Photo by Thomas Jensen on Unsplash
Crypto
The Helium Network is a decentralized wireless system for low-bandwidth IoT devices, offering a cheaper alternative to cellular networks. It has received wide-spread adoption, but is it economically viable?
Linux
AWS Game Day is a competition that allows participants to test their AWS skills in a risk-free environment, possibly discovering new services. Could this be the new eSport for System Administrators?
Linux
A HomeLab provides a proper learning environment for computer infrastructure and software and infrastructure. With over half a million members on the r/HomeLab reddit channel, it is impossible to deny the popularity of the hobby.
Linux
A hard lesson for any sysadmin to learn is to have an outage without even knowing it. The following describes how Technodabbler converted a simple #cron #monitoring into a light-weight monitoring solution.
Linux
Server hardware is typically mounted and operated in specially designed rack. Such hardware is designed from the start to be placed in these racks. However, when building a machine from scratch, finding a good rack mountable computer case can be a challenge. A couple of good options come surprisingly from
Linux
When building a homelab, noise is a common concern. Enterprise-level servers were never designed to be quiet. For those resourceful enough, you can build a sound proof cabinet. Here is how Technodabbler did it.
Networking / VoIP
About two years ago, I started a journey to convert the analog phone system found in my home to a sleek, modern VoIP system. There was one important requirement : the system should work with the existing phone line. That was a perfectly reasonable requirement, many providers already had that phone
Linux
In a Homelab, disk shelves are a simple solution to add storage to an existing server. Just add an SAS adapter for some extra external SAS ports and you are ready. On the r/Homelab sub-reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/], older disk shelves, such as the NetApp DS4243
Networking / VoIP
It's not secret that I am a big fan of Ubiquiti hardware. I've already written about their hardware [https://www.technodabbler.com/edge-router-x/] twice [https://www.technodabbler.com/unify-ac-an-elegant-wifi-solution/] in the past. But this latest upgrade to my home network is elegant superfluousness : the Ubiquiti US-8-150W 8 port POE switch.
Networking / VoIP
Wifi is difficult to deploy properly and even more difficult to debug. When living in a small apartment, the solution is pretty simple : place a simple wifi router roughly in the middle of the appartement. However, in a large multi-floor house, getting a strong wifi signal in every room can
Networking / VoIP
Solutions to share the Internet on a network have tremendiously evolved in the last twenty years. My first experience was using Wingate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinGate], a software proxy that could act as an Internet gateway. Along with the introduction of Internet broadband came the consumer gateways, such
Linux
One of the important aspect of Linux is its Open Source nature: everyone is free to contribute and no one "owns" Linux. This creates a great diversity which is both a strength and a weakness for the operating system. Wars over the best "distro" of Linux are fought with religious
Linux
A KVM Switch is a device that allows a keyboard, a video monitor and a mouse (hence the name) to be shared across multiple computers. This particular model, the Dell 2161DS-2, is commonly used in server rooms, where large numbers of servers only require a monitor and keyboard for troubleshooting.
Networking / VoIP
Last year, the development team for Ghost blog announced [http://blog.ghost.org/cloudflare/] a partnership with Cloudflare. The goal was to improve the Ghost(Pro) infrastructure, making it faster and more secure. With a little tinkering, Cloudflare can be used with any Ghost blog. Technodabbler received this upgrade a
Game Development
I like iOS development. I am actually starting to see some elegance in Objective-C, even thought it has the strangest syntax ever. So far, I’ve release BlokPanic. The next game, I want it to be multiplayer, possibly even massively multiplayer. The problem is that I need some server software.