There are plenty of people looking to extract full-length video from their UniFi Protect instances, either for archival purposes, or (as in my case) to create full and multi-day timelapse videos. The iOS app and the web app both allow limited download of video, but the interface to define your clips is clumsy at best, crashy at worst, and in my experience extracting an entire day seems to fail more often than it succeeds. Given these limitations, I went looking for a more robust way to dump video from the devices – read on for my findings.
Continue readingResetting APC AP7920 PDU
I have three APC PDUs – all the AP7920 model, they monitor power consumption and allow remote switching of a bunch of devices in the main rack. Last week I sourced a fourth device to live in the garage comms rack. This came from eBay, and as has been the case with every used device I’d have, it still had old IP config and an unknown username and password set.
So for future-Howard’s benefit: how to reset the password and settings so it can be set up from scratch…
Continue readingConditional DNS on UniFi’s UDM-Pro
A quick How To for getting conditional DNS forwarding working on the UDM-PRO hardware. Before this upgrade I ran a CloudKey Gen 2 controller and a USG-PRO-4 for routing – this allowed me to deploy custom configuration via the config.gateway.json to insert extra options to the running config.
The options I needed were to force the DNS server on the gateway to check against my Active Directory DNS for those entries that arrive with the correct suffix – ad.durdle.com. This allows the lookup of clients from the UniFi’s DHCP lease table as well as AD DNS entries.
The UDM-PRO is a completely different beast from the old controller and gateway, running an entirely different OS. It doesn’t support config via json. So what’s a geek to do?
Continue readingWindows 10, why you no sleep?
A (minor) annoyance of my recent new build Windows 10 machine has been its inability to properly sleep. I’d hit Sleep, it’d go through the motions of spinning down fans and sleeping… and then immediately spring back into life.
I’ve actually put up with this for months, but yesterday spent some time working out what was happening, so for Future Howard’s benefit, here’s how to see what is keeping your machine awake.
Continue reading“Alexa, where are the cats?”
As is well documented, I have a significant number of feline overlords who thanks to multiple Sure Petcare cat flaps can come and go as they please. The new Connected range of cat flaps comes with a web site, iOS app (a thin skin over the same web site) and is built using what appears to be a pretty solid RESTful API. A few months ago I spent a bit of time monitoring the web app to reverse engineer bits of the API, and then built an Alexa skill so that I could ask my house where all the cats are.
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