Recently I wrote about my car computer project based on the Raspberry Pi 2. The performance while acceptable in most situations, would drop and get noticeably sluggish during resource intensive activities such as processing large play queues or music directories. The free space around the Pi was constrained with the…
Read More
Building a Raspberry Pi Car Computer
6 months ago I bought an 80 series Toyota Land Cruiser and the time since has been doing the car up in preparation for a trip around Australia. Since its release the 80 Series Land Cruiser has earned itself a reputation as a dependable and an almost unbeatable machine off…
Read MoreChanging the Linux Mint Login Background Images
Newer versions of Linux Mint use MintX as the default login screen greeter. By default it comes with a predefined collection of images. These display in the background and change periodically in a slide show type format. The default images are great but I wanted to add a personal touch…
Read More
Raspberry Pi 2 Bitcoin Node
Not long ago I set up a Bitcoin node on a Debian Wheezy VPS to teach myself about Bitcoin and the blockchain in general. It was a great learning experience but the memory requirements of the Bitcoin software kept causing my VPS instance to run out of memory. So the…
Read More
Running a Bitcoin Node on Debian Wheezy
Over the last few years I have keenly followed the rise of Bitcoin from its early days trading at around $8USD. I watched with interest when it made its sharp rise to $1200USD and then felt dismay with more recent decline back to around the $200USD mark. As a whole…
Read More
Creating a Simple Iptables Blacklist
Anyone that had ownership of a server for any length of time quickly learns that the Internet is full of spammers, bots and other characters you would prefer didn’t exist. A firewall is key to keeping these guys at bay and Linux comes with a Kernel level firewall called iptables…
Read More
Creating a Tor Relay on Debian
The TOR project has proven itself an indispensable tool in the fight to protect the anonymity of people on-line. The project needs servers to route traffic through for the project to achieve its goals though. So contributors are needed to donate relays nodes ensuring a free Internet for all. In…
Read More
PHP FPM Errors After Upgrade
Recently I noticed a few of my servers had stopped serving my sites, with 502 errors being to visitors. I took a look at my site logs and noticed that they were full of the “Permission Denied” errors below: 2014/06/09 09:45:17 [crit] 11453#0: *22 connect() to unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock failed (13: Permission…
Read MoreQuick Intro To Memcached Stats
A few days ago I was given the job of changing the caching engine used in a Zend Framework based application from a simple flat file system based caching system to a memcached based object store that could be used by multiple servers. After extending the existing application bootstrap file…
Read More
Linux CLI: File Text Search & Replace
Occasionally you need to change the contents of some files easily to save a lot of manual work. In my case it was a server migration, the old IP address of a server was referred to from numerous DNS records. This meant the contents of a couple of hundred Bind…
Read More