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. ...

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.

Today is the day I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Today, in the SU, about 30 electrical engineers, computer science students, professional software developers, photography geeks, penetration testers, system administrators and anyone else interested, will come together to hack. Today, we’re going to find out if it actually works; there is nothing planned, nothing prepared, and nothing expected. All we have is a FB group, FB event, Hackerspaces.org Wiki, and a few IRC conversations. ...

On Saturday the 23rd October, the Hackers invade The Space! In association with QUESTS, Dragonslayers, and IETNI, HackerspaceBelfast will be running a series of events over 24 hours of software, network, and hardware hackery goodness, as well as screening hacker movies, DIY repair, and maybe, just maybe, how to build a laser. Running parallel to Dragonslayers’ 24 hour gaming event, which will incorporate console, PC, and tabletop games, attendees will be able to both play and make games to their hearts content. ...