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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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