Hello and welcome to #root.bg!

Here you can find tutorials about linux, networks and their firewall, games and fun, as well as hobbies – rollers, drones and many more.

If you want to help the development of root.bg, please click here!

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Smart Home mission

Hi,

Before one year, my colleague inspired me to make my home smart (thank you Lyubak! 🙂 ). So I’ve started to experiment and today I can share, that my Smart Home mission is completed.

I want to tell that I did everything myself, and I did not give money to companies that do this service. That’s why I think that anyone with desire and a little experience in Linux can do the same.

I’m using mostly Apple products, but I guess most of this can be done with Android too.

Here are some of the things I can control from my smartphone at home:

  • I can turn on and turn off the heaters from my smartphone (just a normal airelec heaters)
  • I can turn on and turn off the lights (also normal led lights) from my smartphone
  • I can turn on and turn off all TVs (no matter are they smart or not) from my smartphone
  • I can turn on and turn off the internet access to some devices from my smartphone
  • I can allow and deny access to some websites – tiktok, youtube, facebook from my smartphone 😉
  • I can switch from my primary to my backup ISP from my smartphone
  • I can control the air conditioners from my smartphone

мисия "Смарт къща"

All of this can be automated – like every night at X pm all heaters will turn on and on Y pm all lights and TVs will turn off, etc.

 

Of course, these things do not cost thousands of levs, and are made with the help of several devices:

  1. Raspberry Pi
  2. Sonoff
  3. Apple tv/HomePod

Raspberry Pi is used as server with HomeBridge installed. HomeBridge is used to add not apple certified devices to HomeKit and we can control them from smartphone or Siri.

I use Sonoff plugs and switches (pow r2) for my electric devices (TVs, heaters, etc). Sonoff gives me opportunity to switch divices on/off and look at real time what is the power consumption, and with another plugin for HomeBridge I can see graphics of this consumption – it is very cool!

 

Why I need apple tv or HomePod?

Apple TV or HomePod are needed, because they expose our smart home to internet. Without them we cannot access our smart home if we are not at home. In my case I have Apple TV and two HomePods all of them are used for hub to the internet.

In my next posts I will share in details how and what is needed for configuration on our Smart Home mission 🙂

That’s it!

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Timelapse video

Hello,

Last month with my colleague Andrey start Meteo station for Dobrich town (I will wrote about this next time) – and after this project, we decide to put cameras for timelapse video.

Everything needed for timelapse video which I use is :

  1. Cron which downloads snapshots from the camera every 1 minute and saves it with uniq name (date-hour-minute)
  2. Script which merge every picture snapshots in one timelapse video
  3. Script which makes this video faster so we can get 1 minute video for the laste 24 hours

Here’s how things look like:

 

Cron:

*/1 * * * * root curl -s "http://111.112.111.33:8889/webcapture.jpg?command=snap&channel=1" > "/var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M\%S).jpg"
30 5 * * * root /root/scripts/timelapse.sh &> /dev/null

it’s important to mention that the script that makes the video is starting every morning at 5:30 to catch the sunrise!

Timelapse script:

#!/bin/bash
rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/timelapse.mp4
rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/out.mp4
cd /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/ ; cat *.jpg | ffmpeg -f image2pipe -r 1 -vcodec mjpeg -i - -vcodec libx264 out.mp4 ; ffmpeg -i out.mp4 -vf "setpts=(PTS-STARTPTS)/10" -r 10 ../timelapse.mp4
rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/*.jpg ; rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/*.jpg.webp

To have no cache from the nginx web server, I’ve added a special rule to serve each time to a new one from the cdn timelapse.mp4

location = /timelapse.mp4 {
        # kill cache
        add_header Last-Modified $date_gmt;
        add_header Cache-Control 'no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=0';
        if_modified_since off;
        expires off;
        etag off;
        add_header "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" "*";
        add_header P3P "Can I help you? Contact me via https://root.bg/contacts/, CP=CAO ADMa DEVa IND PHY ONL UNI COM LOC";
}

PS. The version of ffmpeg I use is: 3.4.6 – I had tried before with a new snap installed but did not work as I wanted.

And the result is :

That’s it!

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Fix for Java 8 and iDRAC 6 Connection Failed for MacOS

Hello,

I didn`t write soon (sorry for that).

I use MacOS and often I have to go to old Dell PowerEdge servers that use iDRAC 6, but I got into trouble – Connection Failed.

Fix for Java 8 and iDRAC 6 Connection Failed for MacOS

It turns out that the problem comes from a setting in Java security (SSLv3 has stopped by default – that is, it serves to connect to iDRAC 6).

To enable SSLv3, we need to open the java.security file with the text editor:

sudo vim "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/Home/lib/security/java.security"

and to commend or delete the following two lines:

jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms=SSLv3, RC4, DES, MD5withRSA, DH keySize < 1024, \
EC keySize < 224, 3DES_EDE_CBC, anon, NULL

And we can successfully run the iDRAC 6 console and get it done;))

That’s it!

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Delete systemd journal logs

Hello,

Today on one of my server I saw that the disk space in /var is low, and the reason for that was in /var/log/journal.

In this post I will share how to delete systemd journal logs right, and how to make our server to do this alone.

root@mp-web06:/var/log# du -sh * |grep G
4.1G journal

Delete systemd journal logs older than X days

root@mp-web06:/var/log# journalctl --vacuum-time=5d
Deleted archived journal /var/log/journal/a20c526fbd1ffe2fe0fc6d5056053509/user-1003@55bfa9c91d5944b3a7a133fcec536fb8-000000000042a6ee-00057dd636182198.journal (8.0M).
.....
Vacuuming done, freed 3.8G of archived journals from /var/log/journal/a20c526fbd1ffe2fe0fc6d5056053509.

The idea here is the server will delete the logs older than 5 days.

Delete systemd journal logs bigger than X GB

root@mp-web06:/var/log# journalctl --vacuum-size=1G
Vacuuming done, freed 0B of archived journals from /var/log/journal/a20c526fbd1ffe2fe0fc6d5056053509.

So, if the log becomes bigger than 1GB, server will delete it, and will take care of the free space!

Now the disk space in /var/log/journal is much smaller!

root@mp-web06:/var/log# du -sh /var/log/journal/
257M /var/log/journal/

 

That’s it!

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Mikrotik Winbox for MacOS

Hello,

In this post I will share how to run Mikrotik Winbox for MacOS.

We will need this tools to do it:

  • Wine
  • XQuartz
  • Winbox
  1. First, we need to install XQuartz – version 2.7.9 от тук. XQuartz is needed for wine installing!
  2. After that we need to install wine from their official website – winehq.org
  3. Finally, we need to download the winbox and run in from wine terminal ; wine winbox.exe

Mikrotik Winbox за MacOS

That’s it!

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WordPress and MySQL 8

Wordpress и MySQL 8Hello,

I’m fan of new technologies and I love updates;))

For this reason, root.bg is now working on MySQL 8!

In this post I will share the special features of releasing version 8 and what we need to do our wordpress – especially if its base is large, old and with different types of charset and collation. To emphasize that I migrated from MariaDB 10.2 and for this purpose I picked up a new MySQL server – I did not do mysql_upgrade, and dump and restore the base!

More details about the new features in MySQL 8 can be found on their official site.

What is important for wordpress is precisely this :

  • Character set support.  The default character set has changed from latin1 to utf8mb4. The utf8mb4 character set has several new collations, including utf8mb4_ja_0900_as_cs, the first Japanese language-specific collation available for Unicode in MySQL. For more information, see Section 10.10.1, “Unicode Character Sets”.

This is the problem I encountered after I poured the root.bg base of the new mysql server. Here are all the publications written in Cyrillic:

mysql 8 wordpress chartset problem

 

The reason for this is the encoding in MySQL.

This problem can be solved in two ways – by setting it on the server itself or in our wordpress configuration file.

Here are two ways:

In MySQL:

character-set-server=latin1

We can test this from mysql console:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';

and we should see this result :

+--------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+---------+
| character_set_client | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_connection | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_database | latin1 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_server | latin1 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
+--------------------------+---------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

In wordpress:

In the wordpress configuration file – wp-config.php, we add the following line:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1');

And now we have a working wordpress on MySQL 8!

P.S.
root.bg lives on :
ubuntu 18.04.1
nginx 1.14.0
php 7.2.11
mysql 8.0.13
memcached 1.5.6

Thats it!

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