Category: Computing

Apple Smart Keyboard First Impressions

Having just received my Smart Keyboard for my iPad Pro 9,7″, I thought I’d write a little about it. The first thing I was slightly apprehensive about was naturally how it would feel to type on it. The Apple tables in stores don’t really lend themselves to actually testing that aspect realistically. It turns out… Continue reading Apple Smart Keyboard First Impressions

Monitoring Keepalived with SNMP on Ubuntu 14.04

Introduction Using keepalived in combination with a couple of HAProxy instances is a convenient yet powerful way of ensuring high availability of services. Up until now, I’ve considered it enough to monitor the VMs where the services run, and the general availability of a HAProxy listener on the common address. The drawback is that it’s hard to see if… Continue reading Monitoring Keepalived with SNMP on Ubuntu 14.04

Setting up my gaming computer in Ubuntu 16.04

This is really a how-to for my personal hardware setup in case I want to try other distributions or operating systems on my gaming computer down the line. However it may be helpful to anyone who would like to play games or run flight sims in a Linux environment. What? Stranger things have happened!

SSL load balancing with HAProxy in VMWare

So this is a new project I’ve recently finished. Objective Create a secure high availability (HA) load balancing service spreading user load across two pairs of two servers, providing two different sets of services: One service requires SSL passthrough, while the other is a websockets connection over SSL, where the use of a proxy demands SSL termination. Securing communications with the web… Continue reading SSL load balancing with HAProxy in VMWare

OpenVPN 2.x and Windows Firewall

The documentation for OpenVPN is pretty good, but I found a detail that may cause some confusion in a Windows environment, so I thought I’d address it here: What do you do if you need to run OpenVPN but still want the Windows Firewall to work on your Windows server? The background for this issue is how Windows decides what… Continue reading OpenVPN 2.x and Windows Firewall

A new toy

Background My old Nokia N95 8GB drowned when I rode the SaddleSore a month or so ago, so I figured I’d upgrade. And since I was dead tired of the entire Symbian concept, the serious contenders were, of course, Apple and HTC. Since the release of the original iPhone just about an eternity ago, Apple’s… Continue reading A new toy