IT Accountability: Avoiding Murphy

Amongst technology experts, Murphy is someone we all try to avoid.  Murphy's Law states "Anything that can go wrong, will".  Every IT person has met Murphy, regardless of how hard they try to not meet him.  We try to avoid Murphy through many methods, some work and some don't.  Recently I've been doing a lot of research on a certain type of historical events that should give all IT professionals some tools to potentially reduce their chances of running into the problematic Mr. Murphy.  Even if history does not directly relate to the IT field, we can still learn from it.  (I promise to keep the history lessons to a minimum!)

Crown Molding Nightlight Tour

Due to popular demand, I made a video about the nightlights I made inside the crown molding in our new nursery and bathrooms.  I cover all the parts and pieces and how I did it all.  Check it out!

OpenHAB and LIRC - An Easy Guide: RasLIRC

I've been working on our new home office, and part of the design includes a lot of electronic bells and whistles (shocker, right?)  Well all those bells and whistles need a way to control them.  I already use OpenHAB for my home automation, so it seemed like a good fit to expand that into the office.  However the documentation out on the InterWebs for integrating IR devices via LIRC was spotty.  So I saw the gap, and filled it!

ZoneMinder and Multiple OS's

As I'm working through my ZoneMinder setup (and more posts are coming), I ran into a capacity issue.  I thought it'd be a good time to do a bake-off between ZoneMinder on Ubuntu/Linux vs FreeBSD.  This wasn't as easy as I thought...

VPNs - A Routing Warning

VPNs are great things.  They allow secure remote access to your resources, either for your home or your job.  At work the solution is simple to use because typically someone else sets it up for you.  But if you are that person that does the setup (either at home or if you're the "network person" at work), VPNs can be complex.  I'd like to cover a quick thing to watch out for targeted at small VPNs, especially since I talked about VPNs in a previous ZoneMinder article.

ZoneMinder Sample Infrastructure

So far I've been talking about how to configure ZoneMinder to do certain things.  I haven't said anything about what the ZoneMinder topology looks like.  ZoneMinder can be setup many different ways, but I'm going to stick to the simplest way for the purposes of this post.

Basic Security with ZoneMinder

ZoneMinder "out of the box" is setup with the most basic of features configured and simple to get going.  And security is never simple, so by default ZoneMinder is configured to be wide open to anyone who accesses the URL.  As I'm sure you've probably noticed.  In this post I'll cover some of the basics of ZoneMinder authentication, as well as some additional ideas on securing a ZoneMinder setup.