NodeMCU - Enabling Lua 5.3

I could write this as a 1 line post, but I'm going to pad it out a little.

So, if you've ever used Lua on a NodeMCU device, like an ESP-8266, you know that it defaults to Lua 5.1. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but if you read the whitepaper, you'll see that 5.3 has some neat features. But the question I couldn't find the answer to is: How do you cause the project to compile with Lua 5.3.

Easy IOT with ESP8266 and MicroPython using sockets instead of HTML

The problem I've always had with the ESP8266 was that all of the examples showed wrapping the controls in HTML. So - you'll start up a small web server, then decode the GET from the client and run your control logic from there. I don't like that.

I can see certain advantages, if you want to manually control your outputs from your browser, and you want to actually see the state of your inputs, it's great. Have at it. But I don't want to do that - at least not all  of the time. I want an easy way to read the inputs and control the outputs without having to log in with a browser or use some funky CURL.

Monitoring My Pi Cluster WIth Nagios, Part III - Checking the other Pi's using check_by_ssh

It's been too long since I wrote my other Nagios posts. The server I had running died, and I didn't recover the nagios files from it. Fortunately, I had an AWS machine to compare to, so I didn't lose everything.

Setting up the check_by_ssh checks is, like all of nagios (it seems), a multi-config process. You'll need to modify $NAGIOS_HOME/etc/objects/commands.cfg, $NAGIOS_HOME/etc/nagios.cfg, and $NAGIOS_HOME/etc/servers/<server_name>.

Monitoring My Pi Cluster WIth Nagios, Part II - Adding the Pi's

In Part 1, I compiled Nagios from source, installed it and got it running.

Here,  I'm going to describe how I added my Pi's.

Monitoring My Pi Cluster WIth Nagios, Part 1 - Installing

This will hopefully be Part 1 of the story. BTW - It seems to be pronounced Nah - gee (as in geese) - ose. I installed this on a pine64 to monitor my Pi network (4- Pi3s with MySQL5.7 servers, and 1 Pi2 running Zookeeper) and to learn how to use it.

I know this is going to be like "somebody who's played racquetball 3 times teaching someone else to play for the first time", but here goes:

HT RiffTrax Ator the Fighting Eagle 

Pinebook: Installing Armbian

I just got my Pinebook last week. If you don't know what a Pinebook is: here. I have a couple of pine64's and they are pretty cool. I'm using them as servers, and not using the GPIO or Euler Bus. But the Pinebook is different.

Disclaimer: If you brick your Pinebook, I'm sorry - this is just how I installed Armbian on mine.

Using dhclient to automatically change IP addresses of Raspberry Pi on start-up

So, in my previous post I dealt with changing IP addresses on my Pi cluster by scp'ing the new IP addresses after the Pi had started up and established a network, and creating an ssh/config file from that info.

This is fine for most occasions. But I have one instance set-up to run zookeeper. I'd have to go around and change the config files on all my other Pi's. Ansible could cure this, and I'll get there one of these days. But I'm not there today. And actually - I think I'll use the script I wrote previously to update ansibles' hosts file. I just now thought of that.

Anyway - I want the zookeeper Pi to always have the same address.