so other than the usual apps to play with (like the Hubic Apps for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Desktop and OSX, Duplicity for backing up *nix boxes, and a few others) you can build your own…

A couple of years back, i did a post about my Daily Carry for college… Well, I have finished (ish) college, but i still cary a lot of weird and wonderful stuff… So, this is the update…

The details are on my Daily Carry page, and, in theory, should always be up to date… Thats the theory anyway… 🙂

After my post about the Raspberry Pi acting as a VoIP server, and being able to add a 3G Dongle and allowing it to act as a Mobile Phone gateway, it got me thinking… Why not have something that allows you to rent a mobile phone number in a country, send and recieve text messages, phone calls, etc, all from anywhere in the world? Thats where Mobile Phone as a Service comes in…

Well, if you can read this, this site is now hosted fully on AWS with both S3 and CloudFront. More details eventually…

[UPDATE] How did i host this on S3 and CloudFront? Check out this article by Paul Stamatiou for details…