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Compiling open-zwave-control-panel on a Raspberry Pi 3

I've recently started diving into home automation stuff, and of course immediately ran into issues. I purchased a z-wave water sensor and planned to use Home Assistant to monitor the sensor and send me alerts (via pushover) if it detects water. While getting HA installed was quick and easy, the trouble began when I tried to actually read from the sensor. I could see in the OZW_Log.txt log file that the system was receiving data, but the HA log had no event information.

Compiling Bitcoin on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)

In case you don't know, Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency or as the site says a "peer-to-peer network based digital currency". While most people have been content to use the pre-compiled binaries available, some of us prefer to compile the client from source, for various reasons. Personally, I maintain a repository on github because I like using a number of patches that various programmers have put forth in the Bitcoin community. Whatever your reason for compiling from source, you have likely run into issues with compiling the graphical client since it requires the development version of wxWidgets. After a whole lot of failed attempts to compile the Bitcoin client I finally found a working configuration.

Firefox 3.5: Impatiently Waiting

In case you have been living under a rock, Firefox 3.5 came out today (well technically yesterday). I've noticed a lot of people wondering how they can get it running smoothly on Ubuntu. Never fear, after much trial and error (a lot of error) I've found what I think should be the easiest way to install the latest version of Firefox. So if you are just as impatient as I am, you can rejoice in the all the cool new features.

Tweaking Nagios For Performance

The company I work for has about 3,000 servers that need to be monitored in our Dallas datacenter. For the past few years we've been using a fairly standard Nagios setup. If you don't take the time to really learn Nagios and tweak the config files it'll run fairly well, until you are monitoring more then a few hundred servers. The reason that Nagios slows down when checking 300+ servers is that it stores all state/check information in a flat text file on the system's hard drive. When you have only a few servers and services to check it's not so bad, but when you the more you add, the more IOPS you'll see. At 3,000 servers disk IO is a huge bottleneck.