Adventures in Open Source
In the past couple weeks I contributed to a bunch of different open source projects in different ways and I thought I'd write about some of them.
Fetching Node Status from AirPort APs
Seven years ago, I hacked together some code to update my Ecobee WiFi thermostat temperature depending on whether I was home. While my newer Ecobee thermostat has room occupancy sensors that make this tracking automatic, back then I had to poll my WiFi access point through SNMP to look for my phone's MAC address in its table of associated clients.
Recently I needed to do something similar to pass to my Z-Wave controller but it seems that Apple has removed SNMP support from its Airport Extreme firmware some time ago.
Switching from 1Password to Bitwarden
I've been using an OpenBSD laptop as my workstation a lot more lately, probably because most of my hardware just works now and I don't have to think too much about it. The touchpad works when I touch it, I can be confident that when I close the lid, the laptop will fully suspend and then fully resume again when I open it, WiFi works all throughout my house (although it's not terribly fast), and my web browser is fast and stable. What amazing times we live in.
In the past, one thing that frequently kept me going back to my Mac, aside from iOS and Android development, was 1Password. I have a ton of logins for websites and servers, and because my browsers are all configured to clear cookies for most websites after I close their tabs, I need frequent access to passwords synced across my laptops and phones, and 1Password has great apps for all of those except OpenBSD.
Creating a BBS in 2015
Although it fooled nobody, yesterday for April Fools' Day, Lobsters users that normally saw a boring list of story titles and links were greeted with a BBS-style interface to the site complete with story and comment browsing, private message reading and sending, and a multi-user chat area.
The BBS remains active at
https://lobste.rs/bbs (you can login as
"guest").
Counting Pull-ups
I'm a big fan of my Fitbit pedometer because it does most of its work without any interaction. I clip it onto my pocket and it counts my steps and flights of stairs as I walk throughout the day, then automatically, wirelessly uploads the data to Fitbit's website whenever I'm within range of its USB dongle plugged into one of my computers. The whole thing works without having to think about it or plug anything in. The battery lasts for about a week, and when it finally runs low, my low battery notifier sends a message to my phone through Pushover telling me to put it on its charger for a few hours.
To add to my step data, I got a Withings scale last year which logs my weight and BMI on Withings' website automatically every time I step on the scale. Fitbit's website syncs this data from Withings, so now I'm able to track my steps, flights of stairs, weight, and BMI, all automatically, all on Fitbit's website. I use this data mainly as a motivation to walk more and not get fat, just as my Wii Fit motivated me to exercise every day by tracking all of the data. When I know my Fitbit is counting my steps, I'll avoid hopping on the bus or train to get home and just walk. A few times I've left the house and upon noticing my Fitbit wasn't there, walked all the way back and got it just so the steps I was going to take that day would "count".
Building Pushover
On March 7th, 2012, I announced the launch of Pushover, a simple mobile notification service with device clients available for Android and iOS. I kept some notes during the development process, which mostly occurred in the evenings and weekends around my other work.
I had been using Notifo for a year or so to receive push notifications on my phone from my custom network monitor, but last year the free service announced it was shutting down. When I switched back to my Android phone a few months ago, I was unable to download Notifo's Android app which never made it out of beta.
An Ecobee Automation Hack
I've had an Ecobee thermostat in my house and now in my apartment for a number of years. It's a touchscreen thermostat equipped with 802.11 wireless that can be remotely adjusted and monitored from Ecobee's website as well as iPhone and Android applications. While the expected use case might be monitoring the temperature of one's home while at work, I often lazily use the phone applications while at home when I'm too cold to get out of bed to turn the heat up. With some Ruby code and SNMP, I am now able to automatically detect when I am home and when I leave the apartment, and adjust the temperature automatically.
Properly stopping a SIP flood
At about 9am yesterday morning, I noticed on my server monitor that the CPU utilization of one of my servers was abnormally high, in addition to a sustained 1mbit/sec of inbound traffic and 2mbits/sec of outbound traffic. syslog messages from Asterisk showed it to be a SIP brute force attack, so I dropped the offending IP (an Amazon EC2 instance IP) into /etc/idiots to block it and went back to my work.
A while later, I noticed the traffic still hadn't died down, so I reported the incident to Amazon and my server's network provider. No luck on either front; Amazon just sent back a form reply stating the incident was forwarded to the EC2 instance's owner (yeah, seriously) and the network provider said they wouldn't bother adding an ACL to their border equipment unless it was needed to protect their entire network. With the IP blocked on my server, the CPU utilization had died down and it was no longer sending out reply traffic, but I was worried about the inbound garbage traffic counting towards the server's monthly bandwidth cap.