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A space for technical experiments and hands-on testing. It collects notes on configuring various systems, from setting up virtual servers and backup routines to monitoring energy production and smart devices. These posts document practical solutions found while tinkering with hardware and software to see how they perform in real-world scenarios.

​The focus is on the trial-and-error process of making different technologies work together. It serves as a personal log of considerations, configurations, scripts, and fixes that might be useful to others facing similar technical challenges. It’s about exploring how things work under the hood and keeping track of what actually works.

MaxMind GeoIP in Apache

Tech Playground
MaxMind GeoIP in Apache
In many web development and system administration scenarios, knowing the geographical origin of a request is essential. Whether you are tailoring content for specific regions, managing security by identifying high-risk ASNs, or simply improving your analytics, moving geolocation logic to the web server level is more efficient than handling it within the application layer. This guide covers how to compile, install, and configure mod_maxminddb to inject GeoIP2 data directly into Apache

VMWare VSphere 5.x/6.x - Ghetto VCB and SMTP firewall rule

Tech Playground
VMWare VSphere 5.x/6.x - Ghetto VCB and SMTP firewall rule
Recently I've been asked to setup some VMWare VSphere servers (free edition) implementing some kind of backup of the virtual machines on a secondary server. The choice for secondary server was Openfiler - compared to FreeNAS (I tested both) looked definitively more robust and stable. I configured all VMWare hosts had a secondary storage (NFS) mounted from Openfiler, to easily perform backups on the Openfiler storage. Setting up the backup scripts was quite easy - you just need to google around

Free email

Tech Playground
Probably everyone has a free email address - someone more than one. And many of us has some very old one, that has become the "official one", the one used to register in our main interests service sites (electricity, phone, ISP provider, social networks,...) and the one all our friends use to communicate with us. And many people are recently facing some "little problem", in handling all communications using web mail. Yes, web mail. Noy many providers give free access to your accounts using POP3

WebCams

Tech Playground
WebCams
Recently I had to work with some IP cameras and surveillance systems, and I played around with software and hardware making some tests here at the company before doing the real stuff. I first got some documentation about the cameras I had here available, some old Intellinet IP cameras 550550 and 550710. They have no mjpeg streaming, and images are accesible using a java or activex plugin. Luckily there's the possibility to use javascript to retreive the images and have a live image from the