Custom Builds

Arduino Keyboard Mouse IP KVM with Raspberry Pi, servos and an Orange Pi Zero

This is the page for a project that I started, because I could not find a reasonably priced IP KVM system, that would also have a good chance of the maker providing continuous updates to the firmware. I have used the IPMI system that comes with Supermicro server boards and I remembered that they have a way of powering the machine on and back off. I noticed that not too many people had tried to use servos to press the buttons on a PC, so I decided to give it a try with a test machine and they have been working quite well without dropping off.
 

DataTables Library Example Application in Codeigniter

Here is a Codeigniter build that has had the Paul Zepernick Datatables library added to it, in order to make available a ready made application that shows how to use it.By default the library does not give any help for creating your own links or buttons on the rows, so I have patched it so that custom HTML can be added into each row, with the row id then being applied to any placeholders that are added. There is a sample database included in the resources directory with 100,000 rows, that you can import and use to test the performance. You can download the code at

Snorby with Suricata

With the increase in the number of machines that are being unwittingly used for internet based attacks, it is obvious that businesses will need to have a way of finding out if any of their machines are affected. I had been looking for a while for a solution that is current and receives updates. I had found some old open source solutions, but it seemed as if the authors have gone on to other things and have abandoned the code.

Email Signature Admin

I have a client who has been using HTML signatures for their email for a while, but at first the changes were infrequent, so I made do with editing the HTML files by hand. After a while the changes started to happen more frequently, so I set up a database for the users and used PHPAddEdit to power the form for entering the data into it. Datatables was used to list the users in the database and I have also added links for viewing, deleting and editing the data.

Postfix Groups

Ever since I have been using Postfix as an SMTP service, it has seemed as if there was one thing that it's frontends did not address in a user friendly way. To send an email to a group of people, you would normally have to create an alias file, then edit it by hand. This was ok for a while, but the client then started to ask for the changes more frequently. I had started to use Codeigniter for my web projects, so I realised that it should not be too difficult to put together a frontend, so I coded something up with Codeigniter and Grocery CRUD.

Maia Mailguard

Maia Mailguard is a Spamassasin front end that uses its own version of Amavisd to scan and process incoming and outgoing emails. I have tried looking for other frontends, but they do not seem to be able to match Maia, when it comes to the ease of use for end users. It is not the easiest frontend to install, but it is worth the trouble because of the end user response that I have had from it so far. Spamassassin and the RBL block lists do a good job of stopping most of the spam getting in, but end user participation is still good, for when the spammers switch their techniques.

Fusion Directory

Fusion Directory is a PHP based application that allows you to manage an LDAP directory. Each account can have features enabled or disabled, so if you want to allow a person to have acces to emails, but not to the VPN, then you can individually enable or disable the feature on their account. At the moment it does not support pagination for the users, so it can take a while to scroll through the users, if there are thousands of them, but the developers are working on this for the 1.1 version.