I hope this saves someone the half a day I just wasted.
I was trying to set up dynamic dns for a client. I found a number of helpful links.
A useful script that allows you to do dynamic dns from a DD-WRT box.
http://sami.rox.fi/linux/dyndns-hack.html
A step by step howto for nsupdate.
http://www.ops.ietf.org/dns/dynupd/secure-ddns-howto.html
The problem was that I was getting an NOTAUTH error every time that I tried it from the name server itself. After regenerating keys, trying every possible variation of configs I finally decided to try it from another server, and it worked!
The problem – I had configured different views in my named.conf and I had a localhost view.
Paddling Memory Lane – Trembleur Lake
PADDLING MEMORY LANE – by Tom Madill
My first trip into Trembleur Lake was in the fall of 1985. Along with my brother Alan and a friend we took two, small, outboard powered boats up the Tachie River, the waterway connecting Trembleur and Stuart Lake. It took most of a day to travel the 19 miles of river as we cautiously threaded through the rock gardens and labored up the rapids. Over the years we re-visited Trembleur many times. With each passing year the boats got bigger and faster, more comfortable too. From 14ft, aluminum car-toppers to 22ft riverboats with inboard V8 engines, jet drives, radio telephones and back-up motors for emergencies. In 1996 I got interested in kayaking and then addicted my brother to it. I built a kayak from fiberglass and plywood and he bought a plastic boat fondly dubbed “Tupperware.” Separately and together over the next few years we did a fair bit of paddling and short kayak camping trips.
Continue reading “Paddling Memory Lane – Trembleur Lake”Hale-Bopp
In 1996 – 1997 Hale-Bopp put on a spectacular show.
The night of March 23, 1997 there was a near total eclipse of the moon. The day started off cloudy but a cold front went through in the afternoon and the skies cleared off by dusk. My son and I drove north of town and set up my newly built barndoor camera mount on a sideroad. The night turned out to be one of those special ones with rock steady pinpoints for stars. To the north there was Hale-Bopp and to the south there was a lunar eclipse. I took a number of photos of the comet. When I picked up my pictures from the local lab I showed them to Kevin, the owner and a professional photographer. He in turn showed me the pictures he had taken of the eclipse. He got the idea that he could composite the two images into a single photo. This is one of the early attempts made by just overlaying the two negatives. He later did a composite in PhotoShop that he sold a number of copies of.
Continue reading “Hale-Bopp”Astronomy and Astrophysics
I enjoy the night sky and I’m lucky enough to live in an area (54N 124W) where I can see it. I bought a Coulter 8″ Dobsonian telescope 20 years ago. I still pull it out on occasion but I prefer the naked eye or a pair of binoculars. The best observing platform has to be my computer though. With it I can look at the latest images from the Hubble or check out today’s snapshots taken by the Martian rovers.
Ubiquity PicoStation2 AirOS with CoovaChilli, Wifidog, busybox with awk
First attempt at building AirOS firmware with CoovaChilli, Wifidog, and busybox with awk enabled. It didn’t brick my unit and it seems to all work. Use at your own risk.
XS2 8 meg for PicoStation XS2.ar2316.v3.5.SDK.100616.1213-8M.bin
XS2 for models ??? XS2.ar2316.v3.5.SDK.100616.1213.bin
I found through trial and error that the proper file to edit was /usr/src/airos/SDK.UBNT.v3.5.4499/conf/xs2/busybox.config, not the one in apps/gpl/busybox.
These were the issues and problems I had while building it. ( Copied from my posts at http://coova.org/node/4236 )
Continue reading “Ubiquity PicoStation2 AirOS with CoovaChilli, Wifidog, busybox with awk”NANO – Nechako Access Network Organization
A bit of background on Hwy16 Internet and it’s origins. My first experience with the Internet was volunteering to help with the Nechako Access Network Organization (NANO) Internet society. (see below) Along with John Rowlandson credit should go to the technical team of Dave Irwin, Kevin Scott, and myself who managed to compile this new flangled Linux thing (Slackware 2.2, followed by Redhat 4.1) and make it all work. Every time you changed a driver you had to recompile the entire kernel. (If anyone is up to a challenge, here is a link to Slackware 2.2 http://www.it.freebsd.org/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/slackware-2.2.0/ – have fun)
Continue reading “NANO – Nechako Access Network Organization”Happy 65th Birthday Tom
act your age dude!
RMS Door Contact Alarm Monitor
The Remote Monitoring System V1 is a remote data acquisition and control device designed for use with Battery powered Wireless Internet repeater sites. We recently aquired one of these and plan on using it for a solar powered site in a remote location. More information about the board can be found at http://www.remotemonitoringsystems.ca/rms/rms.php .
We have used internet cameras such as the Dlink DCS-3220 at other sites for security purposes but they draw more power than we will have available. We decided to put a simple set of magnetic door contact switches on one of the IO ports on the RMS board and monitor it via SNMP from our web server and Cacti system.
The Technical Corner
I had contact with my first computer in the the early 80’s at the local Radio Shack. The first computer I owned was a Timex Sinclair ZX81 built from a kit. With 8k of ROM, 1k of RAM and a 2MHz processor it was the first and last computer I’ve really understood. (By that I mean reading and mostly understanding the assembly code for the ROM.) Computers have gotten much more complex since then but my fascination with them remains.
Aspen House Systems started as a venture writing communications software between surveyors handheld data collectors and Wang and HP mini-computers. It had a retail presence for a few years, and now provides MIS services for small and medium sized business networks.
Sendmail queue cleanup
When a subscribers mail box fills up or they exceed their quota the mail starts to pile up in the /var/spool/mqueue directory. A search of the Internet found several scripts that will clean it up but most use qtool.pl which I haven’t been able to find. Typical is http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/deleting_mail_queue.html . I did find a ksh script SQG – Sendmail Queue Groomer at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/scripts/submittedScripts/queue_groomer.ksh.txt that was a starting point for the following.
Note: Jan, 2010 – make sure that the /var/spool/morgue-queue directory exists before running the script or the files will get moved to a file of that name instead of being moved into that directory.