While the current Smart-UPS (aka SMT) range of UPS from APC has much fewer variables exposed in a way that is useful for fancy apcupsd usage (you’ll find apcupsd in EPEL), they are still amply sufficient for home use. Basically, the UPS gives an estimated time left at current load and the remaining battery level. At home these are anyway the only two readings I want to trigger scripts on.

The must read Secure dynamic DNS howto has all the steps you need to set up DDNS updates with BIND.

What follows are some very terse notes for RHEL5, highlighting steps not directly obvious from that howto.

sometimes I need a quick and dirty speed test of an internet connection. Speedtest.net Mini allows just that, but I did not want random surfers to eat my bandwith. So here’s how to set up your own.

Every time a friend comes to visit, I tend to give out the same travel information. Being lazy, turning that into a posting seems sensible.

While I no longer live in Helsinki, there is no real need to delete this post. Keeping what the migration tool spit out.

From time to time people ask me what my motorbike looks like. Here’s some pictures.

The first three were taken shortly after I bough it, they are the ones where the bike is shiny. The rest were taken in September 2014, it’s noticeably dirtier in them.

In January 2010 weather conditions gave this beautiful scene in Helsinki. The trees were all covered with a fine layer of frost.

for paid accounts (DynDNS Pro and Dyn Standard DNS), one can do the updates with TSIG.

This allows us to not use ddclient, thus not having our DynDNS.com password in a config file on disk. Obviously, if the key is leaked, an attacker can still wreak havoc with your DynDNS zone configurations, but at least they will not be able to log onto the web interface of DynDNS under your name.

Helsinki, especially the first Friday of summer months, has a rather high percentage of cool old cars. Here’s a few pictures I took.

In the olden days, one would have to manually calculate[1] to get a file system (FS), in a logical volume (LV) that was part of a volume group (VG) living on a software RAID, properly aligned. I would get this calculation wrong in about 10% of the cases.

These days, modern Linux distributions like Fedora 14 and RHEL 6 parse hints from the storage.