Sending notifications with MQTT and Pushover.net

 Posted on February 16, 2015  (Last modified on April 15, 2015)  |  2 minutes  |  416 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

I’ve improved a bit on my Pushover.net setup, described in this previous article. I started using MQTT, namely the Mosquitto broker for sending data to/from my machines, instead of the old point-to-point setup i was using. MQTT provides publish/subscribe, with messages up to 256MB each. It also features QoS, ranging from 0 - which basically just means the message was sent on the network, to 2, where you have guaranteed delivery of messages to the broker. [Read More]
Python  Monitoring  MQTT  Paho  Pushover.net  Raspberry Pi 

Using Raspberry Pi as a UniFi controller

 Posted on March 9, 2014  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  3 minutes  |  610 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

Despite having had relatively high end network products, I’ve had numerous problems getting maximum performance from the network. Because of this, I’ve recently converted my home network from various consumer products to running mostly Ubiquity products, including EdgeMax Routers and UniFi AP. Part of the UniFi product line is the UniFi Controller, which is an application that sits on your network, and actively monitors your access points. Running it is optional except for various enterprise functions, like guest network hotspot. [Read More]
Ubiquiti  Linux  UniFi  Raspberry Pi 

Realtime login monitoring, Part 2

 Posted on January 24, 2014  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  3 minutes  |  636 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

My original script for monitoring had a few issues. While it worked really well for the actual push notifications, it didn’t seem to be able to survive log files being rotated. I initially settled for a solution where I just scheduled a restart of my service every night after the logfiles rotated, but i hate loose ends, so I rewrote the script, this time using inotify instead of just calling “tail -F” in a subprocess. [Read More]
Linux  Python  Raspberry Pi 

Realtime login monitoring with Pushover

 Posted on September 9, 2013  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  5 minutes  |  939 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

See Part 2. My previous article was about securing your Raspberry Pi and having it alert you via email whenever something suspicious occurred. This time I’m taking it a step further, and adding real time push notifications whenever somebody logs in via ssh. For delivering the notifications I’m using Pushover, which is a generic push service, with clients for both iOS and Android. The app isn’t free, but once you purchase it, the service is free up to 7500 messages per app, per month, which is more than enough for this purpose. [Read More]
Linux  Python  Raspberry Pi 

Securing a collocated Raspberry Pi

 Posted on July 15, 2013  (Last modified on September 11, 2017)  |  18 minutes  |  3704 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

There’s an updated version available of this guide here This is a small guide i wrote for setting up a new Raspberry Pi server hosted at PCExtreme I know there are plenty of guides on how to secure your server, but i wanted this as a recipe for myself. I don’t normally use “cookbooks”, but since setting up a remote server isn’t as trivial as setting up a local server, i felt it was worth creating a list of things to do, afterall if things go wrong you can’t just pull the plug. [Read More]
Linux  Howto  Security  Raspberry Pi