Paul Dugas

Ubuntu 22.04

paul@dugas.cc — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I updated my dev machine to Ubuntu 22.04 last night. Things went pretty well.

Ubiquiti Migration

paul@dugas.cc — Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Ubiquiti’s APs for years and they’ve been solid so when I was looking to get a new switch, I decided to look at replacing my firewall too and moving the controller off a VM onto a new UDM-Pro. It was pretty simple to swap things out but there have been some speedbumps…

Hugo Shortcode for PlantUML

paul@dugas.cc — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I often need to embed diagrams into documentation but I dislike having to keep track of separate files for the image. I went looking for a way to embed them as “code” in the document and found GitLab’s ability to embed PlantUML in Markdown content including READMEs, issues, MRs, etc. I want to be able to do the same with Hugo.

Bash Completion for Symfony Console

paul@dugas.cc — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I got annoyed with the lack of Bash-Completion support for the Symfony Console command and decided to figure out a fix. What I came up with turned out to be pretty simple but perhaps a little sketchy.

GitLab Snippets in Hugo

paul@dugas.cc — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I needed to embed a GitLab Snippet into a page here on the site earlier today so I added layouts/shortcodes/snippet.html with the content below. <script src="https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/{{ index .Params 0 }}.js"></script> Now I can embed snippets just like Gists except using snippet in place of gist and it only takes the single number parameter. I’d put an example here but I can’t figure out how to make Hugo ignore it.

Powerline Prompt Too Long

paul@dugas.cc — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Powerline to make my shell prompt and the status line in VIM show lots of useful details for years. Deep paths in shell prompts can be an issue but the way it trims them by default usually works fine. Things got ugly a while ago when the GIT branchnames I work on got long. I finally took the time to address it this weekend.

Time Series Databases

paul@dugas.cc — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently looked into current TSDB solutions for keeping historical status and performance data. InfluxDB looked promising initially but I ended up using TimescaleDB though I’m still not certain it’s the right solution for me.

Home when the Street Lights Come On

paul@dugas.cc — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Did your mom ever tell you to be home before the street lights come on? That’s the guidance I give to my boy as he roams the neightborhood with his friends but he’s 12 and easily distracted so, I’m often sending “Time to come home, bud” messages. I got bored with that tonight and decided to let Home Assistant do it for me.

InfluxDB & Flux

paul@dugas.cc — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently started using using the InfluxDB time-series database for storing some data I’ve been collecting. It’s the replacement for RRDTool that I’ve used in the past for performance metrics and it’s working nicely.

Their Flux query language took a bit of time to wrap my head around. It isn’t like a traditional scripting language. Yes, it has variables and functions and such but the overall flow of the logic is not like a typical programmer expects with branching and looping. SQL and their derivative, InfluxQL don’t either so it’s not surprising or bad. It’s just different.

Motion Automations

paul@dugas.cc — Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve moved my home automation logic from the ISY994i to Home Assistant but it took me a while to get the responses to activity outside the house right. What I want is for motion to trigger a response (i.e. lights come on) which is simple. Then I want the system to wait until the motion sensors have been off for a while before reverting the initial response. This turned out to be harder than I expected.

Qustodio

paul@dugas.cc — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The boy keeps getting distracted when he’s supposed to be doing school work at home so I’ve been trying to get filters going in the firewall. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to block YouTube. Even if I managed to get something working, he can just turn off wifi on the phone and bypass my firewall. I finally broke down and paid for Qustodio on his phone and laptop.

Recteq Integration

paul@dugas.cc — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I build my first curstom integration for Home Assistant. My Recteq integration lets me monitor and control my smoker without having to expose it out to the Internet. My overactive imagination keeps coming up with scenarios where some hacker manages to burn my deck down…

Home Assistant

paul@dugas.cc — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

IFTTT has changed their business model and wants to charge me to continue using a handful of integrations. This turned into an excuse to take a look around at alternatives to running all the glue logic for my home automation system in “the cloud”. I discovered Home Assistant is the perfect solution for me.

Dell XPS 15 7590 Battery Issue

paul@dugas.cc — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I discovered the battery in my 13-month-old Dell XPS 15 (7590) laptop is now swelling up making the touchpad no longer work. I’m not happy with the way Dell is (not) handling this.

AWS Budgets in Terraform

paul@dugas.cc — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I ran into an issue working with Terraform to setup an AWS Budget for a project and didn’t find the fix in the documentation or online. Thought I’d share here.

ExtJS in a Subdirectory

paul@dugas.cc — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a way for an ExtJS application to coexist with a PHP/Symfony site in the same project. Think I finally have a working solution.

Unifi NanoHD

paul@dugas.cc — Thu, 07 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I replaced an aging Unifi AP-LR with a new NanoHD today. Given all the activity on the home and office networks with everyone working/schooling from home, it was time.

Asterisk PBX Upgrade

paul@dugas.cc — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Taking some time during this work-from-home event to refresh my Asterisk phone system. The old instance is over 5 years old. It’s time…

Using Sencha's Google Package with ExtJS/NPM

paul@dugas.cc — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I had to spend one of my support credits to figure this out so I’m sharing the details here in the hope that it will save someone else the trouble…

Let's Encrypt on Sophos UTM

paul@dugas.cc — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The 9.6 update to Sophos UTM added support for using Let’s Encrypt certificates to secure access to websites behind the built in reverse-proxy feature. They can be used for the management interface and the user portal too. I no longer have to hack around on the machine to automate certificates. Finally!

Ubuntu 19.10 Upgrade

paul@dugas.cc — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I updated Ubuntu to 19.10 on my Dell XPS 15 laptop today and it’s working great!

Moved to GitLab Pages

paul@dugas.cc — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I moved this website and my company website to GitLab Pages today since most of my projects are already hosted there. Looks good so far. I’ll work on pulling the older articles over.

Doctrine SoftDelete

paul@dugas.cc — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I ran into a problem with Doctrine ORM’s SoftDeleteble extension a while back and managed to get some time today to finally track down what is happening.

Increase CentOS7 Root Disk Size

paul@dugas.cc — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of my VMs filled up the root filesystem today so I had to remember how to fix it.

Sniffing XenServer VM Traffic

paul@dugas.cc — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I was troubleshooting a DHCP issue today and needed to see what a Windows VM was doing but didn’t want to install anything on the VM. Turns out, this can be done from the XenServer host. Cool!