Ping-based Host Monitoring Script with Timestamps

In my previous post Server availability monitoring with email notifications I've used the same idea of monitoring. This script is a version 2.0 with some additional features:

1. If you compare old and new version, you'll notice the script was completely rewritten. It's because I wanted it to run on my synology NAS.
2. Next change is additional host states, instead of A-available and N-notAvailable I'm now using 2 additional states Going Up, Going Down. This will delay the notification about host state change and prevent frequent flapping of naughty hosts in network.
3. Last feature added is hosts UP/DOWN times in notifications; see mail notification example:

SSH Two Factor Authentication for RaspberryPi

Another cool feature for your remote ssh connection - 2-factor authentication or 2-step verification. It helps to improve security for remote access to your machine and it is pretty simple to setup, you can get it up and running in just a few minutes...

autofs: automount nfs share

This small tool is designed to mount various types of filesystems, not only NFS shares. It watches for when you try to access defined mount point and auto-mount it right away. Then after specified timeout, it will unmount them.
Advantage: if you have many NFS clients, you may want to reduce active connections to the server and improve overall performance of the server. Or perhaps you are too lazy to mount NFS, as I am and just give it to the hands of autofs (:

LUKS Containers

This post demostrates how to create LUKS encrypted container. Basically I followed these steps to create and mount such a container.

To sum up for TLDR persons (: here are the few basic steps you have to follow:

Clonezilla: Boot from EFI

In this post, I show how to boot clonezilla (iso) from EFI bootloader (Clover) or from USB key with syslinux. You may be familiar with my previous post Boot iso image from GRUB2 or Clonezilla UEFI boot.
This time I have slightly different use case:

• I have working EFI partition with Clover BootLoader on my laptop
• I needed to add Clonezilla to Clover menu, to be able to boot from my HDD

XFCE: some KDE icons are not shown

I've noticed that some icons in KDE Applications are not shown, or replaced by other icons from default gnome set. Solution should be to change icons in the XFCE setting, but if it doesn't work, you can try setting them with gconftool:

gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /desktop/gnome/interface/buttons_have_icons true
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons true

Making Palemoon your default Browser

Weather you are using some weird DE/WM combination, or setting Palemoon as default browser simply does not work, you can try to create following files, to set it up...