Category Archives: Projects

nginx & Pyplate CMS

Last night while reading upon webservers (apache vs Nginx) and running a webserver on a Raspberry Pi (which i have at home) i found this website regarding rapsberry pi webservers which he runs on a cluster in his basement. Next to that he also have a cluster running on a Banana Pi (Chinese made Raspberry)

The writer/owner also made his own CMS (pyplate) in order to host static pages which makes Nginx really fast and stable while hosted in a cluster. I noticed this big online discussion on what is better, Apache or Nginx, but it all has its own benefits.

This made me decide not convert the VPS webserver to nginx but to keep it running apache and play around on the pi. After installing nginx a couple of weeks ago, i already had this basic html page running with a couple of shortcuts (here, my other blog, my owncloud) but after installing pyplate, did a quick look around and configured some pages (http://home.l4urenz.nl)

Progress since august

So since scoring the PE2850 in Auggust i have been very busy at work.
This resulted in getting a new job which i start at the 2nd of November and ofcourse having met this realy sweet girl changed by life a bit.
But she is working towards her bacelor diploma in teaching english, i still have some time in the weekend to play around with the VPS and other tiny stuff.

After introducing my buddy in having a rapsberrypi with kodi on it, he decided to score one.. with me still being me, this resulted in getting my 2nd raspberry pi Model 2+ for playing around with the new jessie release of debian. This little PI is now running my famous home IP of x.x.x.42, which resulted in the name “PI42”. Will this be the allknowing answer ? i don’t know yet.

The 2nd pi running at home will be primary used for VPN & SSH purposes but is running nginx as webserver next to Apache running on the VPS.
The last thing to do is setup openvpn.. which will require a couple of long nights i guess…

Righto, the VPS i still have running moved from an older host to a brand new Dell T410 model wich ofcourse i share with other customers from Fast4you. But since its quite strange that my order 512mb ram machine only has 490 as seen by the OS, i might be upgraded to a higher package (more traffic, more ram and more diskspace)

Things now running on the VPS:

  • This little blog powered by wordpress
  • JDM-ITR.nl, another wordpress blog in relation to how i see the car world.
  • Owncloud, my private cloud environment, pretty usefull in synching stuff between both my laptops, phone and desktop and proving cloud space to a couple of friends.
  • RFW, further blog/webshop to be made for friends

New Toy

The other week we picked up an old Dell Poweredge 2850 2u server.
This to feed the urge for a homelab.
In order to start a homelab , the people love network diagram. so i made one of my home situation. which is visable here.

Whatpulse on Ubuntu, Part 1

When i bought my new laptop in Januari, i installed ubuntu 14.04 on my old one. This due to the fact that i just love my IBM T61 laptop.

Example picture of a T61

After a few week, i found out that i am working more and more on the T61 that on my new i5 windows machine. This had more reasons. first SSH sessions are way easier from a terminal instead of running a separate application like Putty. and when i just a fast machine to make my nas do something or search stuff on the web and want to have bigger screen then my Z1 experia. The ubuntu machine is quite fast.

So back to Whatpulse, I’ll explain more about whatpulse in a later post. but for a TL;DR; Its stats whoring with your keystrokes and a lot more data…

Installing was a issue due to the large number of packages you need, but the knowledge base on whatpulse.org was pretty straight forward and got it finally working. YAY!

ZNC bouncer for IRC

So when we ordered the VPN last tuesday, the prime objective was to have a IRC Bouncer working, so that it can reply the missed messages while my machine was offline.

After looking around, i found a few howto’s that use the ZNC software and eventually used the following article to configure everything.

So yay, happy chatting on Quakenet.org #NijNtje ^^ hows that for oldskool stuff