On 2010 RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) established a distributed platform for Internet measurements called “RIPE Atlas”.
The project consists of multiple hardware devices, called probes, that conduct measurements such as ping and traceroute to specific destinations.
The concept is to hand over RIPE Atlas probes free of change to volunteers, which in turn install them to their networks and contribute a small portion of their bandwidth to the project.
As an incentive, RIPE provides “credits” to volunteers based on their probe uptime. So the more the uptime your probe has, the more the credits you get.
Credits can be redeemed, by creating and conducting custom measurements on the platform.
Currently, more than 11.000 probes have been deployed globally and many network tools have been developed, based on this platform.
One of those probes is hosted on my parent’s house in Heraklion, Crete since 2013.

Few days ago, I noticed that you can enjoy a scenic view of the Attica basin as shown from the foothills of Mount
Penteli via a set of web cameras. In particular, National Observatory of Athens/meteo.gr has installed two cameras on the Penteli Astronomical Station premises.

Five years ago, I had developed an Ansible role that facilitates the
installation and basic configuration of Plesk for Linux. Plesk is a commercial web hosting control
panel and it is widely adopted in various shared web hosting companies.
According to Plesk documentation, the installation process is straightforward; Download and run an installation script locally, that would guide you through the installation process.
By passing some parameters to the installation script, installation is performed unattended.

For the past few months I use Tmux in a daily basis as my terminal multiplexor. It is a very handy tool that solves limitations of screen as well as provides some new features.
I even integrated a tmux session in Guake and completely disable Guake tabs!

When I finally decided to start my personal blog back in 2013, I choose Wordpress as its blogging engine. Despite the fact that there is a big hype with Wordpress right now, I decided that its time to move to a more simpler engine.
In this post, I will explain the reasons for moving from Wordpress to Jekyll and describe my migration experience.

Occasionally, I come to the point where I need to create a Virtual Machine for testing purposes. Either, to check something new (a new version of Plesk or cPanel, for instance) or just create a test environment for my Ansible playbooks. Virtualbox has been removed from my computer completely, in favour of QEMU/KVM. Despite the fact that you can use a GUI application like virt-manager (similar to VirtualBox GUI) to create a VM in KVM, I would prefer a more automated way of creating one.

As far as I know Ubuntu does not have a built-in reminder application. Surely there are some third-party applications that do the job well, but I didn't want to install extra packages etc.
So, I tried to build mine!

Recently, I bought a Samsung 850 Evo 500 GB SSD drive, as an upgrade to my Thinkpad X220. This post is yet another post of installing and aligning SSD partitions in ext4 filesystems.

I use virtualization for various tasks. Either for running photo-editing software in Windows or just run a test CentOS in a safe environment. But for quite a while, for all of my virtualization chores, Virtualbox was the answer when you need something that works really quick. VM management is very easy and you could deploy a VM within seconds. Despite the fact that I use it flawlessly for years, I was tricked into migrating to QEMU. I thought that it is interesting to write down my experience.

I stumbled accross a Sagem F@ST 2404 ADSL modem recently. While I was experimenting with some of its features, I found an interesting feature (or a bug :P) in version 3.21a4