unixdude.net

PSR-100 satellite rotor

Daniel — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I have long been fascinated by ham radio satelites, but once you get past the most basic setup of an Arrow II or Elk antenna and an HT, the required equipment can become prohibitive in both size and expense.

Enter the PSR-100, a small rotor kit that is designed to …Continue reading

Comics

Daniel — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

For 15-20 years, I have run a script that gathers daily images for several comic strips. Recently, this script stopped working, and rather than fix it (it is Perl code that at this point has become unmaintainable) I decided to look for an OSS solution.

Web searches quickly led me …Continue reading

New NAS

Daniel — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I recently discovered that my offsite backup NAS, a Synology DS118 with a 12TB drive in it, had filled up. I considered several solutions to this problem, eventually deciding to replace the DS118 with a DS225+. Since Synology now requires Synology-branded drives, I had to either buy two new drives …Continue reading

Ultimate Hacking Keyboard

Daniel — Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I recently received some advice that I should set up a more ergonomic workstation at home: a split keyboard, an ergonomic mouse, and an adjustable sitting/standing desk.

I did a lot of research about keyboards and decided that an ortholinear or column staggered unit was not for me. I …Continue reading

Bye bye Time Machine

Daniel — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

In my family, we have a half-dozen Mac laptops -- one for each of us, and one provided by my employer. For the personal laptops, I have been using Time Machine, backing up to my primary Synology unit. Unfortunately, Time Machine has proven unreliable, requiring frequent resets of the backup. For …Continue reading

F150 radio install update

Daniel — Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

A while back, I moved my FT-7800R to my hamshack, and bought an FTM-400XDM to replace it in the truck, so I thought an update was in order. I never fully mounted the FT-7800R control head, but after switching to the FTM-400, I finished the permanent install by mounting the …Continue reading

Home lab

Daniel — Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

I was recently asked about how to get started with a home lab. As with most things, the answer depends on what you want to do with it. But, the core components are probably pretty similar.

Every home lab is going to require some sort of storage system. For mine …Continue reading

Home network upgrade

Daniel — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Over the weekend, I upgraded my network: I replaced my Ubiquiti USG with a UDM-SE. I debated between the UDMP and UDM-SE, and decided on the UDM-SE because of its added features. As part of this upgrade, I retired my self-hosted UniFi Controller in favor of the one on the …Continue reading

Solenoid installs

Daniel — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500

A few weeks ago, I installed a solenoid in my truck, to control my ham radio's power based on the ignition key position: I want the radio to power on and off with the engine.

As with most mobile ham radios, my radio has an auto-power-down function, but I want …Continue reading

ESPHome home control

Daniel — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500

I have continued playing with my M5stack. I now have it programmed to show 3 types of data:

The local weather forecast for the next several days; either the 5-day forecast, or a single day at a time.
The temperature and humidity readings in my home office and garage, or …

ESPHome weather display on an m5stack

Daniel — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0500

After using a couple of ESP32s and doing some things with them, I decided I wanted to get an M5stack. I bought a first generation core, and am working to use that as a display for various things around the house.

As I started using the m5stack and trying to …Continue reading

Home Automation using Home Assistant

Daniel — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0500

A few weeks back I mentioned Home Assistant. After I set that up, I bought some Kasa smart outlets. Two have replaced timers, so I no longer have to change the start times as the time of sunset changes throughout the year. A third is set up in my home …Continue reading

Home Assistant; Ham radio digital voice

Daniel — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0400

A while ago, I bought a Freenove starter kit. I never did much with it until recently, when a friend gave me an ESP32 and pointed me to Home Assistant.

The Freenove kit included a DHT11 temperature/humidity module, so my first Home Assistant project was to set up a …Continue reading

IC-7300 external keypad

Daniel — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400

I recently purchased an Icom IC-7300 ham radio for use at home, and when researching the radio around the time of purchase, I discovered this excellent YouTube video playlist, covering many aspects of the radio.

When I got to video 46, I discovered that the IC-7300 supports an external keypad …Continue reading

Mobile Wireguard clients

Daniel — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

I have been using Wireguard for about a year & a half, when I switched from ZeroTier to Wireguard for most of my needs. Unfortunately, since the start, my Wireguard configuration has been completely manual, and very annoying since I had to create a new interface for every client.

No more …Continue reading

POTA kit

Daniel — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Parks On The Air, or POTA, is one of the aspects of amateur radio that I have been enjoying -- both hunting and activating. Ever since I starting doing POTA activations, I have been carrying my equipment in a Rubbermaid container, which is bulky and heavy. The only thing it has …Continue reading

DKIM, Postfix, and FreeBSD

Daniel — Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Recently, I discovered that I was not able to email my wife's mac.com address from my mail server here. Apple's support document indicates that they require DKIM and SPF, and that they support DMARC. I have long had SPF configured, but I had not configured DKIM or DMARC.

Over …Continue reading

FT-7800R install, continued

Daniel — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Continuing my earlier post about my Yaesu FT-7800R install, I completed the radio portion this weekend, so now I can get on the air.

I had a Diamond NR770HNMO antenna, and bought a fender bracket mount for my F150. All I needed was an NMO mount and to fish the …Continue reading

FT-7800R install

Daniel — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0400

This is not my typical type of post, but as I have said, communications and networking are things that excite me greatly. It's why I collect antique telephones, why I enjoy scanner and shortwave listening, why I learned the OSI model and have spent much of my career in and …Continue reading

Using the program map type in autofs

Daniel — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 09:50:00 -0400

I recently learned about the program map type in the Linux automounter.

You can read about it here, but there is little information about it, and I was unable to find any web pages about it, so I am writing this post since it might help others.

The NFS automounter …Continue reading

Better spam blocking

Daniel — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 09:30:00 -0400

As mentioned previously, I continue to be inundated with spam email. Fortunately, every spam has an observable email format: the email comes in the form of user@word1.word2.TLD.

This allows me to update my blocked_senders file to defer every email in that format with a 450, using this …Continue reading

Update

Daniel — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I've been busy at home, but not working in my home lab. Lately I have been preoccupied by a few things.

First, I have been busy with prepping -- I can see how things are going, and I predict we will need stores of supplies, so I have been busy building …Continue reading

Dealing with spam

Daniel — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Somehow I have been added to several mailing lists, all run by the same organization. The emails look legit, and are ones that I might have subscribed to, but I cannot get off of them no matter what I do -- it seems that they ignore all requests to be removed …Continue reading

Learning Python

Daniel — Fri, 20 May 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I have been programming in Perl since the early 1990s. My early scripts were what you would expect them to be, but my skill of course increased over time. I have never found a thing I wanted to do that I could not do in Perl and/or shell scripting …Continue reading

NAS shakeup

Daniel — Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 -0400

For my storage needs, my first NAS was a Synology DS415+. This was my primary NAS until I purchased a DS1618+, at which time it became my backup unit. When I filled up the DS1618+, I had a few options: buy a small NAS and use some 4TB disks I …Continue reading

ECMP in OSPF

Daniel — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0500

I have recently switched most of my offsite network connections to WireGuard, away from ZeroTier. This is great for all of my systems except for one: the NAS (a Synology DS118) I have at a friend's house for offsite backup. That NAS can run ZeroTier and WireGuard, but I don't …Continue reading

OSPF update, Cable cleanup, and finished rack

Daniel — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0500

A quick update on my OSPF cutover. With one exception, everything has worked great. The one exception is that OSPF would not work over the WireGuard link between my USG and my primary DigitalOcean VM that runs FreeBSD 12 and FRR7. I thought that was odd, since OSPF worked fine …Continue reading

Lab update

Daniel — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0500

I have been hard at work these last few weeks in my home lab, and have done quite a bit. Here are a few of the things I have done:

Installed sshwifty, a really cool, useful package that a friend pointed me to.
Built a T1 crossover cable to connect …

Goodbye BGP, hello OSPF

Daniel — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0500

Soon after I learned about Anycast, I employed it on my home network, so that I can have multiple instances of Pi-Hole, mostly so that I can take down my Raspberry Pi without hearing from the family about how the Internet is down.

Until last night, I was using BGP …Continue reading

MacBook Pro recovery

Daniel — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0500

My work laptop, a 2018 MacBook Pro, needs a new battery and so I will be shipping it off to have that serviced. Prior to getting that serviced, I need a temporary system, so I went to the office to grab one of the spares we have, another 2018 MBP …Continue reading

Upgrading to DSM7

Daniel — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0500

I've been meaning to upgrade my Synology NASes to DSM7. I upgraded my DS415+ last week, and it went smoothly, so today I researched all the packages I have installed on my primary unit, a DS1618+. I found that all but two would upgrade seamlessly; the two trouble packages were …Continue reading

Retiring my Dell R610

Daniel — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Ever since a friend gave me a Dell R610, I have used that as my primary home lab server. Due to its age, I find that I am unable to run the most recent versions of some software packages, including the latest iterations of VMware ESXi and vCenter. Also, my …Continue reading

Wall-mount rack

Daniel — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Since I bought my Cisco equipment, I have had it racked in the cheap, two-post desktop rack that came with the equipment when I bought it. It was pretty bad, but it worked:

I really wanted something better than this, so I started doing some web searches to get ideas …Continue reading

healthchecks.io

Daniel — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Recently, a friend introduced me to healthchecks.io, a service for monitoring cron jobs.
A week or so ago, I configured several of my cron jobs to be monitored through this system, and it has already helped me: yesterday I received a notification that an rsync job did not run …Continue reading

Printer update

Daniel — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Here's a months-overdue update on that HP Envy printer: I wasn't able to return the printer, and I still wanted a better scanner app than the HP's built-in one, so I decided to take the Raspberry Pi 4 that I mentioned in an earlier post and attach the printer directly …Continue reading

Update on migration to Docker/Traefik

Daniel — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I have been working hard these last many weeks in order to move all services off of my main DigitalOcean Droplet/VM. In the process, I have been moving everything to Docker, with full automation via Ansible. I have finally achieved this goal, for the web services anyway, and now …Continue reading

MinFS

Daniel — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Over the last month, I have been continuing my work at automating my systems and have made a lot of progress in that effort.

Part of that will be relocating some files that I still want web-accessible, but not on this website. Enter DigitalOcean Spaces, and MinFS to access it …Continue reading

acme.sh and Let's Encrypt certificates

Daniel — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I have been needing to cut over to acme v2 for a long time, and I didn't bother doing it until way too late -- this weekend. As a result of my tardiness, my iPhone has not been able to receive email from my mail server for more than a month …Continue reading

Blog automation

Daniel — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0400

This is a short post after a lot of work.

I have been busy these last few weeks automating the installation of Docker, Traefik, and my Atari blog with Ansible. I have reached the point that I can take a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and end up …Continue reading

Docker build

Daniel — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I have been having a rough couple months with printers: My Samsung C410w is getting old, so I wanted to replace it. My wife recently heard about HP Instant Ink, so she wanted to try that service, but I decided to buy a monochrome Brother printer -- which was great except …Continue reading

Traefik

Daniel — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Lately I have been learning about Docker, and I want to convert my current setup to Docker, where it makes sense to do that. I currently run about 20 vhosts on this Digital Ocean droplet, and at least one of those has a MySQL back end. I also run Postfix …Continue reading

June 2021 update

Daniel — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I've been busy over the last few weeks, so there will be several updates in here.

Over the weekend I updated my Ubiquiti switches, which required that I shut down my ESXi servers. The R610 came back just fine, but the raspi4 ARM one did not. The problem on the …Continue reading

ZeroTier Is Fun

Daniel — Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I recently installed a Synology DS118 at a friend's house for remote backup using Synology's Hyper Backup solution. The DS118 is on my ZeroTier "storage" network, a network shared by the main Synology at my house -- that way, my main NAS backs up to a local system (that is, something …Continue reading

PXE booting on ARM64

Daniel — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

As previously mentioned, my next goal was going to be PXE booting VMs running on the ESXi ARM Fling. Using this page as a guide, I now have this working.

That guide is pretty good, but I had to do adapt it to my setup.

As instructed, I started by …Continue reading

ESXi on ARM Fling - Update

Daniel — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Not long after my last post, the PoE HAT for my Raspberry Pi died -- to be more accurate, one of the components on the board disintegrated. I don't know if this was a manufacturing defect or the result of a bad solder job related to the fan, or something else …Continue reading

ESXi on ARM Fling

Daniel — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I recently decided that I wanted to play with the ESXi-on-ARM Fling, so I purchased a Raspberry Pi 4B (8GB). I received my unit so I set about installing ESXi.

I followed VMware's instructions in their "Fling-on-Raspberry-Pi" document. It's not a difficult process, but there are a few things to …Continue reading

M1 MacBook Air

Daniel — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I recently decided to upgrade my personal laptop. Until recently, I was using a 2015 MacBook Pro that I bought in 2016 after Apple announced they were bringing the butterfly keyboard to the MBP. My goal for that purchase was for it to last until Apple released a better keyboard …Continue reading

Lab, and network upgrade

Daniel — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500

I like networking -- always have. However, today, my networking knowledge is only okay -- but I want it to be great! My goal is to achieve CCNP certification in 6 months. To help with this effort, I have added a Cisco lab to my home network. It is old equipment (2x …Continue reading

FRR and Anycast

Daniel — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500

FRR is one of the things I have wanted to configure on my Raspberry Pi, specifically to enable anycast for Pi-Hole. The reason to do this is that I do not want my Raspberry Pi to be a single point of failure on the network, especially since it has been …Continue reading

General update

Daniel — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500

It has been a while since I did much of interest in the home lab, but that is changing this week.

I am starting to rework lots of things:

This blog content is now tracked in a bitbucket repo
I am upgrading my home network to UniFi hardware
I am …

NFS automounter

Daniel — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

In an earlier post, I mentioned the NFS automounter. I make use of the NFS automounter everywhere. And by "everywhere," I mean "nearly every Unix system I install." FreeBSD, NeXT systems, Mac OS X, Linux -- they all get the configuration.

The NFS automounter is useful because of the ease of …Continue reading

Home Network update 2019-09

Daniel — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

My home network has changed significantly in recent months.

First, I purchased three MikroTik devices, an RB260GS for my office and two hAP AC, one for my office and one for my garage. This allowed me to simplify my network and it provides for several changes. My network now looks …Continue reading

SSH, screen, and tunnels - oh my

Daniel — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0400

I was recently asked about SSH, tunnels, and reconnecting disconnected sessions. Some people use mosh, but I take a different approach, one that does not require any special server software on the target server.

As with mosh, I recognize that sessions will become disconnected. As such, I run a screen …Continue reading

macOS Mail issue with postfix

Daniel — Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

I recently got a new MacBook Pro, and as I was setting up the mail configuration on that laptop, I found that I was unable to send mail through my mail server. I use Apple Mail, and usually it works great for me, but in this case it was not …Continue reading

Scanner

Daniel — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500

I own a CanoScan LiDE 30. This scanner is about 15 years old, and back when I got it new, it was supported on Mac OS X. Canon stopped updating the drivers a couple years later, so I switched to TWAIN-SANE.

When I did that, I wrote a "scan" shell …Continue reading

Postfix relay configuration

Daniel — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Like most people in my industry, I use multiple email addresses at multiple providers. Used to be, I could configure all of my email addresses in my mail client and just send through my mail server and -- voila -- my email would go out as whatever address I wanted to use …Continue reading

Network upgrade

Daniel — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0500

I have a 3-story house, and my office is on the third floor. Wifi connectivity in the bonus room over the garage was terrible, so I brainstormed ideas with coworkers and friends about how to fix this. As a temporary measure I ran a long ethernet cable from the office …Continue reading

testssl.sh

Daniel — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Last week, I needed to make some changes to my employer's production website, but before I made those changes in production, I wanted to test them. Unfortunately for me, our dev server is unreachable by Qualys, so I had to come up with another way to test those changes.

Enter …Continue reading

Lab update

Daniel — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

As mentioned in an earlier post, my ESXi server has been running in a VMware Fusion VM on my iMac. My iMac has 24 GB RAM and 4 logical CPUs; I dediated 10 GB RAM and 2 vCPUs to the ESXi VM.

Last week, I upgraded to a Dell R610 …Continue reading

I love SSH tunnels

Daniel — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Everyone who knows me well knows that tunnels in SSH represent one of my all-time-favorite features, ever. Why? Simple: They are so immensely useful.

Say you are debugging an issue on server, as I am today, and you need a mail server running on that server. But, that server is …Continue reading

Home network/home lab

Daniel — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

I am frequently asked about my home network/home lab setup. The summary is that I currently use a Synology RT1900ac router, and two Synology NAS devices: a DS415+ as primary storage, and a DS214se as backup.

For a number of years, I had a first-generation Drobo; later I added …Continue reading

How to build a Pelican contact form

Daniel — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0500

One of the first things I wanted to configure on this site was a contact form. I searched and found that Iain Houston documented how he configured one. I took his ideas and implemented my own slightly different version.

Where he used a separate template, I chose to use the …Continue reading

Sharing Unix shell config between systems

Daniel — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Like most people who work on Unix, I have shell accounts on hundreds of systems. Very few of these systems share a home directory (e.g., via NFS), so I need another way to maintain a common shell configuration between systems.

Based on the design of a former coworker, I …Continue reading

Welcome

Daniel — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 10:21:00 -0400

A while ago, a friend suggested that I should start a blog. Around that same time, a coworker introduced me to DigitalOcean. I quickly set up a VM at DigitalOcean (that VM is serving this web page), and installed FreeBSD 11.

I looked at WordPress and other popular blogging tools …Continue reading