Ramblings
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Breaking my energy monitoring setup
The ESP8266 module for the emonTx runs what I’d describe as a pretty basic sketch. It’s functional, but it’s not very good at telling me what’s gone wrong. On Monday, I re-imaged the router to upgrade it. A side effect was a setting I’d changed for the DHCP options (what the local DNS is) wasn’t…
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Running emoncms in a Linux container
When I was renovating the house I currently live in, I picked up an EmonTx v3 and some clip-on current sensors from OpenEnergyMonitor.org so that I could monitor the house power consumption more accurately than just getting a bill every 2 months from my energy supplier (even with a smart meter installed, they only provide…
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Rebuilding Cricalix.Net – Part 4
While on holiday, I read a forum post that mentioned a “new” web server called Caddy. I took a look at it, and was intrigued by the integrated TLS certificate renewal using Let’s Encrypt. With NGINX or Apache, I have to run Certbot or similar to maintain the certificates, and I have to deal with…
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A summer of tomatoes
This year I decided against growing potatoes, given the blight and other issues I had last year. Instead, I opted for tomatoes (a staple that I grow anyway), runner beans, peppers, courgettes, and butternut squash. The tomatoes grew beyond my expectations, and I even gained a few random plants in the bigger VegTrug that grew…
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Rebuilding Cricalix.Net – Part 3
Stumbling blocks and annoyances NGINX and certbot’s default permissions EFF’s certbot writes certificates to /etc/letsencrypt/live/<certificate hostname>/<files>.pem, and sets the permissions to only allow root to read the files. This makes sense from the perspective of a system where processes that need certificates will probably spawn as root, read the certificates to memory, and then spawn…
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Rebuilding Cricalix.Net – Part 2
LXD’s Documentation It’s mostly decent. It’s got a lot of detail on what all of the configuration sections are and generally provides examples. What I find missing is a set of practical documentation that guides someone through getting started with LXD – weaving together all of the configuration for devices, proxies, storage volumes, profiles and…