Linux Category
Multi-WAN DNS in pfSense
Posted on May 6, 2018 Leave a Comment
Update: I later figured out there are many other places pfSense restarts Unbound, so this is simply not worth the effort. I reversed the changes & moved Unbound to another box and using just DNS forwarder on pfSense — which is used by the Unbound server. Having multiple broadband connections at home, I have a […]
Monitoring your internet connections with OpenWRT and a Telegram Bot
Posted on August 25, 2017 2 Comments
For the past 5 years or so, I have been using a single ISP at home and mobile data for backup when it went down. But since last few months, the ISP service became a bit unreliable – this is more related to the rainy season. Mobile data doesn’t give fiber like constant speeds I […]
Asterisk PJSIP wizard and phone provisioning
Posted on July 20, 2017 5 Comments
So after setting up Asterisk with a working DAHDI configuration for the PBX project, next was configuration for IP phones using PJSIP and provisioning them. Asterisk has a built-in module called res_phoneprov which handles HTTP based phone provisioning but that didn’t work for me – I just couldn’t have it generate XML configuration for the […]
Asterisk PBX with Reliance PRI Line using Digium TE131F
Posted on July 14, 2017 Leave a Comment
So I got an opportunity to set up Asterisk PBX with a Reliance Communications E1 line. I have worked with Asterisk PBX, but without PSTN interfacing. This post is about what all stuff I have done to get a Reliance E1 line with Digium TE131F card. Having explored a lot of other distributions like Fedora, […]
ZFS convert stripe to striped-mirror
Posted on June 22, 2017 Leave a Comment
I’m a huge fan of ZFS because of its performance and other features like snapshots, transparent compression. In fact I had switched to FreeBSD for servers just because it had native ZFS support. But as of Ubuntu 16.04, ZFS is officially supported for non-root partitions. Now I’m migrating a FreeBSD server to Ubuntu 16.04 with […]
SystemD FastCGI multiple processes
Posted on July 9, 2016 5 Comments
Of late, many mainstream distributions have been switching to SystemD as their init system. This includes Debian (since Debian 8) and Ubuntu (since Ubuntu 15.04). In the traditional SysV init system we used to have stuff like spawn-fcgi or custom scripts for starting a FastCGI process and having the web server connect to it over […]
Group based HTTP basic authentication using Nginx and MySQL with help of Lua
Posted on March 8, 2016 2 Comments

Recently I moved from Apache to Nginx on one of my servers due to increase in traffic. But I was using HTTP Basic authentication with group based authorization on Apache in this manner: However, there’s no AuthGroupFile in nginx. But LUA, a programming language is supported in nginx. So here’s how I used LUA and […]
A networking insight from the past
Posted on November 5, 2015 Leave a Comment
An insight into a networking problem thrt I faced seven years ago wrt unable to use Internet on Linux after learning networking and Linux over the years.
CloudFlare Dynamic DNS using OpenWRT
Posted on September 23, 2015 Leave a Comment
I use dynamic DNS for my home internet connection so that I can access the machines from anywhere on the internet. And I use OpenWRT on my router. Earlier I was using Namecheap for managing DNS but I switched to CloudFlare for performance and security reasons of the website. Unfortunately CloudFlare doesn’t support updating IP […]
The Proxy ARP method of routing subnets to solve the docker networking problem
Posted on June 29, 2015 2 Comments
Recently I discovered something called Proxy ARP. I had seen this earlier in sysctl options but never understood it and why would someone need it, until one day I worked in a networking setup which used this to route traffic from the machine to the Internet. It’s an interesting technique and can solve a big […]