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Bluetooth Versions and PineTime

I’ve done some tests with the PineTime [1] on different Android phones. On a Huawei Mate 10 Pro (from 2017 with Bluetooth 4.2) it has very slow transfer speeds for updating the firmware (less than 1KB/s) and unreliable connection to the phone. On a Huawei Nova 7i (from 2020 with Bluetooth 4.2) it has slow […]

Matrix

Introduction

In 2020 I first setup a Matrix [1] server. Matrix is a full featured instant messaging protocol which requires a less stringent definition of “instant”, messages being delayed for minutes aren’t that uncommon in my experience. Matrix is a federated service where the servers all store copies of the room data, so when you […]

Xmpp Tools

For a while I’ve had my monitoring systems alert me via XMPP (Jabber). To do that I used the sendxmpp command-line program which worked well for it’s basic tasks. I recently noticed that my laptop and workstation which I had upgraded to Debian/Testing weren’t sending messages, I’m not sure when it started as my main […]

TSIG Error From SSSD

A common error when using the sssd daemon to authenticate via Active Directory on Linux seems to be:

sssd[$PID]: ; TSIG error with server: tsig verify failure

This is from sssd launching the command “nsupdate -g” to do dynamic DNS updates. It is possible to specify the DNS server in /etc/sssd/sssd.conf but that will only […]

AMT/MEBX on Debian

I’ve just been playing with Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) [1] which is also known as Management Engine Bios Extension (MEBX).

Firstly a disclaimer, using this sort of technology gives remote access to your system at a level that allows in some ways overriding the OS. If this gets broken then you have big problems. […]

Feedburner Seems to be Dying

Many years ago Feedburner was a useful service. It proxied the RSS feed of your blog and gave you analytics of what happened with it. Now feeds using Feedburner randomly give HTTP error 404s. The Feedburner Twitter account is inactive and recommends that people Tweet at Google instead. It seems that Google wants to get […]

Hangouts Replacement

Google is currently in the process of killing Hangouts. Last year Hangouts was quite a nice IM system with integrated video chat and voice calling. Now they have decided to kill it and replace it with “Google Chat” and “Google Meet” both of which are integrated with the Gmail app on Android. To start getting […]

Installing NextCloud

NextCloud and OwnCloud History

Some time ago I tried OwnCloud, it wasn’t a positive experience for me. Since that time I’ve got a server with a much faster CPU, a faster Internet connection, and the NextCloud code is newer and running on a newer version of PHP, I didn’t make good notes so I’m not […]

Netflix and IPv6

It seems that Netflix has an ongoing issue of not working well with IPv6, apparently they have some sort of region checking code that doesn’t correctly identify IPv6 prefixes. To fix this I wrote the following script to make a small zone file with only A records for Netflix and no AAAA records. The $OUT.header […]

Internode NBN with Arris CM8200 on Debian

I’ve recently signed up for Internode NBN while using the Arris CM8200 device supplied by Optus (previously used for a regular phone service). I took the configuration mostly from Dean’s great blog post on the topic [1]. One thing I changed was the /etc/networ/interfaces configuration, I used the following:

# VLAN ID 2 for Internode’s […]