Printing

Probably like many amongst us the time of the Christmas holidays is perfect to get some IT related stuff back on track. I used to have a print server setup which got broken over time and I didn't found the energy to invest time into fixing it. But the pressure became higher and higher. 111 From both my wife and daughter, especially during the holidays where the wife want to use it to print out tickets and the daughter want to print out color plates..

So during one of the evenings I pulled myself together and installed ArchLinux ARM …

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 …

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 …