Purplecarrot

Baird Television Receiver Model 604

Oct 13, 2013 · 2 min read

When I bought my current house, it had a very old shed in the garden. So old, that the wooden floor was completely rotten through and the sides were also rotting away. It was surprising that it had not fallen down already. So I had to break it up to take it away. Whilst dismantling the shelves that the previous owner …

Configuring Out-Of-Band Management Interface from In-Band Server

Oct 11, 2013 · 3 min read · Linux Hardware

Most modern x86 servers include out-of-band Management or Lights-out Management systems. These systems offer remote configuration and remote console access to a headless server normally located in a datacenter. These are typically used when first setting up a server, or perhaps when the server is hosed. The company I …

Determining the IP Address of a Server's Out of Band Management

Oct 11, 2013 · 2 min read · Linux Hardware

Nearly all enterprise x86 servers include an out-of-band management interface such as HP iLO, IBM RSA or BMC, IPMI, Dell DRAC, etc. These are used for remotely power cycling, monitoring and what the data centre ops guys, confusingly for me, call KVM access (that's Keyboard Video Mouse not Kernel Virtual Machine!) As …

My Subversion Repo Moved!

Sep 30, 2013 · 1 min read · Development

Well, it didn't strictly move anywhere but my broadband IP address changed after re-DHCP. I used to use no-ip.com, but then I no longer really host anything on my home network, so I figured could save myself 20 bucks as I didn't think I needed it anymore. Then I went to check in some old code to an old svn repo (that's …

Broadband External IP Address from Command Line

Sep 16, 2013 · 1 min read · Linux

Just typing "What is my external ip address" into Google is normally the most convenient way to find your external public IP address when you're behind a NAT'd broadband connection. The site ipconfig.me offers an alternative and clean way to get it from the command line, for example for use in a shell script: …

Named Groups in Python Regular Expressions

Sep 11, 2013 · 3 min read · Python Regex

To anybody working with Unix and Linux systems, regular expressions or regexes are extremely useful for fast pattern matching in scripts. First there were basic regexes now known as BREs as used by traditional Unix utilities like sed, and then came along the even more useful Perl Enhanced Regular Expressions. So useful …

Getting VIM Powerline Working with Putty

Sep 9, 2013 · 3 min read · Development Linux Git

After using vim and vi for more years than I care to remember, I came across the vim powerline plugin for the first time today. What an excellent vim statusline, and now I've been using it myself, I can see why it's so popular (that's a relative term - as in popular for a vim extensions! ) Following the installation …

UTF-8 and Euro Symbol

Sep 9, 2013 · 1 min read · oneliner

Quick and easy way to show that UTF-8 is configured correctly in shell and terminal emulator is to display the Euro symbol. If you don't see the Euro symbol, then UTF-8 is not configured correctly. 1linux:~$ perl -CS -le 'print "\x{20AC}"' 2€

Git Cloning Behind a Proxy

Sep 6, 2013 · 1 min read · Git

Normally my development environment lives on my nicely configured workstation. However, sometimes you're on a server, with no certificate chain installed for verification and behind a corporate firewall where git protocol is blocked and not permitted. If you just want to get at the code, using the https url to the git …

SimpleHTTPServer

Aug 16, 2013 · 1 min read · Python

Whilst reading about BaseHTTPServer class as mentioned in the last post, I also came across the very useful SimpleHTTPserver which is most definitely worth recording as a one-liner. Everybody must have come across the situation where you're ssh'd into a headless server with no Apache installed or running on it, and you …