Introduction A new topic for the blog is Home Automation, in this case with Home Assistant, but it doesn’t diverge from the core philosophies of privacy, security and open source software. This post is a pretty specific, but hopefully fairly common scenario, and written mostly as a write up for a fellow Home Assistant OS (HAOS) user looking to replicate a similar setup to mine. Background Home Assistant OS is one of the “Virtual Appliance” forms of Home Assistant; this means it’s easy to set up an identical copy of Home Assistant in a consistent and manageable way, but, it also means that anything slightly out of the ordinary can be more complex to setup.

Preface There are numerous ways to run Kubernetes, with a plethora of certified distributions, hosted options, installers and more, all certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF is the place to look for all things in the Kubernetes ecosystem, but if you’re here, you hopefully already have a good idea of what Kubernetes is all about. What we need, is a solution for deploying Kubernetes in a lean, simple to deploy way, bearing in mind we want to run on Raspberry Pi which uses the ARM architecture.

Part 2.5 of the bantamCloud series is going to cover some of the caveats of running Kubernetes on a cluster of Raspberry Pis. Many of these challenges will also apply to running on other bare metal (computers you own) systems as opposed to running in the cloud (e.g. AWS, GCE, DOKS etc). Many of these challenges can be overcome, others will need to be accepted as compromises, but either way, these are worth knowing before we begin our installation and configuration of Kubernetes.

Part two of this series will cover base configuration for your Pis. Before we get started there are some prerequisites; Prerequisites SD Preparation You will need one SD card for each Pi, if you’re following this blog exactly, flash them with the Ubuntu Server 20.04.1 64bit for Raspberry Pi (Direct link to Ubuntu download site) Pi Power Hopefully, if you followed the previous post bantamCloud - Part 1 - Build you already have a power brick as part of your cluster.

Preface Skip to Build if you aren’t interested in my life story 2020. Building this little Pi cluster has been a journey, one that is not yet over. I plan to catalogue the process here, and share all of the code, 3d-designs, learnings and anything else that comes from it, for all to share. The plan for the cluster is/was to run Kubernetes, something I began learning in my professional work a little while before this project began.

Happy New Year!

This post is a quick one (hopefully) to help those like myself, running Ubuntu on their Raspberry Pi, get access to the vcgencmd tool in order to check things like throttling state, clock frequencies and temperature.

In my previous post “SSH 2-Factor on Linux (RPi)” we enabled OTP as a second factor. That’s a nice step in securing your SSH sessions however it’s not the only step, and in fact is usually not the first.

In this post I’m going to explain a little more about the first factor of two factor authentication for SSH and give a tutorial on using cryptographic key pairs for your first factor instead of using a plain old password.

As always, I try to be as beginner-friendly as possible so if any of the following is obvious, please skip ahead to the tutorial.

In this post I will show how simple it is to enable 2-Factor authentication using a Raspberry Pi, and your smartphone, but this can also be done for other Linux devices and servers too.

Note: I’m going to put a few links in this post to definitions, Wikis and/or articles, feel free to detour there and read more depth about anything of interest that I don’t cover in details here. Most modern devices that connect to the internet require some form of software to run. In home electronic devices such as routers, security cameras and even smart phones this software is also known as firmware.

There are a growing number of devices in the home that connect to the internet, some of the most prolific in terms of remote attack are those designed to give the user access remotely, perhaps from their mobile when they are away from home. Devices such as DVRs (Digital Video Recorders) and security cameras that allow you to check on your home while you’re away, do so by opening a connection out to the internet that you can connect to remotely.

Introduction to DDoS “The Internet of Things” is a popular phrase these days, and whether people know it or not, they probably have devices in their home that would he considered one of these “Things” Recently, a huge number of these devices were exploited globally and used to cripple huge swathes of the internet by way of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. What is DDoS? First let me state what a DDoS is not.

One thing I have always struggled with is finding the time to make backups. You don’t always want to automate this over the internet for various reasons and might want to backup to an external drive that you can stash away safely. Recently I decided that my home git server should be backed up and stored elsewhere, off-site. Making sure to do that regularly can be an effort, particularly so, when you run a headless server.

Recently, I had an issue with my web server, the one hosting this site, where MySQL died. It wasn’t until several (16) hours later, when my Android Email app notified my of failed logins, that I realised there was a problem. For the entirety of this time, anything hosted on this box had been without a database connection, which obviously meant this blog was also down. The first thing that struck me, when wading through the logs to find out what went wrong, was that I had known absolutely nothing about the problem for so long.

Sadly, this post won’t be as image heavy as I like to make them. On it’s own, there is little to show, but the thing that’s really exciting abut this simple library is that it allows me to update Pixel Commander to a point I consider ready to continue the project I’ve spent a long time procrastinating over. Serial commander is intended to be an easy to use, serial command library for controlling your Arduino projects.

With the recent release of the Raspberry Pi B+, I was lucky enough to be working right next to Westminster bridge where the very kind Element 14 were giving out free Raspberry Pi B+ and Ice Cream, both of which I managed to get my hands on, thanks guys! One of the key factors that interested me with the new Pi was its move to more efficient switching regulators instead of the old linear (read: inefficient) ones it had before.

So this story beings quite recently, when, being the ‘noob’ that I am, I reversed the polarity while setting up the Linksprite UART camera ready for another post. Sadly, I had my bench supply set to unlimited current. Well, long story short, the camera is dead. Sad times, because beyond the first post I made about it, I haven’t even had a change to use it yet. Well, having destroyed my latest toy, I thought I’d buy a new one to make up for it.

UPDATE 2016: This project is not dead, but, technology has improved since I started the project and there are now several alternatives; First of all, the APA102 RGB L.E.D is much easier to work with (SPI, so it’ll work on the Raspberry Pi’s non-realtime OS) and also, FastLED is a much better way of managing L.E.Ds Pixel Commander is part of a much larger project I’m currently working on. Its purpose is to allow me to remotely control one of the LED boards shown in the image (the board design will also be open sourced when it is complete).

UPDATE 2016: Sadly this camera died shortly after this first post, so further development was not carried out. Unfortunately, due to the price, and relative capability compared to more modern options (a la Raspberry Pi Camera) I do not intend to replace the camera. Although it was educational while it lasted, it will never be anything more than just that, educational. Here is a small piece of code I threw together with help from the original source from Linksprite allowing me to interface with the Colour UART Camera from an Arduino board, over SoftwareSerial.

UPDATE 2016: I really had to bring this post across to the new site because it amazes me that to this day there are popular apps that still haven’t figured this out. After we have spent years getting used to and developing applications that fit this paradigm of positive-on-the-right, I still have apps I rely on installed on my Nougat (Android 7.0) toting Nexus 6 that not only look hideous on its 1440x2560, 492dpi screen, their dialogs still have positive-selection buttons on the left.

Surface mount soldering if somewhat of an art. Maybe not a fine art, but one that I can appreciate none the less. I have been soldering for the while now, over 10 years (wow that makes me feel old). I’m not sure how much longer than that, because I was only child back then. Surface mount soldering, however, is an entirely new game I have decided to play. How I got there is a long story, perhaps for another time, but needless to say, I realised, I wanted needed, to give it a go.