services – Page 2 – Systems Lab

February 18, 2018August 20, 2020

DNS Structure

The goal of the DNS structure of my lab was primarily to create a very stable foundation. Second to that, was the addition of two services, the first a local DNS server to avoid loopback issues with my ISP, and the second was pihole ad blocking.

To set this up, UCS was chosen as a domain controller/DNS server over FreeIPA. Linux was chosen as the platform of choice as that is what a majority of my systems are, and I don’t have any windows server licenses. UCS was installed to a VM, and a second ubuntu VM was configured with PiHole. These were configured to handle local queries first, then everything else. If one of my local DNS servers is down, the clients won’t notice a change as everything uses Google DNS as backup.

February 18, 2018August 23, 2020

Installing OctoPi on an RPi

3D printers have come a long ways in the past few years. The prices have plummeted for basic units, allowing anyone to buy them. The raspberry pi can be setup alongside a basic 3D printer to enable some amazing functionality. They can allow remote control, management, and monitoring of the printers. When combined with a pi cam, you can even create time lapses of the prints. To do this, we will be running OctoPi on the raspberry pi.

OctoPi is a Raspberry Pi distribution for 3d printers. Out of the box it includes:

theOctoPrint host software including all its dependencies and preconfigured with webcam and slicing support,
mjpg-streamer for live viewing of prints and timelapse video creation with support for USB webcams and the Raspberry Pi camera,
CuraEngine 15.04 for direct slicing on your Raspberry Pi and
the LCD app OctoPiPanel plus various scripts to configure supported displays

Continue reading “Installing OctoPi on an RPi”

February 18, 2018August 23, 2020

Installing MotionEyeOS on an RPi

Raspberry Pis are neat little computers that can be placed just about anywhere assuming there is power and network connectivity nearby. These were made even more convenient with the addition of built in Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi 3. One application of these small devices is for home security, as a small motion sensing webcam that can record 24/7, or only when there is motion detected.

There are ways to build up your own system using the basic raspbian distribution and various software packages, or you can use a custom built operating system for this purpose, MotionEyeOS.

MotionEyeOS has everything needed to run a security camera system, or simply a remote webcam monitoring system. This will cover setting up a camera in this tutorial for basic recording and monitoring. This will let us spy on our dog while away at work. Continue reading “Installing MotionEyeOS on an RPi”

June 10, 2017August 23, 2020

Ansible Setup

Having been running short on time to maintain my servers, I decided to look into some automation on that front. I came across Ansible, which allows management of multiple servers configuration and installation using some of the basic software that’s pre-installed: python and SSH.

Setting up ansible is the easy part. This can be done by simply setting up the Ansible host with SSH key based access to all machines that it will be managing. I set it up with root access to those machines so that it could do mass updates without problem or requesting dozens of passwords and because I don’t have Kerberos or a domain based login system. Continue reading “Ansible Setup”