Status: ✅ My house is cold. I want to start playing with simple electronics before starting Operation Field, so have created Operation Cold House. This is just simply sticking a temperature sensor onto an Arduino, linking that up to my little home “server”, and uploading that to my website. I’ll display some nifty graphs, too, and link it to Pachube. Stay tuned. Update: Complete! The proof is in the pudding. I now have a personal website from home (sorry, not public) that displays the daily and weekly temperature at home. The process is basically like this: my little Arduino gathers the temperature, and is polled every minute with a python script via cron. This script then sticks the time and …

After restoring databases from one server to another I sometimes get this error on Ubuntu or Debian: error: 'Access denied for user 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' (using password: YES)' This makes a lot of sense, and the solution is pretty simple. If you look in: cat /etc/mysql/debian.cnf You’ll see the defaults for your system. Copy the password listed there, and open a connection to MySQL as root (or some other user). Next, enter this (lets say your password specified in debian.cnf was ‘abracadabra’:

I’ve been side-tracked on another little project, and keep coming back to NetFlow. For this project I’ll need to access NetFlow data with Django, but this is a bit tricky. First, I’m sort of lazy when it comes to my own project; maybe not lazy, I just like taking the most direct route. The most up-to-date NetFlow collector I noticed was flow-tools, and there is even a switch to export the information into MySQL. Sweet! However, I wanted to insert the flows into MySQL automatically, or at least on a regular basis. I first started writing a python script that would do the job, but after a few minutes noticed flow-capture had a rotate_program switch, and started investigating. Since I somehow …

I rank OSSEC as one of my favorite pieces of open source software, and finally decided to play around with it more in my own free time. (Yup, I do this sort of stuff for fun). My goal was quite simple: send syslog packets from my Cisco to my “proxy” server, running OSSEC. I found that, although OSSEC supports Cisco IOS logging, it didn’t really work. In fact, I couldn’t find any examples or articles of anybody actually getting it to work.

Historically I’ve used the ever-so-popular AutoMySQLBackup script. While it seems to work just fine, I’ve decided to give another solution a whirl. This solution, provided through Zmanda, seems to be less hackery and more enterprise. The instructions are very clear, and the backup test went as planned. Looks like this is another gem for the toolchest.

I’ve run into this error quite a few times, might as well toss blog entry about it: ERROR 1064 at line 17: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1’ at line 7 One likely reason this comes about is because the data being imported/exported is not compatible with the database version. For instance, at home you export the information from a mysql5 database. Then you try to import it on a mysql3.23 database somewhere else – and it fails on you. Bummer. The solution is quite simple: