Simon Mott

OwnTracks and my Google Timeline

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:47:57 +0000

A while back, a friend showed me an application they had started using called OwnTracks, which periodically sends location updates from your phone to your own server. I used to collect similar location data back in the day via Google Latitude, so the idea of self-hosting my own tracking history intrigued me. Fast forward a few months, and I finally got around to setting it up.

Shortly after, another friend decided to set it up as well and mentioned wanting to import their historical Google Timeline exports into it. I hadn’t even considered that, but I loved the idea of giving it a shot since I had years of location data sitting around. A day or two later, I had my data fully ingested and viewable in OwnTracks, dating all the way back to mid-2010.

The first hurdle I ran into was that iOS Google Maps exports use a different format than the Android versions, requiring me to patch the import script to handle the iOS payload. Using an LLM coding assistant, I threw some sample data at it, and it quickly generated everything OwnTracks needed to ingest the files.

However, I quickly discovered that Google Maps on iOS logs far less granular data than it does on Android. Thankfully, I still had my old Android phone from when Google originally moved Timeline data on-device. That phone contained my complete, detailed history from my Android years up until my switch to iPhone, so I dutifully ingested that data too.

Using ffmpeg's vpp_qsv detail enhancement filter

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 05:04:27 +0000

As part of my last post, I was exploring video transcoding with an Intel Arc GPU and how different levels of ICQ affect video size and quality. During which, I noticed there’s a QSV compatible filter in ffmpeg called vpp_qsv which has a detail parameter. VPP stands for Video Post Processing and the filter help text simply says “enhancement level” for detail. The potential to do some automatic picture enhancements directly on the GPU piqued my interest so I decided to have a play with it.

Transcoding with an Intel Arc GPU

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 18:30:51 +0000

I am a bit of an NVIDIA fanboy when it comes to GPUs. This is partly down to being a long time Linux Desktop user (until recently) and them having excellent drivers allowing me to pretty effortlessly get proper hardware acceleration working.

In my lab environment I have an old Nvidia Quadro P400 that’s set up for various transcoding workloads and its been working absolutely great for me despite being an older card. I have been primarily using the h264 codec but I recently moved over to h265 (hevc) mostly out of curiosity, and to see if I could get quality on-par with h264, whilst getting similar file sizes.

Auto mount LUKS without a filesystem

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 14:52:58 +0000

One of my friends recently installed a new storage server in our shared lab environment and graciously gave me some storage space on it via iSCSI. I use Proxmox for my personal lab, and I intended to store some non-critical VM disks on this new storage so I could play around with properly using HA (High Availability) with Proxmox. Additionally, I wanted to gain some experience using iSCSI at the same time. While I trust my friend, the storage itself is outside of my control, so I figured it would be good practice to encrypt my data. The general go-to solution for this would seem to be LUKS.

A Stratum 1 Time Server - The Basics

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 16:31:06 +0000

A while ago, I decided to play around with trying to create something cheap that would be able to synchronise its time by using GPS instead of over the internet - essentially building my own Stratum 1 time server. I intend this to be a series of articles about NTP and time servers, but let’s start with the basics…

What is a Stratum 1 Time Server?

The lower the “Stratum” number the more accurate the time it should be able to tell. Usually Stratum 1 time servers are directly connected to an accurate source of time such as (but not limited to) Atomic, GPS or even Radio clocks. The stratum of the machine which itself is directly interfacing with the accurate time source would be “Stratum 0”. For each additional layer of NTP servers added, the stratum increases by 1.

So if the server that’s connected directly to the time source is stratum 0, it would appear to any clients who want to synchronise with it as a stratum 1 source. If someone then tries to synchronise to one of those, they would see a stratum 2 source and so on. The image on the right illustrates the top-down increase in stratum and was taken from Wikipedia.

Generally the higher the stratum number, the less-accurate its view of time is. A stratum ranges from stratum 1 all the way to stratum 15 indicating the time is getting further away from a reference clock the higher you go. Stratum 16 indicates the clock is pretty far from the reference and should be considered un-synchronised and should not be used.

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter IPsec performance

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 17:11:16 +0000

I’ve been working on setting up a lab environment for myself and decided to pick up a couple of Ubiquiti’s EdgeRouter 4 routers to act as my core routing devices, along with an EdgeRouter X to act as my out-of-band router. These new devices, along with an EdgeRouter Lite loaned to me for this article by Dom at LoveServers, puts me in a reasonably good position to do some performance testing between these different models of EdgeMAX routers. I thought a good place to start would be to compare how well these different models perform in terms of IPsec throughput and overall CPU usage at the same time.

Part of my lab setup will involve provisioning a couple of IPsec tunnels between the lab and my home network. So whilst this article will mainly focus on IPsec, I will be including some general observations/comparisons between the devices too which may be informative to some people.

Dual-stacking Proxmox Web UI (pveproxy)

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 20:49:59 +0000

As part of my recent (and ongoing) project to implement native IPv6 on my own infrastructure (except at home… I’m looking at you Hyperoptic), I decided to try to dual-stack as much as possible so that when I have IPv6 connectivity, services would prefer that over IPv4, without making things unavailable.

As it turns out, Proxmox’s Web interface (pveproxy) doesn’t listen on the IPv6 address family by default. This stumped me for a little while, but its pretty simple to fix when you know whats going on.

This post is going to spend most of its time explaining why this happens rather than the fix. If you’re just here to see how to do it, check below.

Ethereum Mining with NVIDIA on Linux

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:05:52 +0000

Bitcoin has been getting a lot of attention in the media lately; primarily due to its association with recent high profile ransomware incidents. Bitcoin was first introduced back in 2009 as a digital currency and has been steadily gaining traction since, increasing almost 140% in value so far this year!

Bitcoin however, is not the only player in the game; Ethereum is another popular digital currency, currently sitting at 2nd place in total market value and is getting a lot of activity on currency exchanges.

An incentive to help keep the underlying “network” up and running (for both Ethereum and Bitcoin, amongst others) is a piece of software which can be used to validate transactions on the network and issue rewards for doing so. This is otherwise known as Mining.

My current Gaming PC seems to grab me a reasonable amount of Ethereum Tokens on 2+ year old hardware. Certainly enough to make me want to play around with actually mining some.

Shoehorning Proxmox into mdadm RAID1

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 01:04:30 +0000

My home server has always been somewhat of a Frankenstein’s Monster when it comes to hardware. Until about 2 years ago, it consisted of a large JBOD array of several different drive sizes with no kind of redundancy what-so-ever - for both OS and Data disks. That all changed though when I decided to invest in some 3TB disks and build a “proper” RAID array for my data; Which coincidentally was around the same time my data storage array lost a drive resulting in about 800GB of data-loss - I was unable to source a decent hardware RAID card at the time so I went with Software RAID (mdadm) instead.

The chassis which houses my home server happens to be an old X-Case model that has 10 internal bays, a couple of 5.25" for Optical drives and a 5.25" to 3.5" caddy that seems to be designed for a floppy drive (it has a cut-out at the front for access). I use the floppy slot to house my OS disk and the rest are for my data disks which are all in RAID6 for redundancy. This gives me a total of 11 hard drives in this chassis in its default configuration.

When I rebuilt my server to make use of Proxmox, I put in a known-working drive as the OS drive; It was an old drive at the time but didn’t have much in the way of power on hours so I figured it’d last me a while. Here I am a few years later and the drive is still going, but SMART data is showing some figures that’re making me worried it’s going to start having problems soon so I set about replacing it.

Routed Subnets, rp_filter and arp_ignore

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 20:40:25 +0000

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been quite accustomed to my ISP providing me with an IP block (typically a /29) instead of just a single static IP, but recently I’ve switched to Hyperoptic for their FTTP offering (Because, Gigabit!). Unfortunately, they seem to only offer single IPs for residential service and require you to be on their business package which costs £££ if you want more IPs.

To get around this I decided to try to tunnel some IPs home - My setup is rather complex but I’m going to skip over the specifics for most of it and focus on the issue I was facing - lets ignore how the IPs route around the rest of my network and ultimately end up at the router for now and just look at the rather simplified view below.

Odd behaviour with /etc/mtab being a regular file

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 19:53:35 +0000

One of our customers had recently requested a Bare-Metal Restore (BMR) of one of their servers; which is a pretty routine task for us. However, upon bringing the restored server up I’d noticed some odd behaviour with some of its services, notably snmpd.

Our monitoring successfully polls most metrics that we look for, however fails on getting disk statistics and eventually snmpd just starts timing out. Using snmpbulkwalk I could see that I was getting a response right up until midway through the HOST-RESOURCES MIB. It did look to be hanging on mount points and once snmpbulkwalk had timed out, I couldn’t get a successful response from snmpd again. This was also seemingly affecting MariaDB, preventing it from starting, amongst other things.

Growing my Linux RAID5 array

Sat, 09 Jul 2016 20:00:11 +0000

Recently I’ve needed to expand my RAID5 array by adding another disk. My experience with mdadm since starting to use it back in 2009 was for RAID1 only so I’ve never really needed to actually expand an array and so I thought I’d document the process here for future reference.

This process should in theory work for RAID4 and RAID6 personailities too, not just RAID5.

My array consists of 4x 3TB WD Red NAS drives in RAID5 for a total of ~9TB of space. I’m not going to cover creating of the array here because its mostly the same as RAID1, this instead will cover how to add a new disk to it and subsequent growing of LVM and ext4 to make use of the extra space. You can see how everything is stacked together in the image below.

Slow DNS resolving using bind9 as caching resolver

Sun, 26 Jun 2016 02:30:46 +0000

I currently have 4 DNS servers across my estate and until recently these were all configured to forward all queries to Google DNS (8.8.8.8). I ended up having an issue with Google caching an undesired record value so I opted to change my DNS servers so that they no longer forward queries elsewhere, but instead try to answer it themselves; Doing this gives me slightly more control over my DNS cache.

As I use named (bind9) this was a pretty trivial change - Simply remove the forwarders { 8.8.8.8; }; clause in my configuration and that should be that.

During my post-change testing though I’d noticed that resolution was taking significantly longer for un-cached queries than I’d expect (microsoft.gointeract.io is only used to illustrate my issue):

PHP Handlers and PHP 5 vs 7

Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:39:47 +0000

The idea for this post actually came from observing performance after moving this site over to WordPress (and to a lesser extent, my other website, General Photography). I use Puppet orchestration for my servers and I made the mistake of trying to convert everything to puppet manifests and also get things working how I wanted without fully understanding how puppet works at the same time; That however is another story. This does means that my puppet manifests are not very flexible currently and I use suphp as my main PHP handler just because for me, at the time, it was easier.

That being said - I’m fully aware of the performance issues suphp exhibits because my Observium install used it at first - it now uses mod_php because loading all the graphs was noticably slow. I thought I’d try to quantify the performance differences between suphp and mod_php and decided I should do all 3 common PHP handlers. Whilst I was gathering metrics for this I decided It’d be useful to include PHP7 results too.

Caching with Apache's mod_cache and mod_deflate

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 18:21:49 +0000

I currently work in the hosting industry and as part of my job I have to deal with WordPress on a regular basis and as such I’ve seen how appalling it can be sometimes with regards to page loading times. Given that my content on here doesn’t change all too often, it makes sense to spend the time generating the content only once and serving it to meet multiple requests for the same document. In order to do this one would usually employ some form of caching.

WordPress itself does have the option for multiple caching plugins which integrate nicely but in my experience they still have to pass the request off to a PHP handler which means some processing is still needed to accommodate the request (albeit less than a full page load). For the purposes of this article though, I’m going to assume a generic framework as this technique is not specific to WordPress at all.

There’re a number of software solutions to sit in front of your web server which act as a cache and some of the more notable ones are nginx and varnish and each have their pros and cons (As far as I know, Varnish can’t do native SSL termination yet). For this post though, I’ll be making use of some Apache modules to do the same thing. This was mostly an experiment for myself to see what I could do with it - I’ve found some limitations which as of yet I haven’t been able to work around for lack of knowledge on the inner workings of Apache, but for now It does the job.

Full screen Flash Video on Linux

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 00:01:23 +0000

So here we have it - I’ve finally got around to tackling this issue which has been bugging me for a while.

When watching a flash video in full screen on dual monitors, as soon as you go off to do something else you will soon notice that your video is no longer full screen! How annoying.

The way to fix this is to edit the flash player binary. Firstly you need a hex editor - I use “ghex”

$ sudo apt-get install ghex

You can of course use your hex editor of choice.

UN2400 Mobile Broadband on Ubuntu 11.10

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 09:09:32 +0000

I have a HP Compaq Mini 311c-1030SA netbook with ION. I decided to encrypt it the other day just on the off chance it was stolen that way I would be happy that none of my data would be lost.

It had the orignal OS (Windows XP Home) and Kubuntu Linux in a dual boot configuration. Windows encrypted nicely with TrueCrypt and I decided to start fresh with Linux as the version I had installed was fairly old and as far as I am aware there is no way to on the fly encrypt a currently installed distro.

Lets just say that due to a slip of the hand I somewhat destroyed my encrypted Windows partition! (Foolishly, one of the first things I did when i got the netbook a few years ago was remove the recovery partition for more HDD space too)

This isn’t really a big problem for me as I hardly ever used the Windows install. Here is the clincher though, the netbook has a Qualcomm UN2400 Mobile Broadband chip which requires the firmware to be uploaded to the chip based off what country/carrier you plan on using. This firmware and some of the ppp configuration scripts are installed onto the Windows partition… which I had just destroyed!

VPN Bonding

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:44:22 +0000

This page details step by step how I accomplished aggregating two separate internet connections into one, seemingly single, connection to the Internet. This “single” connection has a greater bandwidth capacity that either of the individual connections could yield. As a side affect this also nicely doubles up as a redundant connection. This method can be used for achieving link aggregation for both home and business users alike for a fraction of the cost of commercial connections / aggregation units available that do the same thing and in theory could be expanded to as many links you like however be warned, the more links there are, the more overheads there will be with tunnelling; thus potentially noticeable drops in speed.

For this demonstration I am using two Virtual Machines via VirtualBox. This enables me to experiment with without cutting my servers off from remote administration. Both machines are running Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS (Lucid) however there is no reason this wont work for other distributions as long as you modify the steps accordingly.

Office 2010, KMS Activation and Domain Relationships

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:33:51 +0000

Whilst this seems trivial to some people, not only did this issue affect my office, but one of our branches in India too so I figure its worth noting somewhere!

My current employer has many operating companies (OpCo’s) dotted around the world, all under one brand. Because of this structure, our OpCo in the UK has a two way trust relationship between our domain and the parent company’s. For arguments sake, lets call them UKNET and CENTRALNET.

At the end of last year we were told to use a Microsoft KMS server hosted on CENTRALNET to install Office 2010 on some of our workstations. Easy.. or so we thought.

LAN Events!

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:14:29 +0000

For those of you that know me fairly well, you would know that over the last 5-6 years i have attended a number of LAN events hosted by MultiPlay.co.uk. Whilst I decided to take a break from the event last year we have jumped back on the band wagon again and are here for this years Spring event, i42.

To be truthful the group of us that agreed to attend this year decided this would be a meet up primarily aimed at coding DMDirc and as yet that coding remains to be seen. For the time being we have succumbed to the usual shenanigans that befalls a LAN event - Lots of junk food, lots of video games, lots of random shouting, “Hax!” or “ROFL!” (Pronounced roffle) as a brief example and general other tom foolery.

Me, myself and I

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 06:49:13 +0000

As you have have discovered, I’m not especially big on blogging. I lead quite a mundane (or at least I think so) life compared to some other people I know. That said I feel I should share at least something new!

I had some advise from a few of my closest peers to which the “jist” was the need to not sit on my arse and at least try to better myself. As of a few days ago I made the decision to look into the possibility of gaining some professional certifications. I am looking to start a career in the IT industry and, partly because of where I live (and my unwillingness to just get up and move) and my lack of industrial experience … its not going very well.

"Nexus One - Web meets Phone"

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:46:21 +0000

On Monday my shiny new Nexus One phone finally arrived!

The phone was ordered on 14th April but with all the recent disruptions to air traffic caused by the icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, delivery of my phone was delayed.

Overall I am really impressed with the phone. It’s a lot more zippy than my older G1 and looks one hell of a lot nicer too. The UI is pretty similar to the G1’s Android 1.6 but there are some significant differences. Most notably are the 2 extra home screens, giving the phone a total of 5 screens instead of 3. The AMOLED is sharp, bright and most importantly, larger which makes a nice change as it is a pleasure to look at. The phone is nicely weighted (not too heavy, not too light) and feels sturdy.

Logical Volume Manager - LVM

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:25:03 +0000

This page covers some of the basics of using LVM. Please ensure that you back up any important data on any had drive or partition you wish to use for LVM.

I take no responsibility for any data loss if you choose to use any of the commands on this page

Installation

For the purposes of this guide, I am using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and the package manager apt but this should work with any installation of LVM

Java Development

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:45:05 +0000

Yesterday, I took my first official steps at attempting to learn Java. It has been on the back of my mind for a long time (since the days of Visual Basic 6) but I have just never settled into it; Yes, I’ve tinkered, but never anything serious.

Thanks to some of my long time friends I now have a place to develop my skills and a place to get assistance as and when I need it. Since early 2007 they have been on-off developing an alternate IRC client for Linux that happens to be cross platform with a wide selection of operating systems due to it being Java based. In my opinion their client has far surpassed any IRC client that I’ve ever come across. If you don’t agree, keep watching, you soon will!

Happy New Year

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:23:22 +0000

Happy new year.

This year has been full of interesting things for all of us and today is the start of yet another. I hope you’re all not too stuffed on turkey as it all goes back to normal Monday, wouldn’t want you falling down the stairs as you cant support yourself! There is lots to be done this year.

OpenSSH

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:49:45 +0000

Here you will find some tips and tricks for OpenSSH that I found useful. Note that the instructions on this page do not cover all the capabilities of OpenSSH and I advise you to use these commands at your own risk.

SSH Aliases

If, like me, you have lots of servers and find it quite tedious to continually type “ssh admin@server1.co.uk” for all your servers, Aliases might be a god send!

To add an alias is really simple. Below is an example of an alias that shortens “ssh admin@server1.co.uk” to “ssh s1” (This can be further shortened with bash aliases which, at present, are not covered here).

Iggy Woes

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:22:27 +0000

I have a pet Iguana called Iggy. Its a female Green Iguana and over the weekend she broke her leg, badly. (See image to the right)

I was in Milton Keynes over the bank holiday weekend with the #MDBot Group (Quakenet). We arrived on Saturday at about midday and we left the next day in the afternoon. Milton Keynes is, on average about 2.5 to 3 hours away from me so leaving at 15:15 meant I wouldn’t get home till early evening.

When I eventually arrived home after having a relaxing 1.5 hour bus journey from Milton Keynes Central to Birmingham International, my pet Iguana did her usual routine of coming over to me to say hello which, in her world means she wants me to make a fuss of her and usually give her some food. After I had spent 5 or so minutes rubbing some dead skin off her back and prepairing some cress for her to munch on, I sat at my computer and proceeded to catch up on some of the TV shows I had missed over the weekend. After a short while I noticed Iggy was climbing down onto the floor (Which isnt unusual, she likes a good wander), as she walked around the side of the desk I saw her leg was the size of a rugby ball…

My Website

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:48:36 +0000

Well, just in case you didn’t realize, this is my website. For the most part it is about myself or things I enjoy. I will use this site to host facts/statistics about me and also things that will, in the future, help me with things I may have forgotten (for example, config files, command arguments for things like iptables etc).

If you find any of these pages useful please feel free to link to them. If you are sad and have no life like me feel free to subscribe to my RSS Feed.