Author Archives: john

Verifying a pkcs12 file with openssl

Posted on September 12, 2017 by john | 5 views

Intro The easy way How to examine a pkcs12 (pfx) file $ openssl pkcs12 ‐info ‐in file_name.pfx It will prompt you for the password a total of three times! The hard way I went through this whole exercise because I … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Security | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Your AWS Instance was scheduled for retirement? don’t panic

Posted on September 7, 2017 by john | 5 views

Intro After nearly four years of continuously running my AWS instance I got this scary email: What to do? The details Since I never dveloped much AWS expertise (never needed to since it just worked) I was afraid to do … Continue reading →

Posted in CentOS, Hosting Service | Tagged | Leave a comment

Getting your micro SD card ready to load Raspbian: easier than you thought

Posted on August 21, 2017 by john | 19 views

Intro Configuring your own micro SD card in order to install Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi is not so hard. Some of the instructions out there are a bit dated and make it out to be harder than it really … Continue reading →

Posted in Raspberry Pi | Tagged | 2 Comments

Compiling curl and openssl on Redhat Linux

Posted on August 17, 2017 by john | 69 views

Intro I have an ancient Redhat system which I’m not in a position to upgrade. I like to use curl to test web sites, but it’s getting to the point that my ancient version has no SSL versions in common … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, SLES, Web Site Technologies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Reverse upper and lower case letters

Posted on August 15, 2017 by john | 11 views

Intro I am a look-at-the-keyboard typist! I can’t count the number of times I’ve begun an email with CAPs lock on, and found a nice correspondence looking like this: hI aNDRES,   i RE-CREATED THE SCRIPT. … Tired of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, Linux | Tagged | Leave a comment

F5 BigIP irule: serving a dynamic proxy PAC file

Posted on August 2, 2017 by john | 19 views

Intro A large organization needed to have considerable flexibility in serving out its proxy PAC file to web browsers. The legacy approach – perl script on web servers – was replaced by a TCL script I developed which runs on … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Site Technologies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

curl showing its age with SSL error

Posted on May 26, 2017 by john | 173 views

Intro I’ve used curl as a debugging tool for a long time. But time moves on and my testing system didn’t. So now for the first time I saw an error that is produced by this situation, and I will … Continue reading →

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Adding a swap file in Amazon AWS for CentOS

Posted on May 1, 2017 by john | 61 views

Intro I was running a new daemon on my server, factomd, to experiment with digital currency. It’s an old m1.small instance with only 1.7 GB of memory. The first few times I ran it it would 70000 or so blocks, … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, CentOS, Digital Currency, Linux | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Automating guest wireless access for monitoring purposes with Raspberry Pi

Posted on April 26, 2017 by john | 45 views

Intro I decided to monitor guest wireless access to the Internet using a Raspberry Pi. By that I mean a basic, binary, is it working now or not response. The back end is a Cisco wireless LAN Controller (WLC). Like … Continue reading →

Posted in Apache, Raspberry Pi | Tagged , | Leave a comment

WAN load-balancing routers

Posted on April 23, 2017 by john | 76 views

Intro I got an offer for $20/month broadband access from Centurylink. It got me to thinking, could I somehow use that as a backup connection to my current cable ISP? How would that work? Could I use a Raspberry Pi … Continue reading →

Posted in Consumer Tech, Network Technologies, Raspberry Pi | Leave a comment