Recent Posts

Chef and iptables

July 14, 2014 - Categories: Questions for the Community,Utilities And Other Useful Things

4 minute read

Like many DevOps professionals before me, I needed a way to manage iptables programmatically through Chef. Before I realized that Opscode had written a cookbook for just this, I had already spent some time building my own. The cookbook written by Opscode is very clever and allows you to apply a set of iptables rules with a single line in another recipe. The only problem is that it is predicated on you creating 'templates' of iptables policies you want to apply in advance, and you can only apply those templates. You can't just supply a port number or part of a rule. Additionally, their cookbook wasn't compatible with Vagrant because of the ruby binary wasn't in the paths used in the cookbook.

Short version - I wrote my own iptables cookbook and augmented the Opscode iptables cookbook, and I wanted to share.

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Bootstrap Scrollspy Workaround

June 16, 2014 - Categories: IT/Software Projects,How-to Guides

10 minute read

I was recently working on a new HTML project when I came across the Scrollspy feature in Bootstrap's framework (v2.3). The feature looks really good on Bootstrap's pages, I figured I'd use it in my project as well. I immediately had issues with the links aligning the content to the viewport and issues with the scrollspy highlighting the right link based on what content was in the viewport. This was all supposed to be out of the box functionality... After doing some research (read: Googling), I came across a few bug tickets and workarounds, but no wholistic solutions to reproducing the functionality on Bootstrap's site. So I decided to build it manually.

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Raspberry Pi Project 1: NAS and XBMC

January 4, 2014 - Categories: IT/Software Projects,How-to Guides

9 minute read

The Raspberry Pi makes a great HTPC or media PC, whatever you want to call it, because of its low cost, low power consumption, quiet, and small form factor. As I was getting ready to start my Raspberry Pi build, I realized that the Pi could take over a few other functions that my desktop does, including NAS, at a fraction of the cost (see my previous post about Powering a Pi and related utility savings). But could I modify a RaspXBMC build to also run Samba or some other network file sharing? Could XBMC be installed on Raspbian with less than a thousand calls to aptitude? Could XBMC and Samba run simultaneously on a Pi without making video playback unwatchable? That's what I hoped to find out.

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Powering a Raspberry Pi

December 18, 2013 - Categories: How-to Guides,Questions for the Community,Electronics Projects

3 minute read

I recently started building out a combination NAS and HTPC on a Raspberry Pi and came across some interesting information about powering Raspberry Pi's. While this isn't a project post per se, I thought it was interesting enough to share and wanted to send this out as sort of a PSA for the users out there who don't know the potential danger of "backpowering" a Raspberry Pi.

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Thematic Password Generator

November 2, 2013 - Categories: Utilities And Other Useful Things

1 minute read

I've been wanting to build a thematic password generator for some time. Basically, choose some sort of "theme" and a few password strength parameters, and it will generate random passwords for you. Will come back to update this post and expand on themes shortly.

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