Blog & Posts

Overview This post documents the hardware build of my solar-powered standalone MeshCore repeater. The design prioritises low power consumption, clean RF performance, and weather resistance — running completely unattended on a 10 W solar panel and a single protected 18650 cell. Credits A big thank you to a fellow member Thoren of the MeshCore Rheinland group, who came up with the original idea and pointed me towards exactly the right components....

Meshcore Repeater: DE-KO j3nstastic This is my home repeater for Meshcore. Core Components Component Specs Function RAK19007 Dual carrier board Modular base for WisBlock sensors RAK4631 nRF52840 + SX1262 LoRa 868 MHz core, Bluetooth LE, ARM Cortex-M4 18650 Battery 3.7V 3000mAh Li-Ion > 48h autonomy (no sun) Solar Panel 6V/3W polycrystalline ~1.2A peak charging MPPT Controller 1A TP4056-based Max Power Point Tracking, overcharge protection Technical Highlights Spec Value Frequency 868 MHz EU ISM TX Power 20 dBm Antenna Gain 5....

SSH is a critical service for system administrators, but it is often targeted by brute-force attacks. As part of the Pangolin open-source project, securing your infrastructure is a priority. Beside other security measures like setting e.g. proper firewall rules, we could use crowdsec to scan our auth.log for suspicious behaviours. To additionally secure your hosts ssh access using crowdsec, we’ll have to take a couple of steps. Install local bouncer on your host To be able to react to crowdsec decisions (made in its docker container ;) on host-level, we need to install a remediation component....

This morning I wanted to upgrade my paperless instance on Debian 12 to the latest version 2.14.1. Unfortunately, the installation of the requirements.txt via pip resulted in the following error: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 error: externally-managed-environment × This environment is externally managed ╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to install....

This is just a small fix for you guys facing the following error while consuming new documents in paperless. Due to a vulnerability, the NLTK tokenizer had to be bumped to a recent version. But there seems to be a problem with bare metal installations. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Doc.pdf: The following error occurred while storing document Doc.pdf after parsing: ********************************************************************** Resource punkt_tab not found....

That’s a short one for Unifi (I’m on Network version 8.1.113) users struggling with the connection between the Home Assistant Bridge and Apple Homekit. In my installation, the connection attempt constantly ran into a timeout. First of all make sure the port of the HASS Bridge is enabled in your firewall rules. In my case it’s port 21064, which should be the default one. In your Network settings, enable Multicast DNS and IGMP Snooping for the involved VLANs:...

The Bike At the beginning of 2023, I decided to buy a new e-bike. My old Canyon Neuron:ON was to remain at my parents home as a second bike. My requirements for the bike were relatively simple. A trail bike with an upright, relaxed riding position, modern geometry and enough potential to be able to take on the occasional rough trail. In terms of equipment, it should therefore have decent components, without claiming to be a performance bike or for posing at the ice cream parlor 😄...

Maybe it will help some of you, but I just had an error updating 2.8.0 on my bare metal Paperless NGX instance. When trying to migrate the changes, the following error occured: Conversion between UTF8 and SQL_ASCII is not supported In fact, my Postgres database was set to SQL_ASCII instead of UTF-8, so it helped to rebuild the database. Make sure to backup/snapshot everything in case something goes wrong, I managed to kill my instance while fiddling around with this 😄...

If you’re an avid user of the open-source image library Photoprism, you know how convenient and powerful it can be for managing and organizing your photo collection. However, keeping your library indexed and up to date manually can be a tedious task. Thankfully, with a simple cronjob in Linux, you can automate the indexing process and ensure your Photoprism library stays current without any manual intervention. Indexing with Cron Create the shell-script auto_index....

For anyone who struggles to get into their Ubiquity CloudKey Gen2 via SSH… There are a bunch of forum posts swarming around offering a wide variety of options. ubnt/ubnt, root/ubnt… For me, using version “UniFi OS UCK G2 Plus 3.1.9” the following combination worked: Setup the SSH password in the CloudKey: Now you could use the username root and the password you just setup to SSH into your CloudKey: