This page serves as the GDPR Privacy Notice for www.bentasker.co.uk.

The controller of the data collected is Ben Tasker.

You have the right to object to processing, either by objecting to a specific mechanism as described below, or by Contacting Me. If you feel your objection has not been appropriately handled, or that the processing does not have a lawful basis, you also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority.

As an overall summary of the policy - I collect some data in order to run and improve the site, but will not share that data with third parties unless I'm legally compelled to do so.

Where I'm performing a service for you (i.e. you're a customer rather than simply visiting the site), our contract will include sections as needed to cover any additional elements I may encounter whilst working for you.

Read more…

Sometimes it can be pretty useful to access a remote system's filesystem from your own, and sometimes NFS isn't a great fit for the connectivity at hand.

It is, however, possible to use sshfs to mount a remote filesystem on pretty much any box that you can SSH to - giving quite a bit of convenience without the need to make changes at the remote end.

This documentation details how to create an auto-mounting SSHFS mount

Read more…

I've used Joomla for years, the first incarnation of BenTasker.co.uk used Joomla 1.5 back in 2011, then 2.5 with an eventual move to the 3.x branch of Joomla in 2013.

Recently though, I made the decision to migrate from Joomla! to Nikola, a change that went live in the last few days.

This post details how and why

Read more…

I've migrated my site from Joomla! to Nikola - moving from having active code exposed to visitors, to simply serving static files.

As with any migration of this size, there'll be things I've missed, and there are a few things where I've kicked the can down the road a bit

• Search is not yet implemented
• The template uses Javascript (this will be made optional in future)

At some point soon, I'll write up a post detailing how I migrated, and why

Update: that post can be found at Migrating from Joomla to Nikola

Some time back, I switched our internet connection over from BT to Andrews & Arnold. Although the quality and reliability of our service has improved immensely, it does mean I've had to get used to us having a quota (generous though it is) rather than being "Unlimited".

AAISP make checking this pretty easy - you can simply go to their homepage and it'll display there.

However, they also expose a JSON API to check it

curl -s -L https://quota.aa.net.uk --header "Accept: application/json" | jq
{
  "monthly_quota": 5000000000000,
  "monthly_quota_gb": 5000,
  "quota_remaining": 9026529201951,
  "quota_remaining_gb": 9026,
  "quota_status": "green"
}

(AAISP let you roll over half of your unused each month, which is why quota_remaining is higher than monthly_quota)

So I wanted to configure Telegraf to poll this periodically and write it into InfluxDB.

This post details the steps I followed

Read more…

I've basically lived my life inside issue tracking systems - it used to be JIRA, and I had built tooling allowing effective indexing/mirroring of JIRA issues, but then Atlassian decided to all but do away with on-prem users. So, like many others, I moved over to Gitlab instead.

As a product, Gitlab's great: it's got project lifecycle management, issue tracking, wiki support and even a container registry baked straight into it.

However, it's indexability is basically non existent - even if you have projects marked as public, significant parts of pages are fetched by javascript, so a crawler can't index things like issue references (no, I'm not kidding) unless they execute javascript. It's like they reverse search engine optimised...

It's not just on-prem Gitlab either, it also affects their cloud offering.

Search within Gitlab is excellent, but this is of little use if you have things spread across systems and want to search from a single central point (to be fair to Gitlab, their idea is that everything you do should be within their solution, but life rarely actually works that way).

This documentation details how to use my new tooling (rudimentary as it currently is) to expose an indexable version of your Gitlab life. Although this is focused on an on-prem install, this tool should work with their cloud offering too, as the APIs are the same (but I haven't tested against it).

Read more…

A month or two back, I put up a post detailing how I was capturing information on our energy usage into InfluxDB. The natural extension of that was to create an In Home Display (IHD) that displays current and historic usage.

Some time back, I created a Music Kiosk using a Raspberry Pi and a touchscreen, so it made sense to adjust that in order to fulfil both needs.

This post details the steps I took to have my kiosk run Flux queries against my InfluxDB instance to retrieve energy consumption data, and then graph it using Flot.

Read more…

Version: 0.3

Project Info

Gitlab Issue Listing Script (GILS) is a php front-end to the Gitlab API. It's intended as a means to work around Gitlabs awful SEO

Much like my original JIRA implementation (JILS) it provides a simple HTML view of information - it's intended as a read-only interface rather than one accepting input.

Read more…

This, almost certainly, was a mess of my own making, but as I didn't find any answers with web searches I thought it was worth documenting for anyone else who sets a similar time bomb for themselves.

I've got some Raspberry Pi's which use NFS for their root partition. They used to be PXE booted, but at some point starting failing to boot so some time back I put a SD card back in for the /boot partition.

This, I suspect, was probably my undoing.

The Pi's have been working fine since, but I wanted to install Docker onto one of them. Although it installed, Docker failed to start, logging the following

Oct 09 22:45:43 redim-4-search-pi dockerd[3534]: failed to start daemon: Error initializing network controller: error obtaining controller instance: failed to
Oct 09 22:45:43 redim-4-search-pi dockerd[3534]: modprobe: FATAL: Module ip_tables not found in directory /lib/modules/4.19.75-v8+
Oct 09 22:45:43 redim-4-search-pi dockerd[3534]: iptables v1.6.0: can't initialize iptables table `nat': Table does not exist (do you need to insmod?)
Oct 09 22:45:43 redim-4-search-pi dockerd[3534]: Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.
Oct 09 22:45:43 redim-4-search-pi dockerd[3534]:  (exit status 3)
Oct 09 22:45:43 redim-4-search-pi systemd[1]: docker.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE

On examination, there is no modules directory for the kernel version I'm currently running

root@redim-4-search-pi:~# uname -r
4.19.75-v8+
root@redim-4-search-pi:~# ls /lib/modules/
4.19.66+  4.19.66-v7+

This post details the steps I took to resolve this issue

Read more…

This is a slightly obscure one, but when I was initially hit by it, didn't find much searching on the net.

After setting up a new OpenVPN client config (i.e. the OpenWRT box is VPN'ing into somewhere, rather than acting as a VPN server itself) on an OpenWRT box, you might find that OpenWRT eventually crashes.

This documentation details the cause, at least in so far as it affected me

Read more…