A few years ago I discovered the nest thermostat. It looked nice, is connected to the internet, self learning but a bit expensive and not so much documentation if it will work in Belgium nor with the boiler we have installed (Vaillant TurboTec).

Doing some research on the internet I figured that they have updated their system software and are supporting European countries including Belgium. A solution for the power has also been found by an ICY converter so it could easily be implemented in setups where no power is transferred over those wires.

So I had only to tackle …

Since I discovered the joy of linux servers over desktop distributions a few years ago I revived an old portable and promoted him to be my home server.

Connected him our router in the little storage room on a top shelf gathering dust I could test, configure, break (and pass sleep) a huge variety of open-source software.

Many of those adventures I also used to provide my blog with content. After a while I figured this setup isn't really needed to be powered on 24h a day 7 days a week. So I bought myself a raspberry pi which would …

At our office we have an ultimaker 2 installed, we have it now for some weeks and already printed out a bunch of stuff. It's cool to see, amazed by the technology.

Expect the manner to start a print job, you have to save your generated gcode files onto an SD card, stick it into the ultimaker and use the rather simple menu from the tiny display to start the print job.

The time of a print job is rather long depending on the object you want to print, so many times you got up and went seeing if everything …

Nowadays it becomes more and more relevant knowing which version of a package is installed and having an overview of the packages infected by some bugs or security holes. That way you could see which servers are possibly vulnerable for those on the dark side.

That's where pakiti comes in a clean web based overview of your servers listing all packages vulnerable against the CVE in particular.

It's a client server setup where the client reports the version of the packages to the pakiti server. The server on his turn checks those versions against CVE to see if there are …

To make our and other lives less painful writing documentation is a good start to decrease the level of frustration when working on a shared project.

It's a common feeling writing documentation isn't something we are all waiting for to do. In an effort to make it easier for all of us an automatically way of deployment can be managed by our good friend jenkins in combination with docker.

The details about this flow is been described on this page. After reading through this documentation section you should be aware of the general deployment idea so you can implement it …

Cloudstack, an item I had on my todo list with some lower priority against daily maintenance of our server park. But since attending David Nalley's talk on LinuxCon I shifted it up some places. Although I expected a real hands on session the talk he gave about a cloudstack environment for development was really intriguing and matched completely with what I had in mind.

Being fully convinced it fits in my idea of a fully automated development environment which meets to all the needs of developers to start writing code real quickly on machines similar to the production environment.

At …

For some of my development projects I'm using git repositories because of the flexibility of it. But the initial beta phase I don't want to keep private until I created something working. Normally I use github.com repositories for them, a good service except you have to pay for private repositories.

So I searched the internet for private alternatives and installed gitlab on my CentOS 6 machine. It worked fine, but it was a bit of an overkill to manage about 10 repositories for only one user, myself. So I decided to migrate it back to the essence.

The essence …

Using multiple nice interface dashboards to get an overview of your services is a great thing. But navigating to them all separately could sometimes be rather pain full.

Therefore I looked for some central place to give a broad overview of all of them. During last year many passed through during my search on the internet. The 2 most interesting ones where team dashboard and dashing.

Team dashboard is a promising one which could gather extremely specific data and give those back in some nice graphics. That way you could create your own very specific dashboard with all graphics and …

I got a great opportunity by attending LinuxCon in Edinburgh.

Will try to share my experiences there in this blogpost by listing the topics and people I found interesting so perhaps others could take also advantage of it.

I went crazy from perl and the installation of their modules. For some icinga checks we need to install a few base perl packages using cpanminus. It's taking a long time before the installation succeeds depending on the internet connection or server specifications.

Using a puppet exec to automate this installation is frustrating because the timeout is unpredictable and could take hours from time to time!

So I started to look for a way to package it into an rpm which I can distribute over our own yum repository.

The first software I got reviewed is cpan2rpm, it looked promising …