To get an overview of my todo's I used to list them in google tasks. Back in time I was convinced it would nicely integrate with all tools software and distributions I would use. After some month's I figured out it wouldn't.

So I searched on the web for software which would take that task over from google. I used to play with several tools, from trac, to chiliproject to redmine. All those tools worked very nice but were some overkill to only manages todo lists.

In the meantime I installed gitlabhq, tried to abuse the issues there to manage …

Every time I want to join a channel on a jabber account using bitlbee I'm a bit confused and have to search the whole inter-webs before actually finding out howto configure my chat setup to do so.

My online search points me out to the bitlbee wiki. Nevertheless those commands never got to the point to have it actually working. After many attempts a colleague pointed me to the right solution.

To never forget it anymore and sharing the working setup with the world I summarize it in this blog post.

In your bitlbee control channel &bitlbee :

chat add [account …

Recently I bumped into GTalkSMS when I was surfing the net for manuals on irssi & bitlbee using to chat so I could move away from pidgin.

This GTalkSMS tool is quite cool. When am at work or at home my mobile isn't always in my sight. Therefore it could happen someone has to call me a few times before I answer the call.

(biggest frustration of the girlfriend meaning you have to answer your call within a time period of 3 seconds because you're working in IT)

Using this nifty tool you can control your mobile through your favorite chat …

It seems like a very simple job, and in fact it is. But I had an issue when I tried to change this in my Cent OS 6.3 setup.

After some digging on the internet I found out selinux was the blocking factor.

The configuration of the new port has to be done in the lighttpd conf file.

/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

server.port = 2080

When I changed the config file and restarted the /etc/init.d/lighttpd service I got following error:

(network.c.379) can't bind to port:  2080 Permission denied

I checked that I added the …

Reading this article will go through the process I went through configuring multiple dropbox accounts on my centos machine (one personal and one for work) and encrypting them both using encfs.

That way I'm sure dropbox can't read the data stored into it. Because no I don't trust anybody on the cloud!

In the first part I will configure 2 dropbox services using a CentOS 6 Desktop, in the second part I will encrypt those 2 dropbox services using encfs.

The first account you can just install and configure the normal way provided by dropbox itself. Here I configured my …

I started the day with ssl issues using puppet. Last week I cleaned 2 hosts in our tree using the puppet command

# puppet node clean [hostname]

on the puppetmaster. I did this to clean out the stored configs for those nodes.

But I didn't realized this also cleaned out the ssl certificates for those clients. So I started the new week with this uncomfortable issue:

[root@agent ~]# puppet agent --test err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server session ticket A: sslv3 alert certificate revoked warning: Not using cache on failed …

Recently I started to try writing a customized script for the icinga monitoring tool. I will try to describe the steps I went trough to achieve this in this post. I assume you already have a working icinga setup. If not you can find documentation about this on http://docs.icinga.org/.

First of all you need to script. I created a script which will check if a service is running using the command

# /etc/init.d/service status

to see how to implement this in icinga. The script can be found on my github repo.

Once you have tested …

On this page I will describe the way I went trough to configure an sms gateway using a laptop, huawei modem, falcom A2D-1 or the option Globetrotter hardware using the open source software kannel & playsms.

The main goal of this project was related to the scouting movement in Belgium I'm active. We wanted to interrogate all of our members who were on a start weekend of the next scouting year. To do this we had the idea to use the sms communication channel. This because almost every youngster has the possibility to send sms messages without a big effort.

To …

Recently we installed a Lacie Network Space 2 at home. Easy to share documents on the LAN network, having a central place for common media etc. After playing around with it I wanted to see if it's possible to gain access to the underlying operating system of it. On that way I could for example use this access to wake up a pc with wake on LAN.

And guess what, it can be done and thanks to a script of a guy Andreus it's even very easy! I found a forum post about his work and tested it successfully with …

You wrote a piece of software and want to distribute it on an easy way through a yum repository? That can be done, by making in the first place an rpm package of your code.

In the first place you need to set up a directory structure. This can be done using the tool rpmdevtools on a rhel based machine:

# yum install rpmdevtools

Once you installed the software you need to setup the directory tree:

$ rpmdev-setuptree

This will install the necessary rmpbuild directory tree.

You will see there is create a SOURCES directory, you need to get your software source …