iPhone / iPad / iOS / MacOS one way SMS

I recently upgraded my iPhone, and upon doing so it was shortly apparent that while my other devices were still receiving SMS forwarding, they could not reply/send SMS. iMessage worked fine, and after a frustrating number of things tried to resolve the issue. The one that did it for me was simply;

Open Settings -> Messages on your iPhone

On the Use iMessage toggle, toggle it to Off/Disable it.

Reboot your iPhone ( with iMessage still disabled )

Upon your phone coming back up, unlock it, go back to settings -> Messages, re-enable iMessage and wait about 60 seconds. SMS sending should now work from your other devices.

Sigh. That was frustrating and so simple to fix.

LED Rope Lighting / Alexa

I’ve had a few people ask me about this so, I figured I would write an article on what I used to do it.

Parts List:

Zigbee/Zwave Controller: I utilize a SmartThings hub ( now Aeotec ) but you can use anything that is compatible with Zigbee/Zwave if you already have a hub.

RGBW Controller: I used a monoprice 136511 but it looks like maybe they aren’t making these any more or are sold out? Any RGBW controller that is Z-Wave or Zigbee will work, just make sure it supports enough amperage to power your LED strips, depending on length, this can be up to 20 Amps.

LED Power Supply: Now this depends on your LED length and voltage, I used 12VDC 16′ light sections from Amazon for the big ceiling, these are three of those strips connected together. As such I need quite a bit of amperage at 12VDC, so I chose a hard wired PSU which I added a cooling fan to the top of.

For our shorter runs, we used standard power brick style PSUs. Although you could use this style for both, it has enough power capability.

LED Strips: I chose generic RGBWW ( Warm White ) LED strips that are pretty cheap with an adhesive backing to them.

Installation:

Installation is fairly simple if you hare hand and know basic electrical skills.

Power supply to the RGBW controller, controller to the LED light strip(s).

Generally, once the controller is powered the hub you have will see it and you’ll be able to adopt it and it basically just works from there, I’m not going to go into detail on this step because the variations depending upon your devices is limitless but, as long as they speak the same protocol(s): Z-Wave or Zigbee, you should have no issues.

We used multiple controllers, one for each set of LEDs so that they could be controlled individually, with things like SmartThings and Alexa you can group them so if you want them to change together they can, or they can be told to change independently, the flexibility is yours.

We have fantastic ceilings that have a great place to hide the lights behind some crown moulding, and we couldn’t be happier with the results, this is 2-years into these being in service and being used every day and they all still work perfectly:

The green around the fan is one controller, and one adjoined long set of RGBWW LEDs.

The red around the TV and above it are another set of two LED strips connected with a longer extension but controlled by the same controller.

The white gap on the left above the fireplace is our dining room on another controller. We also have started adding them underneath our cabinets in the kitchen although that project has stalled a bit lol.

Rev.IO and Netbox…

Rev.IO has kind of a terrible asset management interface, (and they’ve killed their WWW subdomain without a redirect,… but that’s another rant) but we’ve chosen it due to its ability to handle MSP billing, so while it’s not ideal it’s something that my team has to work with.

So our first task was taking all of the Inventory that was in Rev.IO which as been transitioned into being our asset management platform as well since inventory is tracked in Rev.IO for billing purposes it does not make sense to use another platform given our small volume. The issue lies in how Rev.IO does its asset management and that is that you cannot tie an asset to a physical location. You can add multiple sites, but cannot associate an inventory item to a physical location. This is where Netbox comes in for us, since we have all of our physical locations in Netbox, we can associate an asset tag ID and asset ID from Rev.IO to a physical location or customer.

Here is what I did, with Python, to make this work;

First, we have to ensure that we import all of our customers from Rev.IO into Netbox, now we have two issues with Rev.IO here. Their documentation indicates that the ALL flag will get you all customer status’ – OPEN, CLOSED, PENDING etc… this is untrue, you must run each individually to get them all, the ALL flag, returns 0.

We created a custom_field in Netbox called revio that is the customer_id from Rev.io to allow pivoting on that id.

#!/usr/bin/python
import requests
import json
import argparse
import sys
import re

#Get customer list from Rev.IO and ensure they are all in Netbox
        r_parms = {"search.page_size":"100000","search.status":"OPEN"}
        response = requests.request("GET", url + "Customers", headers=headers, params=r_parms)
        netbox_r = requests.request("GET", netbox + "tenancy/tenants/?limit=10000", headers=netbox_h)
        #Read JSON in response
        data = response.json()
        #Read JSON in netbox
        netbox_d = netbox_r.json()
        #Iterate over JSON
        customercount = 0
        for i in data['records']:
                customercount += 1
                revio_id = i['customer_id']
                netbox_hasit = False
                for n in netbox_d['results']:
                        if n['custom_fields']['revio'] == revio_id:
                                netbox_hasit = True
                                break
                if not netbox_hasit:
                        print("No Netbox entry for " + i['service_address']['company_name'] + " - " + str(revio_id) + "Adding it")
			netbox_name = i['service_address']['company_name']
			netbox_slug = re.sub('[!@#$\'\".,&()]', '', netbox_name)
			netbox_slug = netbox_slug.replace("/", "-")
			netbox_p = {'name': netbox_slug, 'slug': netbox_slug.replace(" ", "-"), 'custom_fields': {'revio':revio_id}}
			sc = requests.post(netbox + "tenancy/tenants/", json=netbox_p, headers=netbox_h)
			print(sc.text)

The above will check Netbox for existing customers (tenants) that have the matching custom_field value and if not, add them. Again, you have to change the parms value from OPEN to CLOSED etc. to get everyone.

More to follow in a later post.

HashiCorp Vault

This is more of just a quick note to remember some things for the LDAP configuration when NOT using Microsoft AD.

For OpenLDAP/FreeIPA, this is what you need for correct group listing/membership-

Group Filter: (|(memberUid={{.Username}})(member={{.UserDN}})(uniqueMember={{.UserDN}}))
Group Attribute: cn
Group DN: cn=groups,cn=accounts,dc=<your domain>,dc=<your suffix>

Oxidized Container via Podman

I hadn’t really dived into familiarizing myself with Podman however, it does offer some really unique advantages over say Docker. Firstly, Docker requires that you run a daemon to manage your containers whilst Podman can start individual containers at boot via systemd. This is a huge benefit and so it looks like I’ll be moving most of my Docker containers over to Podman management. Podman is very easy to understand since… if you understand Docker, you understand Podman, the commands are even the same.

So on to Oxidized which is a RANCID replacement ( thank god ). It has a great community around it and support for lots and lots of different device types and works great with Gitlab.

So the important part for me was to get the systemd script setup for Oxidized, and here’s what that looks like;

more /etc/systemd/system/oxidized.service 
[Unit]
Description=Podman container-oxidized.service
Documentation=man:podman-generate-systemd(1)
Wants=network.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/usr/bin/podman start oxidized
ExecStop=/usr/bin/podman stop -t 10 oxidized
ExecStopPost=/bin/rm -rf /etc/oxidized/pid
KillMode=none
Type=forking
PIDFile=/var/run/containers/storage/overlay-containers/.../userdata/conmon.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The command to initially generate this was;

podman generate systemd --name oxidized

However we have to enable Podman to also remove the .pid from Oxidized as sometimes that is not cleanly resolved so that is why;

ExecStopPost=/bin/rm -rf /etc/oxidized/pid

Has been added, finally save this file to say;

/etc/systemd/system/oxidized.service

And enable/start it via systemctl;

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable oxidized
systemctl start oxidized

Site Back

Well this site is back, my career took me away for a while but I’m moving back into the FOSS space a bit and so hopefully we can get this updated.

Also it’s now running on an RPI 4B instead of a standard server which I guess is neat.. but in reality it’s just, you don’t need to burn the extra power these days even if you want to host your own site.