Puppet from Puppet Labs is a utility for controlling multiple machines from a single point. It allows for easy server roll outs, as well as keeping multiple servers in the same state. I have a server dedicated for Linux KVM virtualization, and because of this I have spun up about 10 VM’s, so 10 individual Linux installations. I use puppet to make sure that they all have the packages installed that I use on a daily basis, as well as a to make sure that anytime I make a change to my bash or zsh rc it gets populated out to all my servers. Also I store my public key in puppet, so any new server I provision will automatically be populated with it so I can easily SSH into it in a more secure manner.

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This update was in the works for a couple of weeks now, but just a couple of minutes ago I finally pulled the switch, and switched my webserver over to nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache. Nginx can serve up static content faster than you can blink, so that is why it is the first responder to all web requests on 80 and 443. I have a regex line that looks for static content and tells nginx to deliver it without hitting Apache. If the request does not match this regex it will simply be forwarded to Apache to handle it like a normal request.

This update has allowed me to move my webserver from a physical host with 8GB of ram and 2 Intel Xeon processors to a Virtual Machine with only 2 virt cores and 2GB of ram. Putting my server under a stress test I see that I can’t max out the 2 cores, or get the ram to go above 500mb, whereas with the old machine I could max out all 4 cores and get the ram up to 4-5GB’s used.

Static Content Regex

location ~* ^.+\.(png|jpeg|jpg|gif|css|js|ico|txt|swf|zip|rar|html|htm|pdf|flv|mov|mp3|m4a|woff|eoff)$

Kippo

I have been running Kippo on my server for a couple weeks now, and from it I have a lot of funny logs from people connecting to my server and thinking that they have logged in successfully as root over ssh.

Kippo is an SSH honeypot, according to their website:

Kippo is a medium interaction SSH honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and, most importantly, the entire shell interaction performed by the attacker.

– Kippo

Perhaps later I will post a tutorial on how to get kippo installed and secured on a server, but for now this tutorial will focus on how to install Ajaxterm to watch the logs that kippo captures.

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I think about how my macs battery can’t last a whole day at school… and all i really use it for is terminal for ssh, and full screen chrome.. i really wish i got a cr-48 netbook.. it would have fit my needs perfectly!

Check out this text document of sed one liners, i’m mirroring it on this website. (thanks for alex levinson for sitting on my couch… where all sed wizardry happens).

http://www.daveeddy.com/sed1line.txt

For an iPhone development class I took in the fall I began developing an iPhone Ampache Client. It was for my final project, so what you have here is the result of me learning objective-c and cocoa touch, and in 10 weeks coming up with this app from scratch.

You can check out a page with all of the details of this application and the source code at http://www.daveeddy.com/iphone. I have released this project under the BSD 3-Clause License in hopes that somebody might pick this project up, as I have ceased development on it after my class was over. If nobody decides to pick it up, I still hope that someone can at least benefit/learn from my code.

Check out this video from the band BEING! I just found them a couple days ago and they are creeping their way up to my top played on last.fm!

Check out my girlfriends new website! It uses a lot of Ajax/jQuery to attain a rich-user experience with minimal page refreshes!

http://splitprimary.com

LIRC and xpad with XBMC

When I first started using XBMC on Ubuntu, I read that it is impossible to use LIRC and xpad at the same time, and that in order for the IR receiver to work with LIRC you need to blacklist the xpad module. This is true from a stock install of Ubuntu, but upon examining the source of the modules, I found that they could be edited in such a way to allow both to be used at the same time without stepping on each other.

The problem lies in the way that the two modules look to see if something plugged in is an Xbox accessory. They both use the vendor ID’s, but they both have a default case of accepting the id 0xFFFF which is sometimes used by third-party chinese accessories. Because I knew what IR receiver I was going to be using, I could edit the LIRC module to ignore the vendor ID 0xFFFF, so it could be picked up by xpad. This would allow the LIRC module to only pick up the stock Xbox DVD dongle, and ignore any other Xbox accessory. Then xpad would be able to pick up any accessory that wasn’t matched by LIRC.

Editing lirc_atiusb.c

This is the source code of the kernel module used to scan USB devices to see if they are an IR receiver. I followed the (somewhat outdated) guide here on how to modify the source code, and replace the module with the new source https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LIRC.

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This is just a teaser for a new project I’m working on. The goal is to build a computer capable of full HDMI 1080p video into an Xbox case. Right now I have the components installed, the Xbox power button working, all four controller ports working, and I built in the Xbox IR receiver! More to come soon…