Category Archives: Raspberry

Linux, Network, Raspberry

Kiwix – Make Wikipedia anD other websites availAble offline

Leave a comment

In some cases it might be handy to have a website available offline for cases where no internet connection is available.

With Kiwix and the ZIM-package format it’s quite easy to do so. It can easily be run on a Raspberry and made accessible on the local network.

To automate updates of ZIM packages I wrote some little scripts which are available in the following Github repo: https://github.com/fawcs-at/zim-downloader

Information on how to use the scripts can be found in the readme in the GIT repo.

To automate the process of updating ZIM packages once a month the “updateZim.sh” should be added as a cronjob to your crontab:

e.g.: 

#cat /etc/crontab
45 2    1 * *  <username> /<path_to_script>/updateZim.sh

Will start an update on ever 1st day of the month at quarter to 3 in the morning.

Hardware, Network, Raspberry

MIkrotik packet loss (Ping <70%)

1 Comment

Today I experienced an interesting story with my Mikrotik router at home. While updating the PiHole instance the system hat quite some problems obtaining either system updates but also the PiHole update packages. A ping on 9.9.9.9 showed that the Raspberry – on which the PiHole was hosted – had somewhat between 70-80% packet loss. Pinging the same IP from a Windows machine resulted in 0% packet.

All this happened only on wired connections but did not cause any problmes when connected via wifi.

As the Raspberry is directly attached to the Mikrotik router I also tried to connect it via a switch in between as that’s the setup for the windows machine. Same behavior.
Running pings from 3 Linux systems in the network and two Windows systems (even with exchanging network connections to be directly connected to the Mikrotik and connecting through the switch) came up with an interesting result:
All Windows machines had hardly any packet loss in 10 mins (<3%) and all the Linux systems had somewhat between 70%-80% packet loss (tested with a ping).
Any ping that involved the Mikrotik routers L2 functionality seemed to result in packet loss on the Linux machines.
Pinging any other machine on the same subnet worked without problems, but as soon as there was one hob in between the problem occurred.

Interestingly the problem vanished as far as the Torch tool was activated and no more packet loss occurred on any of the systems.

After some additional troubleshooting time (and disabling nearly all Mikrotik-configuration -> Firewall-Rules/Interfaces) the problem seemed to be with the Bridge interface used. It seems that the deactivation of the IP Firewall for the bridge interface caused the problem. After enabling it the behavior vanished and all systems no longer had any packet loss issues.

[admin@MikroTik] /interface bridge settings> /interface bridge settings 
[admin@MikroTik] /interface bridge settings> set use-ip-firewall yes

Hardware, Raspberry, Tools

Flashing NextThing C.H.I.P. with a Raspberry Pi

Leave a comment

Today I somehow bricked my CHIP (I think it wasn’t the wised idea to set the system-target to network_online) as I didn’t get access via serial connection or ssh.
It wasn’t that much of a problem as I wanted to set up the CHIP as a headless system.
So the journey begins (http://docs.getchip.com/chip.html#installing-c-h-i-p-sdk) with setting up Virtual Box + Extension pack and installing vagrant on my Windows 10 (Git was already installed).

After everything was installed I started the VM wich was setup by vagrant and ran the chip-update-firmware.sh script to start the upgrade, but it failed with “Waiting for fel……………………………TIMEOUT”.
The reason was, that regardless of the USB-rules in the Vagrantfile, the CHIP was not available in the VM. Easy to check with “lsusb”. No Big deal – As the VM is available in the VirtualBox Manager we can boot it up from there and just attach the CHIP-USB-Device to the VM.

waiting for fel…OK -> 🙂
BUT:
waiting for fastboot……………………………TIMEOUT
-> 🙁

So, it seems that after the reboot of the CHIP windows is not recognizing it the right way and also has some problems to pass it through to the VM.

I dind’t find a fix for that problem, but reportedly a physical Ubuntu installation should would (regarding to some forum post on the NextThing BBS). Too bad I only have Fedora on a laptop, but no Ubuntu – but I had a Raspberry which i was currently not using, so I gave it a try and it worked out quite nice.

I used a “Jessy lite” and installed the following packages:

[pastacode lang=”bash” manual=”sudo%20apt-get%20install%20android-tools-fastboot%C2%A0u-boot-tools%20u-boot%20cbootimage%C2%A0uuid-dev%20libacl1-dev%20liblzo2-dev%C2%A0libusb-1.0-0-dev%20libusb%2B%2B-dev%20libusb-1.0-0%20libusb-dev%20git%0Agit%20clone%20https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FNextThingCo%2FCHIP-SDK%0Acd%C2%A0CHIP-SDK%0Asudo%20.%2Fsetup_ubuntu1404.sh%0Acd%C2%A0CHIP-Tools%0Asudo%20.%2Fchip-legacy-update.sh%20-f%20-s” message=”Install packages and flash the CHIP” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]
(I don’t think that all the packages are needed, but i got some errors and hence installed everything I thought fix those errors)
After that & a reboot of my CHIP i was able to access it again with:

screen /dev/ttyACM0 115200

 

Linux, Monitoring, Raspberry, Tools, Zabbix

Install Zabbix on Raspberry PI 2

2 Comments

Wouldn’t it be cool to monitor your home? For example all your devices, but also temperature and other sensors an have all that data accessible via a web interfaces?

I think it would so, i thought about setting up Zabbix for home monitoring, but on the RaPi B and B+ it’s not the most performant setup, So i decided to try it again with the PI2.

This post provides a short log on how I set it up.

At first we have to download the source from Zabbix’ SF-page because there is no official package for the ARM-architecture available.

[pastacode lang=”bash” message=”zabbix installation” highlight=”” provider=”manual”]

cd /opt
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/zabbix/ZABBIX%20Latest%20Stable/2.4.6/zabbix-2.4.6.tar.gz?r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zabbix.com%2Fdownload.php&ts=1441447329&use_mirror=skylink^C
mv zabbix-2.4.6.tar.gz\?r\=http\:%2F%2Fwww.zabbix.com%2Fdownload.php zabbix-2.4.6.tar.gz
tar xfvz zabbix-2.4.6.tar.gz
cd zabbix-2.4.6/


#With ./configure --help we can see all the availalbe switches which can be used to compile zabbix.
root@raspberrypi /opt/zabbix-2.4.6 # groupadd zabbix
root@raspberrypi /opt/zabbix-2.4.6 # useradd -g zabbix zabbix
root@raspberrypi /opt/zabbix-2.4.6 # ./configure --help


#I used the follwoing switches to compile the zabbix server and agent, use a MySQL-DB, enable jabber-support, lib-xml2 - which is needed for webmonitoring, net-snmp, ssh and curl which is alos needed for webmonitoring. IPMI can be useful if you also hav a realy server with a BMC to monitor. But for most homeusers the IPMI-option is not neede if you only want to monitor your home and thats it. If you have a LDAP/AD-environment where you want to integrate zabbix you also should use the ldap-switch, but I think most home users also do not have a directory service running at home. ;)

#If this command is run there will ocure some erroes in most cases because there are missing dependencies

./configure --enable-server --enable-agent --with-mysql --with-jabber --with-libxml2 --with-net-snmp --with-ssh2 --with-libcurl


apt-get install apache2 php5-mysql mysql-server mysql-common mysql-utilities libiksemel-dev libiksemel-utils libxml2-dev libxml2-utils libxml2 snmp libsnmp-dev libsnmp-perl libssh2-1-dev libssh2-1 libcurl3 libghc-curl-dev libmysql++-dev php5-gd

#now all dependencies should be resolved
./configure --enable-server --enable-agent --with-mysql --with-jabber --with-libxml2 --with-net-snmp --with-ssh2 --with-libcurl

#copy init scripts
cp /opt/zabbix-2.4.6/misc/init.d/debian/* /etc/init.d/
#copy webfrontend
cp -r /opt/zabbix-2.4.6/frontends/php/* /var/www/zabbix/
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/zabbix/


#create the database
#at first log in to your mysql-server as a root useradd and runn the following commands
mysql -uroot -p
create database zabbix character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;
CREATE USER 'zabbix'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'zabbix';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON zabbix.* TO 'zabbix'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql -uzabbix -pzabbix zabbix < /opt/zabbix-2.4.6/database/mysql/schema.sql
mysql -uzabbix -pzabbix zabbix < /opt/zabbix-2.4.6/database/mysql/images.sql
mysql -uzabbix -pzabbix zabbix < /opt/zabbix-2.4.6/database/mysql/data.sql

#adapt configuration files at /usr/local/etc/ like in the attached examples
#create dircetories for logfiles:
mkdir -p /var/log/zabbix
chown -R zabbix:zabbix /var/log/zabbix/

#create dirs for alert & external scripts 
mkdir -p /var/zabbix/alertscripts
mkdir -p /var/zabbix/externalscripts
chown -R zabbix:zabbix /var/zabbix/


#configure php-settings
vim /etc/php5/apache2filter/php.init
post_max_size = 16M
max_execution_time = 300
max_input_time = 300
#select timezone from http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php and set:
date.timezone = 

#restart/reload webserver to accept changes
service apache2 restart
service zabbix-server restart
service zabbix-agent restart

#open http:///zabbix in browser and finish installation

[/pastacode]

 

zabbix-conf