January 6, 2022

Turning a Raspberry Pi into a Day/Night clock

One of my kids is an early riser. And for the last year, that meant we’re all early risers, regardless of if we’ve gotten enough sleep. So in an effort to have everyone well rested, I’ve put a small 3.5" TFT screen on an unused Raspberry Pi and coded up a simple HTML page, CSS stylesheet and javascript to display a fullscreen clock on boot. In addition, the background of the clock is green when it’s between 7am and 7pm, and red during the night.

September 12, 2021

opengear - ansible role

I have created a simplified version of the Opengear ansible role I’m using in my production DC deployment. See link to the repo below. Opengear’s configuration is a mix of unix and it’s own internal database. To make matters more challenging, the Opengear config format is not really idempotent so you have to watch out when doing tasks like creating new users. So my hack is to essentially overwrite existing users every time I do an ansible playbook run.

September 5, 2021

Creating a Juniper SRX VM for Libvirt/vagrant

I needed to replicate a Juniper SRX firewall to create and test a BGP config for a customer. I could have done this in GNS3/EVE-NG or some other virtual enviornment, but I find that Vagrant/Libvirt gives me the most usability when trying to reuse a setup over time, such as for automated testing. So with that goal in mind, I needed to create a vagrant box of Juniper’s vSRX firewall, but specifically for use with libvirt.