blog how-to

Fun with Discourse on Docker

Discourse is a popular forum tool available as a self-hosted open-source tool. It can be installed bare-metal on Linux, but the Docker installation is one that I found most interesting. Unlike most Docker-implemented tools, Discourse has a script that runs outside of the docker containers (on your base machine) to set up the tool. This monolithic script (./discourse-setup) seems to do many of the things that docker-compose does, but obviously worse. I’m no fan of doing things this way; especially when the base alternative is nowhere on their site. My challenge this time was to build a basic docker-compose.yml that would get Discourse running in a test environment. Here’s what I did.

how-to

Bridge networking in docker: Assigning static IPs on creation

Docker has been an amazing tool for deploying applications fast, but as I have come to need containers that interacted with each other, the networking aspects have brought some major challenges. I wasn’t a fan of docker’s documentation either. It doesn’t explain the nuances of this process. Namely, I wanted to know how to bring up a container and right from the start assign an IP address. Let me show you how that’s done.

blog how-to
Unifi Ubiquiti Logo

Resetting a Unifi Controller’s admin password

If you use Unifi gear, you know that it can proliferate quite fast. Couple that with cameras, a second network for cameras, and you have a growing need for more Unifi controllers to manage devices. The best approach is to, uhm, unifi controllers into a cloud-based setup – but you can’t always do that. When controllers get isolated on networks, you may find that you’ve lost the administrator password for one. Here’s how you can reset it so long as you have root shell access to the machine running your controller.

blog how-to
"email" by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0

How to gather email addresses from mail and other data to create a list

My problem here was that a client asked needed to extract data from a few disparate sources and build a clean, usable list of email addresses. Certainly, no small feat since some of this would have to come out of an email account itself. I wasn’t even going to benefit from working from contacts either – addresses had to come from the messages themselves. I’m going to describe what I did to get there.

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