what i’ve been up to lately

I’ve been doing a fair amount of work on my home network/servers lately. It started innocently enough with wanting some place to test puppet without breaking out development environment at work. I set puppet up on my server at home. I realized that there were several non-trivial configurations that I had applied to that server that I didn’t want to loose should I have to rebuild or migrate that server, so I started puppetizing everything.

At home, I had been using CVS for SCM, but I’ve been using SVN at work for the last year or so and really started liking it, so I decided that my new puppet configs were going to use SVN. I didn’t want to have to admin SVN manually, so I applied a puppet recipe I cooked up a while back. Since this new svn puppet recipe was dependent on httpd, I had to puppetize my httpd configs. This was a can of worms. I got it 90% sorted out to the point where the svn repository is up and running using a self-signed ssl cert. I just need to finish configuring the backups.

I’ve been doing more work in the garage lately working on little projects. One thing I’ve been wanting to do is build a linux box to stick in the garage so I can access the internet and all of my music over the network. This meant either buying a wireless usb dongle and dealing with that, or putting a wireless bridge in the garage. Since I also wanted to stick a wired web-cam out there, I decided to repurpose an old Belkin F5D7230-4 v1444 wireless router that was collecting dust. By default, the router looks to support wireless bridging, but only with a few specific Belkin access points and only when the router is the master/main device. This wasn’t going to work for me, so I installed dd-wrt on it and configured it as a wireless client bridge. The only issue I’m having with it is that any wired device connected to it has to have a static IP. Not a big deal since I was going to set everything up that way anyways. Now I just need to mount it in the garage, hook up my wired web cam (for a DIY security camera), image one of the old machines I have lying around with linux, and purchase an LCD to stick out there.

In addition to all of this I’ve been editing some photos that I have been ignoring, I built a DIY beauty dish (for my off-camera lighting), and taking care of Dexter. Good times!