I’m presently contemplating a project to build a small DC/storage outbuilding down the side of my garage, basically to relocate all the random servers and such which are currently located in my study to somewhere else, ideally with proper climate control. Now of course I don’t want the inconvenience of actually having to go out there to yutz with things when I need to so I went digging around on eBait for an IP KVM, turned up a “Prima IP-16 Uniclass” for $140, seemed like a reasonable price, unfortunately it’s one of the ones that uses an oddball cable that...

The final battle in my quest for properly integrated UPS Monitoring was to get my ESXi 4.1 box into the mix. Some rummaging around online turned up a NUT Client for ESXi 5 (french) which doesn’t work for ESXi 4, fortunately the same guy has also done a NUT Client for ESXi 4 (french) which will work, but takes some effort. The tricky part is that it seems that the only way to customise an ESXi 4 install is via oem.tgz, whereas in ESXi 5 we have the concept of “packages”, I broke my ESXi box several times...

Part 3 - The tools which Espressif hath provided So we’re still chasing power savings at this point, the next logical step is to reduce the TX power of the ESP8266 because we don’t need much range in this application, unfortunately NodeMCU does not expose the TXPower API… Looks like we need to write a patch against NodeMCU… Or not… Something of a diversion; Around about this time I decided I needed the rtc API for the software which necessitated a new build, off to the NodeMCU Build service we go; build a new image, flash to ESP8266,...

After I got NUT sorted out on my *nix fleet it was time to bring my Windows box into the mix, I frequently run VM Guests on my workstation for various different tasks, basically unless it’s something that’s going to be providing an active service for an extended period I run it up in VMWare Player, any “servers” go on the ESXi box. Because VMWare doesn’t gracefully shut down or suspend VM Guests when the host gets shut down there was the possibility of badness as a result of an abrupt windows shutdown in the event of a power failure,...

Always one for “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing”, I use a rather oldschool 2RU rackmount 3kVA Compaq UPS (R3000h, OEM badged PowerWare 5119) for my network core, NAS, ESXi and workstation. It was a cheap buy at ~$100 sans batteries, I just threw 4 7.2AH SLA batteries into it and called it good (I also have a much larger dual-conversion UPS, but it’s in need of a new battery pack, and being that it’s internal pack is 20 7.2AH SLAs, it’s rather $$$ to replace). For the first time in two and a half years since we bought...

Part 2 - In which ESP8266’s do HORRIBLE things to batteries So initially I went with the naive approach, I stuck a pair of CR2032’s in parallel and strapped them to the ESP8266, I was rather disappointed to discover that that only got me about 20 mins of life, repeated the test with a pair of AAA’s for interests sake, I think I got about an hour out of them, time to do some ACTUAL research… In doing some fishing around online I found some YouTube video around powering ESP8266’s from batteries or somesuch, which alerted me to the...

Part 1 - The Inspiration For Ruxcon 12 this year it was decided to expand the Black Bag competition into two phases, the first being on the Saturday which was the “standard” Black Bag fare, get into a hotel room, acquire intel, don’t set off alarms and such, Sunday however was a bit different. We decided to send the top three teams on something of a “scavenger hunt”, basically we’d send them to a few locations across the Melbourne CBD to find clues which would eventually lead them back to the conference venue where they would find...

Thanks to all who visited us at the Ruxcon 2016 HHV, hopefully you got some value out of my presentations and such (I’m sure you got value out of the other presenters at least). I’ve uploaded new Gerbers/Drill file for the SimpleSolder kit to my Ruxcon 2016 HHV page, these have the assorted cock ups from the original design corrected, just in case anybody wants to go make their own. I’ve also included a DigiKey basket link, though for one-off quantities you’re probably better off going elsewhere if you’re AU based. The RuxBadge build instructions, firmware and firmware source...