[howTo] Improve piaware results

I noticed I've got drastically better results with piaware ( Raspberry Pi + Flight Aware ADS-B ) by enabling SSH, and upgrading the underlying raspbian packages.

Enable ssh on raspbian:

• Mount the micro-sd on another computer. 
• Create an empty file called "ssh" 
• Boot the Pi
• sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade

Alternatively you can go through flightware and issue an "Upgrade all installed Debian Packages" command. 

My results went from: 18k reports to 50k reports (Fri vs Fri comparison). With no change to antenna placement or hardware. 

Dramatic difference. Pretty obvious when the change was made. 

[howTo] Fix DNS on OpenVPN headless install + (Private Internet Access)

Ran into an issue when getting a headless OpenVPN client working with Private Internet Access. After the connection was up, system could not resolve DNS.

Quick and dirty solution is to add a public nameserver to /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/head

cat /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/head

nameserver 8.8.8.8

There's probably a better way to have OpenVPN get a DNS from PIA, but I'll have work that out later.

 

[howto] Install DokuWiki in Ubuntu 14.04 and nginx on DigitalOcean VPS

This is the base link I used:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-dokuwiki-with-nginx-on-an-ubuntu-12-04-vps

Its slightly old, meant for Ubuntu 12.04. But if you're somewhat familiar with linux and how nginx works, you should have no trouble getting it working.

Comments on the bottom also have changes needed to get it working in 16.04, the next LTS.

[howto] Fix certbot-auto renew failure (404)

Here's how to fix this type of error:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/my-domain-example.com.conf

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Renewing an existing certificate

Performing the following challenges:

http-01 challenge for my-domain-example.com

http-01 challenge for www.my-domain-example.com

Waiting for verification...

Cleaning up challenges

Attempting to renew cert from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/my-domain-example.com.conf produced an unexpected error: Failed authorization procedure. my-domain-example.com (http-01): urn:acme:error:unauthorized :: The client lacks sufficient authorization :: Invalid response from http://my-domain-example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/0s8Ci_55qtap46cwbXbL8uhGRRnf_M7_tkcH1DjObjU: "

404 Not Found

---

", www.my-domain-example.com (http-01): urn:acme:error:unauthorized :: The client lacks sufficient authorization :: Invalid response from http://www.my-domain-example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/3ZwAH4Q5mgHx3hCKty7OYsDHgh9ZiwlgrI-JnSMA6XQ: "

404 Not Found

---

". Skipping.

All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:

  /etc/letsencrypt/live/my-domain-example.com/fullchain.pem (failure)

1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)

IMPORTANT NOTES:

 - The following errors were reported by the server:

   Domain: my-domain-example.com

   Type:   unauthorized

   Detail: Invalid response from

   http://my-domain-example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/:

   "

   

   

   

404 Not Found

   

---

"

   Domain: www.my-domain-example.com

   Type:   unauthorized

   Detail: Invalid response from

   http://www.my-domain-example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/:

   "

   

   

   

404 Not Found

   

---

"

   To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was

   entered correctly and the DNS A record(s) for that domain

   contain(s) the right IP address.

The error is showing that the client is getting a 404 error webpage as a response to its challenge. The reason this seemed to be happening was that I had HSTS on, which prevented the challenge from going through properly.

For me the the answer was to disable SSL for that website. Then run the certbot-auto renew. This allowed the script to renew the certs. Afterwards simply re-enable SSL.

The simplest way for me to disable SSL was to remove the relevant entries in my config file.

/etc/nginx/sites-available/