Tiernans Comms Closet

The Raspberry Pi is a pretty amazing peice of kit for its price and size. And now, you can make it even more amazing by using it as a VoIP server for your house!

Check out Raspberry Asterisk for downloads, documentation, etc, on how to setup a Raspberry Pi and Asterisk. I have a couple Pi’s in the house, and plan on setting this up in the next few days. Keep your eyes on the site… more posts coming!

Tomorrow, Monday the 28th January, 2013, will be the start of my final real Semester in College. I have been studying part time for the last 3 and a bit years, and tomorrow marks the begining of the end… Its the final REAL semester, meaning at the end of this i will have exams, but i wont be “finished” as such… I have a final semester from September to December where i hand up my final year project, which i plan on documenting here soon.

I have been using an iPhone 4 as a wifi hotspot for a while now. It does not have a “phone” SIM in it, with calls and texts enabled, instead it has a 3G Data SIM from a dongle… It works OK, but there are a few issues i have with it…

• No easy way to see how much data is being used, unless you Jail Break, and then battery life goes away…
• not very hackable… other than Jail Break, and thats not hackable enough…
• not a lot of storage: 16Gb, and most of that is takin up by Music and Apps
• no background network daemons… more on that in a second…

The Network Daemons i am thinking would be useful for a WiFi Hotspot would be Squid, WANProxy, SSH, PPTP or OpenVPN Client and possibly a downloader of some sort. What i am thinking is as follows:

I have been running a Dedicated Server from Hetzner for a while now, but have started to look at what i am running on the site, and reailized i under utilize the machine a lot… For example, this site is generated using Jekyll, which takes up very little power, and becomes static HTML files. My other blogs (Tiernan’s Comms Closet and GeekPhotographer) are both low traffic WordPress sites, and I run a couple of other static sites also for friends… All in all, not a lot of power…

I am in the process of moving my Email domains from one Office365 plan (a Professional) to an Enterprise Plan. During the move, i set up some Email Aliases for older email addresses, which are still being used, but i dont send a lot of email from. But if i do need to send emails from these addresses, with the help of Powershell, I managed to set it up. The full details are listed on “how to send as an alias in Office 365”. It works perfectly! And, as a bit of shamless self promotion, if you are interested in Office365, why not drop me a mail at Tiernan at LimitedSlipNetworks dot com and i can set you up with a trial and more information.

After yesterday’s post on IPv6 Networking in the house, I realized that all machines internally had publically facing IPv6 addresses! I started to panic, then went looking online, and found the following script:

This script, when run on your RouterOS board, will allow Established and Related connections, allow outgoing connections, and drop anything incoming that has not been requested… so, now everything inside the network should be more secured… I am new to this IPv6 stuff, so I am still learning… but, i am getting there…

I have been wanting to setup an IPv6 network for a while now, but never had the hardware or network to support it. My broadband Modem, a Cisco EPC3925, was pretty useless… But with the advent of Bridging on the Cisco EPC3925 it now works!

The first thing i needed to do was setup a Tunnel Broker Account with Hurricane Electric. I got a /64 block of IPv6 addresses, which should do me for a while… 🙂

Part of a project i am working on required sending large amounts of data between different instances. To get this to work efficially, we started using the ProtoBuf using ProtoBuf-net in .NET. but the files where still quite large (17mb, give or take). So, we looked into compression…

here is some examples of how we managed to compress the protobuf files. We got some decient compression: 3mb files, down from 17mb. very happy.

I use GIT a lot for different things, including this blog. so, here are a few tips and tricks i have found useful over the while…

• Using Dropbox as a local GIT/Mercurial Repository: my own post from a while back.
• Twelve GIT curated Tips and Workflows from the Trenches
• Using GIT with Subversion: tips that will make your life easier: The office has an SVN server, but i like GIT. This doc, with the help of git-svn and this post on StackOverflow allows me to use GIT locally, and then push to SVN.
• 25 tips for intermediate git users
• git ready: learn git one commit at a time
• A few git tips you dont already know
• The ProGIT book (paperback amazon) or Kindle Edition. Also available online

I have previously posted about CrashPlan as my Backup System. I also, a long time ago, talked about Backing up SQL, MySQL and other stuff on my other blog. Well, CrashPlan is all good, but there are 2 “niggly” bits with it…

• Its not FREE (well, this year i got it Free on Black Friday…) but it is cheap ($120 a year to backup 10 machines to the cloud aint bad.)
• Its NOT FAST! The CrashPlan Datacenters all live in the US, and my servers live in Europe (either Dublin or Germany). So, bandwidth is limited… Getting less than 1Mbit/s most times, but have seen it reach 3… I have 20Mbits/s upload… even half that would be nice…

So, thats where Symform comes in. Symform is a P2P Backup Service, which runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX. In theory, it should run anywhere that has a Mono runtime since its written in .NET. Anyway, you start with 10Gb of free storage, and you can increese that by one of 2 ways: