Category: Linux Mint

Centralizing Certificate Management of LetsEncrypt with a Raspberry PI

Lets Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). At the time of writing it’s currently in Beta and is due to go public in December 2015.

Update: Lets Encrypt went into public -beta on December 3 2015. I have updated this article with the minor change needed to work with the live servers.

Now in the default mode, the standard Lets Encrypt client (it’s not the only one) can manage this automatically – however it’s not ideal if you have more than one server.

What I describe here is how to centralize managing certificate registration (& later renewal) on a central machine. When a certificate is then registered or renewed we can then copy the certs to the remote servers.

Continue reading “Centralizing Certificate Management of LetsEncrypt with a Raspberry PI”

Setting up a Weather WebCam on Linux

Weather webcams are always popular and it is easy and free to set one up yourself.  This article will show how to setup a simple USB webcam to produce still images and serve them on a local apache webserver.

Continue reading “Setting up a Weather WebCam on Linux”

Formatting xml in emacs

I had this problem of debugging some xml but when reading the output of some log4j it was almost impossible to read so I needed some way of prettifying the xml quickly.

For this example I have the following xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?><xml><iq xmlns="jabber:component:accept" from="test1@temp.retep.org/client" id="iq_257" to="service.retep.org" type="get"><query xmlns="some:namespace"/></iq></xml>

So how do we pretify this in emacs?

Well the first thing to do is to write an extension function & place it into your ~/.emacs file. Placing it here means that when you open emacs the extension is available:

(defun xml-format ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (shell-command-on-region (mark) (point) "xmllint --format -" (buffer-name) t)
  )
)

Now this works by passing the buffer to the xmllint utility and replaces it with the output – in this case nicely formatted xml.

Now we need to install xmllint:

pi@lindesfarne: ~$ sudo apt-get install libxml2-utils

Ok so now open emacs and open the xml. To format first select the xml you want to format then Press Escape then x followed by xml-format & press return. You should then get the xml nicely formatted:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xml>
  <iq xmlns="jabber:component:accept" from="test1@temp.retep.org/client" id="iq_257" to="service.retep.org" type="get">
    <query xmlns="some:namespace"/>
  </iq>
</xml>
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