rethinking pi-hole (again)

About 2 years ago, I started running Pi-hole as a DNS resolver and ad-blocker. Then last year, I ditched it. After seeing a recent post by Troy Hunt, though, I thought it might be worth revisiting..but I needed a better way to control how it worked. Enter {{OpenVPN}} – a service I already run on …
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update: keeping your let’s encrypt certs up-to-date

Last year I posted a simple script for keeping your Let’s Encrypt {{SSL}} certificates current. In conjunction with my last post sharing the “best” SSL configs you can use with {{Apache}} on {{CentOS}}, here is the current state of the cron’d renewal script I use. systemctl stop httpd.service systemctl stop postfix ~/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -t -n –agree-tos –keep …
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ssl configuration for apache 2.4 on centos 7 with let’s encrypt

In follow-up to previous posts I’ve had about SSL (specifically with Let’s Encrypt), here is the set of {{SSL}} configurations I use with all my sites. These, if used correctly, should score you an “A+” with no warnings from ssllabs.com. Note: I have an improved entropy package installed (twuewand). This is adapted from the Mozilla config …
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half year update: how are my predictions so far?

Back in Feb, I published a list of tech-related predictions for 2015. How’m I doing? Let’s see ones that have happened (or are very close to have happened): Itanium OEL’d HP spinning-off business units – sorta, they’re splitting in half IBM is losing value … but not as much as I predicted (yet) cloud is …
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pydio has clients now

In update to my recent how-to, I found out from the founder of Pydio there are dedicated clients now. IOW, you don’t have to use just the WebUI. I haven’t tried any of them yet, but good to know they’re now there – it makes comparing Pydio and other tools like ownCloud easier.

owncloud vs pydio – more diy cloud storage

Last week I wrote a how-to on using Pydio as a front-end to a MooseFS distributed data storage cluster. The big complaint I had while writing that was that I wanted to use ownCloud, but it doesn’t Just Work™ on {{CentOS}} 6*. After finishing the tutorial, I decided to do some more digging – because …
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first experiment follow-up

I’ve been attempting a “reactive”/”consumptive” reading experiment recently. The first book I tried it on was the {{Henry Petroski}}’s horrid {{To Engineer is Human}} (my review). That turned into a failure as I couldn’t stomach his writing, and so “reacting” to it was going to pretty much be an exercise in futility. So I’ve ditched …
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pxe works differently in hpsa 10.x

2 years ago I wrote-up how you can change the default choice for the PXE menu in HP Server Automation. Found out this week that those instructions are not valid if you are running 10.0 (release this past summer). HP changed how they present their PXE menu with 10.x, and I have filed an RFE …
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continued slowness :|

We are still at 31 this month – there were no referrals in November at all. We are assured by our agency that this is due to new legal processes in-country, and that it “should pick up soon”. “Soon” isn’t soon enough 🙂