Bump filesize limit in All-in-One-WP-Migration plugin for Wordpress

This post is just a quick note as I allways forget how to bump the hardcoded filesize limit in the awesome All-in-One-WP-Migration plugin for Wordpress. Since you’re reading this I guess the same applies to you ;). I’m using the Bitnami Wordpress image image in AWS Lightsail. So your paths will probably be different, use your brain.. PHP The default upload limit is hardwired to 80M in php.ini, but we can change that: [Read More]

Custom HTML form and submit button in Splunk dashboard

Sometimes you just need a quick solution for having a custom form in a Splunk dashboard. So this short blogpost will showcase how to create the HTML form and custom submit button using Javascript. Create the dashboard I’m still using the XML dashboarding capability of Splunk - the newer JSON based stuff seems promising but is as of now lacking in features - I guess it will take them some more years to be on par. [Read More]
splunk 

Multiple time widgets in Splunk dashboard

Sometimes you need to have multiple time widgets in a single Splunk dashboard, the scenario I encountered was for a global SOC operation. The solution provided here handles displaying local time using just a timezone parameter. As a bonus; it automatically handles daylight time savings too :-) The solution consists of two components; a report that creates the timestamp string and a dashboard component displaying the timestamp. All code is available as a ready to use Splunk app which you can find in my Splunk Content Library repository on Github. [Read More]
splunk 

On-boarding journald logs into Splunk

I needed to on-board the Linux system logs of all my homelab systems into Splunk. Apparantly I haven’t been paying attention… but only now I noticed that in EL8 (CentOS in my case) rsyslog is not even installed by default. So that prompted me to finally take a closer look into journald, this resulted in a very simple Splunk TA that can be deployed to any Splunk instance to ingest the journald logs. [Read More]

Replacing the Delta & Caiway router

If you’re a bit (nerdy and paranoid) like me, you probably are never really satisfied by using the ISP supplied modem/router device. My current ISP (Delta/Caiway) provides their fiber customers a Genexis device. This device is quite limited in (security) features, but most important of all it does not provide the option to be configured into L2 bridge! Having your ISP device in bridge would allow a customer to use a router device of choice without a nasty double NAT configuration. [Read More]

Booting into the OpenBSD 6.7 installer on an APU2 system

Every now and then I want to re-install OpenBSD on my little APU2 system, this time I wanted to benefit from the recent FFS2 improvements which requires filesystems to be recreated. It seems I struggle with remembering some bits and pieces of this process as I get older ;). This blog post is here to document what stuff I need to get the OpenBSD installer going! Yes, that also means I’m not documenting the OpenBSD installer here. [Read More]
openbsd  apu 

Stepping down from Cobbler

This blog post briefly describes how I got involved with the Cobbler Project, what I managed to get done and why I’m (finally) stepping down as the project lead. How I got involved Back in 2011 I was working for the Dutch DoD in the IT Infrastructure department where I was deeply involved with UNIX/Linux systems engineering. At some point we wanted to replace our internally developed deployment solution for something more generic and better maintained (upstream). [Read More]

Improving website management

In a previous post I described how I migrated this static website from Github Pages to Amazon AWS using services like S3, CloudFront, Route 53 and Amazon Certificate Manager. Though the technical result is quite satisfying in terms of features and security, espcially from the view of a visitor. The workflow of updating the website is quite annoying as I have to upload new website content manually to the S3 bucket using the upload feature of the S3 Console. [Read More]
blog  cloud  aws 

Moving this blog to Amazon AWS

This website has been happily running on Github Pages for quite some time now. And to be honest I’ve never experienced any issues with that service. Also their pricing is pretty awesome, you can’t beat free, right?! ;-). This is a very simple static website which uses Hugo as the site generator. Anyway, I’m moving this blog over to Amazon AWS so that I have an actual “workload” (yes, I like using big words) to work with in order to get some more hands-on experience in using Amazon AWS services. [Read More]
blog  cloud  aws 

Provisioning HP firmware with Cobbler

When dealing with a bunch of servers one of the many things you are expected to do frequently is to update your systems firmware. In this blog post I’ll describe how I implemented this process for HP ProLiant DL servers. Since this basically is a systems provisioning issue I prefer that this process to be integrated with my current PXE based deployment infrastructure which is based on Cobbler. Luckily HP does provide a Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) as a bootable ISO which does an unattended firmware update for all supported components (iLO, BIOS, disks, NIC’s, HBA’s, etc), it actually works pretty well. [Read More]