Rob the Geek

Random Musings: a blog of technology things

  • Loving the Summer in New Zealand

    As we’ve got our fair share of folks who have only recently come to New Zealand in our team at work, we were discussing the many and varied things that can be done to soak up the incredible sights of summer in our region. One of our guys really enjoys the outdoors and suggested “Epic […]

  • Testing NAS speeds

    So, recently I had reason to try bench-marking an off the shelf NAS server against an Opensource alternative and I wanted to ensure the tests would be as fair as possible (and quick to implement). As an aside, I thought that because it has been literally YEARS since I’d publicly documented any of my IT […]

  • Looking at logs…

    I have recently had cause to pay a little more attention to the logs generated by my home firewall. While I use SARG for the day-to-day analysis, I needed a quick and easy command to fire at my squid logs to see what a particular device had been up to. This entry is by no […]

  • pfSense: SARG Reports (v2.2.6 Update)

    This post follows on from my (surprisingly popular) article “pfSense: SARG Reports Not Showing“ After an update to v2.2.6-RELEASE I had re-inherited the same Error: Could not find report index file. Check and save sarg settings and try to force sarg schedule. error. On jumping onto the firewall via SSH, it appears that, at some […]

  • Office 365 DNS (or; Nightmares with Dreamhost)

    First things first, this is NOT a failing with Dreamhost, it is merely an issue with poor/outdated documentation. I will attempt to resolve that shortcoming via this post. When you sign up to Office 365 you are able to use your own domain for user authentication for the various services on offer. As I am […]

  • Logging your connectivity

    I had a message this morning from a friend who was having intermittent disconnection issues on their internet. The network itself was fine and, when using another provider, that too was working so it came down to evidence gathering to support the case to the ISP to investigate. As a quick throw together, we came […]

  • Backing up the Pi

    We’ve just had some work done on one of our systems (which runs from a Raspberry Pi v2) so, aside from the config file backups that we can collect from the systems interface, I thought it would be prudent to grab an image backup.. this is how it was done:

  • Grabbing Video (back) from YouTube

    Usual Disclaimers Apply: This guide should not be used to subvert copyright restrictions. Responsibility falls to the user to ensure they are not breaking the laws of the country in which they reside or breaching any restrictions placed on content published in, or on infrastructure where other jurisdictions and/or terms of service may apply. Ignorance is […]

  • CentOS 7 – CLI to GUI

    I’ve been playing with a few VMs as I try to figure out a new infrastructure for our office, and as part of this I’ve taken a particular shine to CentOS as a minimal build for my virtual servers. I then decided I wanted to get a few sandbox environments running with desktop software and, […]

  • PBX in a Flash – Cyclic Reboot under Hyper-V

    This post is for anyone who is running into an issue where following the guide over on Nerd Vittles and setting up under Hyper-V leaves their virtual machine in a cyclic reboot… er, cycle. If you are quick enough, you may catch the error (Fig 1) umount: can’t umount /mnt/selinux: Invalid argument ..which isn’t entirely […]