https://blog.aaronhastings.me/Recent content on Aaron HastingsHugoen-ieWed, 12 Aug 2015 12:00:09 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/installing-new-relic-servers-on-opensuse/Wed, 12 Aug 2015 12:00:09 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/installing-new-relic-servers-on-opensuse/New Relic Servers is an excellent cloud-based server monitoring platform. I maintain a set of servers, both physical and virtual, running a range of operating systems, namely: Debian 7/8, Ubuntu 14.04, CentOS 6/7 and openSUSE 13.2. I work with configuration management (particularly Salt), so maintaining multiple configurations is important in understanding complex environments. New Relic already provides packages for Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat, Joyent SmartOS and Windows. For some reason, openSUSE doesn’t get the royal treatment, but they do provide the requisite package files in a tar.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/scroll-wheel-functionality-in-gnu-screen/Thu, 16 Apr 2015 19:00:30 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/scroll-wheel-functionality-in-gnu-screen/GNU Screen is one of my biggest time savers in work. It allows me to handle multiple shell and SSH sessions in one virtual terminal, and ensures those sessions stay alive even when I lose network connection due to switching access points, plugging in to a wired network or just general network issues, uh-ohs and whoopsies. Screen works pretty well “out of the box”, as long as you learn a handful of essential commands/key bindings, like Ctrl+A+D (detach from session), screen -r session-name (re-attach to existing session) and Ctrl+A+numkey, where numkey represents a particular session.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/completely-recovering-from-a-bricked-buffalo-linkstation-ls200-series-nas-and-opening-the-firmware-too/Tue, 17 Mar 2015 17:03:43 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/completely-recovering-from-a-bricked-buffalo-linkstation-ls200-series-nas-and-opening-the-firmware-too/I recently bought a Buffalo LinkStation LS220 NAS (network-attached storage) device. The device itself is a good quality piece of hardware, but the software leaves a lot to be desired. I bought this NAS purely as a redundant (i.e. RAID1) backup solution and intended to use it as an SSH server for my rsync backup scripts. Much to my disappointment, however, the firmware came far more locked-down than I had hoped, and provided no means to (easily) enable SSH.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/updating-to-android-5-1-0-on-rooted-nexus-5/Wed, 11 Mar 2015 17:45:21 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/updating-to-android-5-1-0-on-rooted-nexus-5/Updated (2015-05-29) - I have tested this method successfully with Android 5.1.1 and have updated the post title/content to reflect this. Does this post look familiar? I wrote a post back in December 2014 solving this same problem for Android 5.0.1, whereby a rooted Nexus device will not update via over-the-air (OTA). Rather than go over everything again, I’ll cut straight to the chase of how to update your rooted Nexus 5 to Android 5.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/updating-to-android-5-0-1-on-rooted-nexus-5/Fri, 19 Dec 2014 17:53:45 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/updating-to-android-5-0-1-on-rooted-nexus-5/OTA (over-the-air) updating in rooted Nexus land has never been the most elegant process. But, prior to Android 5.0 Lollipop, at least it worked as expected, with the main irk being that you’d need to re-root your device afterwards. While trying to update to Android 5.0.1 on my rooted Nexus 5 via OTA today, I discovered that things are now even less clear-cut and that the update itself will now fail during the recovery phase.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/whos-trying-to-break-in-to-your-linux-box/Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:08:10 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/whos-trying-to-break-in-to-your-linux-box/Fun with pipes! Just a quick Bash snippet for getting a good look at who’s attempting to log in to your Linux or other standard GNU system: #shell> lastb -w | sort | awk '{print $1, "\t", $3}' | uniq | less Here’s a quick summary of what’s going on here: lastb reads and echoes the contents of the failed login database, generally located at /var/log/btmp. The -w flag just ensures it doesn’t ellipse or otherwise cut-off the username field.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/uluas-developing-a-real-time-luas-app-for-ubuntu/Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:32:11 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/uluas-developing-a-real-time-luas-app-for-ubuntu/Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a project called uLuas. uLuas is an open source smartphone app developed using the Ubuntu SDK. It provides real-time tram stop information for Dublin’s Luas light rail service. In this post I’d like to talk about my reasons for developing this application and why I chose the Ubuntu platform. First - and most importantly - I live and work in Dublin and commute daily using Luas.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/getting-ubuntus-notifications-to-appear-on-the-correct-monitor/Thu, 25 Jul 2013 18:23:50 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/getting-ubuntus-notifications-to-appear-on-the-correct-monitor/Like many of you, I use Ubuntu at work with a dual-monitor setup. One of the most frustrating things I’ve always found is its behavior regarding pop-up notifications. I regularly miss new emails or chat messages due to the notification popping up on my secondary monitor, right on my eye’s blind spot. I’ve been putting up with this up until now, deeming it to be a bug in either Unity or notify-osd itself.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/django-not-the-movie-part-1/Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:23:48 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/django-not-the-movie-part-1/For added ambience, listen to this song while reading. Django is a web framework. I only vaguely knew what that meant when I declared I was using it for my project. In a nutshell, it’s a way of plugging everything about a web application together in a coherent, structured way. That includes HTML, CSS, images, data stores and middleware. Anyone can write a CGI script in their favorite language that does nothing but spit out HTML to a browser, but that’s unnecessary with Django.https://blog.aaronhastings.me/final-year-project-introduction/Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:33:12 +0000https://blog.aaronhastings.me/final-year-project-introduction/I have to admit that I wrote the Raspberry Pi off at first. I mean, my initial description of it as a “slow Linux computer” are technically correct, but I never really thought of looking at it for what it really is - a cheap, small and, least importantly, slow Linux computer. Top-down view of Raspberry Pi I’ve been actively using Linux since 2009, with Ubuntu eventually becoming my primary OS in early 2010.