The Things Network is a grass roots, community driven, effort to provide free access for low power, low speed Internet of Things deployment in cities or other regions around the world. My contribution is working with the Ithaca, NY and New York City teams to apply Configuration Management to our gateways. My Ansible control repository can do virtually all configuration of the MultiTech Conduits including firmware upgrades.

I’m a software engineer at heart, which means I’m lazy; I don’t want to do a job more than once. This applies to system administration. I run a number of Linux (mostly Debian at this time) systems and one of my least favorite tasks is making sure I have configured something properly on all of them. And I especially hate having to remember everything that I need to reconfigure when I install a new system or reconfigure one that died.

While travelling to Beaverton, OR for work once many years ago I picked up a copy of Linux Journal and read about Configuration Management with Puppet. When I got home I tried it out and was hooked. My configuration is up to over 9,000 lines of Puppet manifests and Hiera configs.

One place where Puppet will not work well is my Cloud server. I don’t want to share all the Puppet configuration and do not want to open a VPN back to my home network. I read an article on Ansible and gave that a try. It’s a perfect fit for managing a remote server. I currently use Ansible to configure my Mac (similar to Jeff Gerling’s mac-dev-playbook), but mine is not public). cloud servers and Raspberry Pis.

I mainly use Gmail because it has great SPAM filtering and makes my mail available on all my devices. For secure e-mail I use Proton Mail.

I have been a heavy user of the nmh mail system for decades and a developer on the mh-e front-end for nmh in Emacs. For large volumes of mail (i.e. at work), MH-E was much more efficient.

Unfortuneatly employers after Wind River thought security was more important than productivity and we were forced into a closed ecosystem.

At home I use postfix configured to send e-mail. For years I used sendmail and wrote custom configurations but I find postfix easier to configure.

My first exposure to Unix was a BSD port on a Gould PowerNode 9000 while at Clarkson University. Back then I was a mainframe guy (VM/CMS) and implementing a terminal program on MS-DOS. Then I installed Mt Xinu on a microVax to build an Internet gateway. Part of the bring-up was booting into single user mode and adding support for the latest disk drives.

When I moved to the Cornell Theory Center I moved headlong into the Unix world, using SunOS (BSD at first and then System V based) and eventually became the owner of the infamous devvax.tn.cornell.edu (a DEC VAX 11/750 running BSD 4.2 and eventually running BSD/OS on an i486). That was back when you built your own copy of gcc, compiling it three times just to be sure it worked. By then my life was totally on Unix/BSD.

I joined BSDi in 1995 to work as a core engineeri on BSD/OS. BSD/OS was a commercial derivative of the BSD/386 port. I had a very enjoyable five years at BSDi working on many different facets of the OS. In 2001 Wind River acquired the rights to BSD/OS and hired most of the engineers. BSD/OS lived on for a few years at Wind River as the Platform for Server Appliances.

After BSD/OS Wind River started Wind River Linux, an embedded Linux distribution to complement their VxWorks real-time offering. Eventually I converted all my BSD/OS systems to Linux, first Fedora and then Ubuntu. At one point I had half a dozen systems running Ubuntu, at the time of this writing it’s a couple. A server (Plex, Nextcloud, Gitlab, backups, DNS, DHCP), a low power server (running UniFi Controller, M/Monit, DNS, DHCP) and another lower power server running at our house in Florida (because, that is what you do).

At AppNexus/Xandr/Microsoft I was part of the architecture team for the internal cloud, consisting of more than 13,000 servers and VMs. All running Ubuntu and managed with Puppet.

My primary UI these days is macOS, primarily on Apple Silicon Mac Book Pros.

I started out my home automation adventures with X-10. The biggest problem was that I wanted to control my house with Linux and I had trouble finding good options. For a while I played with MisterHouse but eventually settled on Insteon with a Universal Devices ISY controller, currently an ISY994i. The ISY devices know a lot about Insteon devices and simplify much of the configuration and setup. Control is local (i.e. not via the cloud) but they are continually improving and adding additional functionality.

Most all lights in my house are on the Insteon network. Most of my control functions are basic, turning off lights on timers, using motion detection for lights in specific rooms, programming one buttons for sequences such as bed time.

I’ve recently added Z-Wave thermostats to most of the rooms (there is one room that will be hard to wire that I have not gotten to yet). I do some day-night temperature control with those and would like to do some occupancy detection to set the heat.

I wrote a use a Perl interface to the Universal Devices ISY series of devices, Device::ISY. I chose Perl because there were not any easily installed SOAP libraries available on Ubuntu when I started. My assignment of the Device::ISY identifier took quite a while and I got distracted from the project. I need to move it over to Github where other folks can contribute. I personally use it all the time.

I currently have a Home Assistant installation running on a Raspberry Pi 5 powered by PoE with an NVMe disk. This runs a network of dozens of Z-Wave devices, from thermostats to motion sensors to switches. With a significant numbers of automations and integrations.

I’m soon to convert to a Nabu Casa ZWA-2 controller to improve reliability.

I find motion sensors annoying. I already have one Aquara presense sensor installed and a couple more waiting to be installed. I also have a few Apollo automation ESP32 based sensors I want to play with.

I’ve long been interested in telephony at one point wanting to buy a Panasonic Hybrid PBX, but was not willing to spend so much money. Now they are relegated to history.

Then IP Telephony happened and I learned about Asterisk. I’ve went through several iterations of ATA adapters and service providers. I finally settled on an Obihai Obi202 with Google Voice. This configuration went stale and I lost intereest.

In the meantime, I just use Google Voice on whatever device is near me.

Interesttingly, when getting into Ham Radio I found that Allstar nodes are based on Asterisk. What goes around comes around.

FlightAware hosts a community network of ADS-B receivers that track the location of aircraft around the world. One option for installing these is to use a Raspberry Pi based system called PiAware which uses a Raspberry Pi and USB Dongle with an external antenna to receive the aircraft location information and upload it to the cloud.

To facilitate a good location for the antenna, I installed a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in a weather-tight box on the outside of my house. Power and networking are via a Power-Over-Ethernet connection. This installation uses a LovePi PoE HAT and a Flight Feeder Pro USB stick. Pictures of the installation are available in a Flickr album.

The German term Blitzortung means “lightning detection”. Blitzortung.org is a community based installation of ligthning detectors around the world. An installation consists of a receiver and one or both of an H-field (magnetic) and E-field (elelctrical) antenna.

After a few years on a waiting list, I received my kit in September of 2018. Over two years later I assembled it. The boards come mostly pre-assembled, with all the surface mount devices (SMD) pre-installed. All that is required is to solder on a few larger components.

Again, I’m powering this with a POE connection. I found a PoE to USB-A female and am using that to connect to the System BLUE via a USB-A to mini-USB connection and a length of sheilded Cat 5.it

Photos of my installation are available in a Flickr album. My station data is available here.

As I’ve migrated my server(s) from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 20.04, I’ve put just about all services possible in Docker Containers. Someday I plan to write up a bunch of lessons learned.

I maintain a number of docker containers that you can find on my GitHub site.

I’ve always wanted local weather monitoring. With the caveat that it not just provide a local display and not only upload the data to a proprietary cloud.

I think I’ve found the solution in the WeatherFlow Tempest Weather System. There seems to be an active community around this product with lots of options to obtain and share the data.

You can see my station data on TempestWX or WeatherUnderground. Pictures of the installation are in a Flickr album.