Latitude, longitude? MQTTitude! 14 Aug 2013 | 11:41 am

Some of my friends have been using Google's Latitude on their children's phones (with the child's consent), and they were a bit miffed when I told them the program was being retired. How would they ke...

Brilliant advertising via Twitter 13 Jul 2013 | 08:16 pm

Adapting inventory for Ansible 18 Jun 2013 | 11:14 pm

Ansible uses a so-called "inventory" to determine the list of nodes and groups of nodes it can use. This inventory file defaults to /etc/ansible/hosts and typically looks something like this in INI fi...

A very welcome addition to Ansible's setup module 17 Jun 2013 | 04:49 pm

Ansible's setup module retrieves "facts" from nodes, and Seth Vidal, whom I had the great pleasure in meeting during AnsibleFest last week, has added a very nice feature to it. By specifying the fact...

Notifications with MQTT 14 Jun 2013 | 01:54 pm

Sometimes important things happen on your networks and you want to be notified about them. For some, notification means an SMS or a popup somewhere, for others it may mean a Nagios or Icinga alert. Us...

If this, then all of that: home automation with MQTT and homA 4 Jun 2013 | 01:35 pm

homA is a framework for building "smart homes" and adding automation to devices and software components. homA was created by Alexander Rust and Stephan Wypler who recently released the source code to ...

Using stash53 with the MQTT emitter 28 May 2013 | 12:18 pm

After introducing stash53 (which logs DNS queries and responses with Logstash) yesterday, I got quite a bit of positive feedback. There were a couple of queries whether I could explain what people can...

Server-agnostic logging of DNS queries/responses 27 May 2013 | 02:35 pm

DSC is probably the de-facto standard for monitoring queries to DNS servers, certainly in larger environments. It consists of so-called collectors which sniff DNS packets and periodically dump them as...

A few notification modules for Ansible 8 May 2013 | 11:23 pm

Brian Coca recently submitted a jabber module for use with Ansible. This module allows an Ansible playbook to connect to an XMPP service and just push out a message, such as "all's well" or "I'm done"...

Live blinkenlights dashboard with SVG 22 Apr 2013 | 12:56 pm

Blinking dashboards turn me on. Really. I love seeing things move and blink. Andrew Hazelden's post on monitoring a solar hot water system using a dashboard created in SVG made a deep impression when...