Networking

Super quick one this time; I’ve been experimenting with MQTT to act as a central messaging broker for “Farset In-Space Related Stuff” as part of the near continuous renovations and expansions. We previously had a well configured EMonPi set up with nice dashboards and things, but that died a death at some point during the move, who knows. Anyway, EmonPi has a built in mosquitto broker, which it uses to keep ‘state’ across several parts of the emonpi ecosystem. ...

So today is my last official day in the University of Liverpool office. Time for a bit of reflection. This is a self indulgent “For the sake of history and my bad memory” post so feel free to skip it. It’s just over two years since I left Belfast, and in those two years, life got weird(er). TL;DR for my own benefit in years to come: Worked for DSTL for a while on autonomous maritime systems Went to the Bournemouth Airshow Studied FPGA programming at Cambridge Coordinated a Raspberry Pi Outreach programme between Farset Labs, W5, and Digital Circle (along with the inimitable other Andrew; Mulholland) Spoke at TEDxBelfast and the All Island Innovation Conference Built a green field network research lab from scratch (it’s still not finished) Joined the Liverbeards Contributed to a joint project using atomic clocks for submarine location Went to GDC in San Francisco as part of an InvestNI organised Trade Mission Visited the Microsoft and Google campuses in SF Visited Noisebridge (and didn’t get involved in any drama…) Presented some research at Stanford Played with the Intel Galileo Went to Prague Got my first paper rejection Met the Queen, Prince Phillip, the Duke of York and a load of interesting entrepreneurs at Buckingham Palace Participated in VC negotiations and biz dev for a small tech firm Spoke at Ignite Liverpool (The video doesn’t do the animations justice…#cringe) Drank my way around Manchester with a load of beards Secured funding for a Farset Labs Raspberry Jam outreach programme Saw Dylan Moran Live Presented at a defence conference Attended a death metal gig in a suit Lost my passport and poster on the way to present at another defence conference… Took part in the Worlds Biggest Catwalk Presented at TrustCom in Helsinki Played glow-in-the-dark-haunted-house-mini-golf as part of what goes down in history as the most random night of my life… Was named Liverbeard “Beard of the Month” (well, I was leaving, they had to give me it sometime… :p ) Participated in a mayoral discussion on smart cities Got the most unheard of submission extension Finally got rid of a collection of “joke” twitter accounts I’d wired up to IFTTT ages ago and forgotten about… (Sorry QUB…) Got a trim from barber-to-the-stars, Cutthroat Pete Entered and won my first “food challenge”; a hot-wings challenge (and didn’t cry about it afterwards), also earning my second consecutive Liverbeard-of-the-month-status. Discovered far too many awesome bars in Liverpool Made some amazing friends I won’t be able to get rid of for the rest of my days Managed too many Undergrad, MSc and MEng projects That’ll do. ...

TL:DR: Setting up Observium to perform autodiscovery with dynamic DNS, and sample snmp configs to manage Linux servers This week I’ve taken a ‘break’ from the academics since I nearly killed myself sorting out some research for TrustCom (Fingers crossed), and I’ve been engrossed in redoing the network here in our University of Liverpool research lab. Good network and system monitoring tools are hard to come by, especially for free and with decent OSS tendencies. ...

Inspired by a pretty good write up by Cynofield as to his setup for getting a Raspberry Pi to “phone home”, I thought I’d set out how I do it. I have a machine that lives behind a ‘security’ infrastructure that makes my life a living hell. As a result, I set up automatic persistent reverse shells going back to other machines I use, so if I connect to those machines, I can get into the secure environment, without anything nasty being able to get in with me. ...

UPDATE I’ve long left QUB since this post was writted so as expected, IS have changed things again. If you’re hitting this, head over to Ryan McConville’s updated instructions QUB Information Services can be a bit of a mess, so in the interest of saving time, here is what works for me. In the below, the asterisks* mean that the value may be called something different depending on your mail client. Let me know in the comments if you find anything different and I’ll try and keep this reasonably up to date. ...

QUB Relevant: Mostly PGR or prospective PGR Just out of a great meeting with QUB Information Services regarding: Researcher/ Student webspace Email Wifi and VPN Web Space For a while now, this has been a bee in my bonnet; many other institutions provide User-Dirs or Public Facing Pages that, while being slightly monitored, are in the control of individual researchers and students. These draw attention to the bleeding edge of an institutions academic research while maintaining ownership of the content. ...

So Everything Everywhere are holding a press conference tomorrow… Rumours abound about device selections and other bits of juicy gossip (given the state of the global handset market… I’m not surprised), so this seemed like a good opportunity to rant. In Late August, OfCom, the UK’s communications regulator, gave the go-ahead to bring the planned 4G spectrum allocations forward to this year. In short, 4G is go! This was music to the ears of Everything Everywhere, and that’s not hyperbole. ...

Idiot proof setup for persistent reverse shells / port forwards (same thing) under a Ubuntu VM remote and my Dreamhost server, but should apply to nearly* all *nix’s First off, some terms to keep this easy. I want to be able to access my in-office VM, xavier from my server magneto (not my names, but they conveniently complement). xavier is not publicly accessible, but magneto is. I’ll be replacing all of the FQN’s with these terms so expand on your own. In generic terms, xavier is the remote machine (i.e the one behind some NAT firewall or such that you want to get access to) and magneto is the local machine. Its a bit confusing since all of the work is done on xavier, but it makes sense in the long run. Just trust me and get on with it. ...

Ordered Groceries (Tesco Online), Ordered Case of Wine (Virgin Wines), Planned PhD and Literature Review writing (StackExchange) Read more papers (Mendeley) Managed some Investments (Zopa) As I was walking back from our kitchen in the office, I realised that that ’lift coffee cup, walk to kitchen, make coffee cup, return to desk’ was the most inefficient part of my working day; I can even justify writing this post as vaguely productive as I’m waiting for a download to complete… ...

More a note for myself than anyone else. Stolen shamelessly from Marc Fletcher. In Settings, alt+e,alt+q, alt+q.