Back to Rotterdam?

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Aug 252012
 

There is a chance I will be moving back to Rotterdam this year. The thought alone is awesome. Gotta do some calculations to see if I can make all ends meet. Stay tuned….

Arduino upload error

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Jul 272012
 

Great. Just as I tought I solved the problems with the old libraries, the Arduino itself is giving problems. After (or just before the end) I get the error:


avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00

And then nothing. Tried every solution I can find with Google:

– other USB port

– reinstall Arduino drivers

– make sure port/board are okay

– reset before uploading

– reset while uploading

– remove all component so only upload to the bare Arduino board

Nothing works. I guess the Arduino hardware itself is just rubbish. Made in Italy, that explains a lot.

 Posted by at 22:47

Arduino 1.0.1 with old libraries

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Jul 262012
 

Recently I bought some more Arduino “toys”, the Rainbow shield and an LCD shield. But no matter how I tried, I could not get both to work. Always errors like:

delayns() not declared in this scope

The reason for this is that the Arduino 1.0.1 environment is different from the latest pre 1.x version (0023). So if you include the following lines on top of your LIBRARIES (yes, you have to modify the old library files), things should work out:

#if defined(ARDUINO) && ARDUINO >= 100
#include "Arduino.h"
#else
#include "WProgram.h"
#endif

At least I could compile my sketches, now lets see if they do what I told them to 🙂

Mail

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Jul 212012
 

My mail is now running on the server again, not the Synology. The Synology does a good job, but the spamfilters are not what I like them to be. It marks mail as spam by adding “**SPAM**” to the subject line and listing how much spampoints the message got. Not what I want. I want an unaltered mailmessage in my spambox, or no message at all. I used to have that with Postfix/Postgrey/Amavis/Spamassassin.

 

I installed iRedMail, basically an installer layer over the standard Linux mailcomponents. Installing is done in about 2 minutes, switching of greylisting took me more time to figure out how…. Thanks people, for such a great product.

SSL for per directory restriction

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Jul 192012
 

To have some directories on my server protected by more than a simple username and password, I wanted to use SSL and client certificates. I could easily restrict the directories to my local network IP-addresses, but when I’m “outside” that would present a problem. Hence the solution with client certificates.

 

As I blogged earlier, I requested a real server certificate from the people at Xolphin. Nice people, low prices, fast service. But…..you cannot create/sign client certificates with such a certificate. You need the real certificate installed on the server, and you need to create a certificate that has been created/signed by you as a fake Certificate Authority. The Fake CA has to be known to Apache and to your browser. Next the client certificate (created/signed by the Fake CA) must be imported into your browser, and of course the directories you want to protect need to be in the SSL-configuration of Apache.

 

Now that I know how it works, it is simple, but most guides on the internet either follow the Fake CA principle (so you don’t need to buy a real certificate) or they only use a real certificate. Spending money to have your SSL-certificate-supplier do the job for you is another thing. But this works. And for € 10 (excluding VAT) per year I now have a real server certificate, and I can further protect my server with my own certificates.

Back on decent hardware!

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Jul 152012
 

The domain switchbl8.nl now runs on a PC/server again. I replaced the motherboard, processor and memory, and ditched the old 9GB SCSI disk in favor of a 60GB SSD from Adata. Also, the system now runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64, no longer the unmaintained 7.04 (in 32-bits).

 

The gallery is not back yet, gotta find out how to reimport/recreate the original structure, but as you can see, the weblog is up and running.

Work

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Jul 132012
 

Yesterday I had a workday again, since ages. I almost worked 8 hours, and the job was fun to do. Today a major setback: extremely tired and most of the day I spend sleeping. It is now about 10 in the evening and slowly the energy is coming back. Monday another try.

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