Doctrine2 Service Provider for Laravel 4
I’ve just released a Laravel 4 package which contains a service provider to the Doctine2 entity manager and the Doctrine2 cache. These are made available via facades named D2EM and D2Cache...
View ArticleDoctrine2 Provider for Laravel 4 Authentication
I’ve just added to the Doctrine2 service provider for Laravel by adding a UserProvider allowing Doctrine2Bridge to provide a driver for Laravel’s authentication system. Simply put – this allows a...
View ArticleVirtual Mail with Ubuntu, Postfix, Dovecot and ViMbAdmin
As part of pushing our new release of ViMbAdmin, I wrote up a mini how-to for setting up a virtual email system on Ubuntu where the components are: Postfix as the SMTP engine; Dovecot for IMAP. POP3,...
View ArticleWell, there goes my day…
I arrived to work this morning to find that the Heartbleed Bug happened. This is one of the biggest security issues to crop up in a long time – allowing the data normally protected by TLS/SSL to be...
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Peering Week Articles on trefor.net
I spent the first few days of St Patrick’s week last month in Leeds at the first of the two annual Euro-IX conferences on behalf of INEX. Trefor Davies, of trefor.net, organised a series of articles...
View ArticleDevelopment Contracts
At Open Solutions, we tend to undertake a lot of fixed price contracts to develop web applications. In fact, clients usually insist on fixed price contracts as they want to know in advance what the...
View ArticleCordova, Facebook, Android and no Eclipse
This post relates to creating an Android application with Facebook support (via phonegap-facebook-plugin using Cordova 3.5 and, specifically, without Eclipse. Most existing documentation expects you to...
View ArticleEmail Templates – Useful Links
Some useful links originating from a repository on today’s GitHub explore: Premailer – “For the best HTML e-mail delivery results, CSS should be inline. This is a huge pain and a simple newsletter...
View ArticleViMbAdmin and Vacation / Out of Office Auto-responders
An FAQ post for future reference because, well, it’s a FAQ! ViMbAdmin is primarily a database frontend for managing virtual mailboxes with mail services such as Postfix and Dovecot. A frequently asked...
View ArticleIXP Manager – Planning for v4
A lot has changed in the 3 to 5 years that the decision was made to use certain libraries / technologies / methods on IXP Manager. In previous major version changes we made some serious architecture...
View ArticleOS X Built-in tftp Server
Turned out to be very useful during a recent RMA maintenance window: sudo launchctl load -F /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist sudo launchctl start com.apple.tftpd The default tftp file path is...
View ArticleNagios Plugin to Check Extreme Networks Devices
Over at INEX we’ve embarked on a forklift upgrade of the primary peering LAN using Extreme Networks Summit x670’s and x460’s. As usual, we need to monitor these 24/7 and we have just written a new...
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Debugging NFS Slowness
During patching for the recent GHOST bug, I updated all packages (including kernel) on a Ubuntu 14.04 file server (filer). This filer provided static content (mainly tens of thousands of images) to a...
View ArticleDoctrine2 Provider for Laravel 5 with Authentication Support
About a year ago, I released a Doctrine2 provider for Laravel 4. We’ve just updated this as a new package for Laravel 5. Full details can be seen in the project’s README.md. This package creates four...
View ArticleMigrate Helpdesk from Cerberus 5 to Zendesk
After seven years of using Cerberus as our helpdesk system at INEX, we decided it was time to upgrade / move on. Following a fairly exhaustive (and painful!) search, we settled on Zendesk as having the...
View ArticlePersonal Profile for INEX
I was asked to write a personal profile for INEX in <= 300 words. Reproduced here. If you want to confuse Barry, ask him where he’s from: born in Cork, spent his formative years in Galway and...
View ArticleA Brief History of IXP Manager
For another INEX project, I was asked to put together a timeline for IXP Manager – an open source application for managing Internet eXchange Points. Reproduced here: IXP Manager was originally a web...
View ArticleLinux (Ubuntu 16.04), PHP and MS SQL
In the many years I’ve been using the traditional LAMP stack, I’ve successfully managed to avoid having anything to do with MS SQL server. Until 2016. This year I’ve had to work quiet a bit with it –...
View ArticleDisk Usage on Windows under Windows\Installer – Useful Tools
Windows usage is mostly an occupational hazard for access to tools such as Microsoft Visio, VMware vSphere, proprietary VPN software, XenCenter, etc. We tend to use it on an as-needed basis via...
View ArticlePhpStorm and Xdebug – macOS / Homebrew
After many years of Sublime Text and, latterly, Atom, I’ve decided to give an integrated IDE another look – this time PhpStorm. I’ve always dropped them in the past as they tended to crash (hello Zend...
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