How to extend the runtime of your Inverter battery

How to extend the runtime of your Inverter battery

Comments 0 Comment

Like countless other people in South Africa, I have invested in an Inverter with a Lithium battery. The battery is a significant part of this investment, so it is essential to get as much runtime out of a single charge as possible.

My inverter is connected to my DB board, meaning all the sockets and appliances in my house are powered by the inverter during a power outage, which, in South Africa, happens frequently and for hours at a time.

Having “always on” power in all the sockets is great and super convenient, but not always smart. As winter encroaches, we start plugging in appliances that draw substantial amounts of power, like electric heaters and blankets. Some electric heaters can draw up to 2 kilowatts of power per hour. Given that the typical inverter system is paired to a 5-kilowatt battery, which means a single electric heater can almost drain the entire capacity in just two hours.

To solve this problem, I built a “smart extension cord” that turns off when the power fails and turns back on once the power returns.

…

Read More Read More

Boosting Your Network Security and Performance with Radius Proxy Servers

Boosting Your Network Security and Performance with Radius Proxy Servers

Comments 0 Comment

Are you looking for a way to improve your organisation’s network authentication security, reliability, and performance? Look no further than radius proxy servers! By sitting between the client and radius server, these servers provide an additional layer of protection, help prevent attacks, and improve redundancy, scalability, and performance. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the benefits of using radius proxy servers and why they should be a crucial part of your IT infrastructure.

Radius servers are essential to many organisations’ IT infrastructure, providing a central point for managing network access and authentication. However, as with any critical component of an IT system, there are potential risks associated with relying solely on a single radius server. This is where the use of radius proxy servers comes in.

…

Read More Read More

Managing IT complexity through simplicity

Managing IT complexity through simplicity

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve always been obsessed with the details. Whether it’s coding, cycling or carpentry, the detail is where my mind wanders first.

I see this as a sort of superpower, as the detail is complex, and has many moving parts. Making sense of the overwhelming noise the detail creates is where even the brave fear to tread.

But over time I have come to gain another perspective. Painting the big picture is the purest form of technological art.

…

Read More Read More

Boosting Availability and Performance: How to Load Balance a Node API Gateway with Docker

Boosting Availability and Performance: How to Load Balance a Node API Gateway with Docker

Comments 0 Comment

Load balancing is an important technique for scaling web applications and ensuring their reliability and availability. In a microservices architecture, a common pattern is to use an API gateway to route incoming requests to the appropriate service instances. However, as the traffic grows, a single API gateway instance may become a bottleneck and a single point of failure. To avoid these issues, we can use multiple API gateway instances and distribute the traffic among them using a load balancer.

In this post, we’ll explore how to set up a load-balanced API gateway using Node.js and Docker. We’ll use Docker Compose to define multiple instances of the API gateway and a load balancer, and we’ll configure the load balancer to distribute the traffic among the instances using a round-robin algorithm.

…

Read More Read More

Changing Cybersecurity Attack Vectors: How to Stay Ahead of the Shapeshifting Threats

Changing Cybersecurity Attack Vectors: How to Stay Ahead of the Shapeshifting Threats

Comments 0 Comment
Cyber criminals are hiding in plain sight

Cybersecurity has become a critical concern for businesses and individuals alike, as the world becomes more interconnected through technology. With the proliferation of new technologies and innovations, the attack vectors used by cybercriminals are constantly changing. What are the most significant changes to cyber security attack vectors and what do they mean for the safety of digital assets?

  1. The Rise of Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware attacks are a type of malware that encrypts a victim’s files, making them inaccessible. The attacker demands a ransom payment in exchange for the decryption key to restore the files. Ransomware attacks have become increasingly common in recent years, with many high-profile incidents making headlines. These attacks have the potential to cause significant financial losses and business disruption, regardless of wether data backups are available or not.

…

Read More Read More

FreeRADIUS high availability Made possible with NGINX Load Balancing

FreeRADIUS high availability Made possible with NGINX Load Balancing

Comments 0 Comment

FreeRADIUS is a popular open-source RADIUS server that provides centralized AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) services for network access. It can handle a large number of concurrent sessions and can be used for various purposes, including wireless network authentication and VPN access.

In my previous post, I talked about how to build a high-performance and high-availability radius cluster. Using NGINX for load balancing is core to that design.

Load balancing is a crucial aspect of any network infrastructure, and it is even more critical when it comes to authentication and authorization systems like FreeRADIUS, where unavailability can result in the inability to connect to key networks or systems. Load balancing helps distribute the workload across multiple servers, improving performance and ensuring high availability.

…

Read More Read More

Cloud RADIUS: How to Build a Highly-Available and Secure Authentication Cluster

Cloud RADIUS: How to Build a Highly-Available and Secure Authentication Cluster

Comments 0 Comment

Creating a high availability (HA) RADIUS cluster in the cloud is a complex but crucial step for ensuring that your network authentication and authorization services are always available to your customers. In this blog post, I will discuss the right way to create a HA RADIUS cluster in the cloud.

High availability RADIUS cluster
…

Read More Read More

ChatGPT – My 10 AI principles – a compass for the new world

ChatGPT – My 10 AI principles – a compass for the new world

Comments 0 Comment

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm and has accumulated millions of users in just a few weeks. Boardrooms all over the world are scurrying to find ways to integrate it into their daily operations, with the hope that it will save them time and money, and probably people too. 

What is chatGPT? 

ChatGPT is a program that uses advanced computer techniques to understand and respond to human language. It’s been trained on a large amount of text data and can answer questions, generate text and do other language-related tasks. Think of it as a virtual assistant that can understand and respond to natural language. It’s like a computer version of a human who can understand and respond to written or spoken language. 

Why is it so popular? 

ChatGPT is a popular language model because it has been trained on a large dataset of conversational text, which allows it to generate human-like responses to a wide range of topics. Additionally, its ability to generate text in a specific style or tone makes it useful for a variety of applications such as language translation, question answering, and text completion. Its ability to generate text in a specific style or tone makes it useful for a variety of applications such as language translation, question answering, and text completion. 

Where do we go from here?

…

Read More Read More

AI coder
Is ChatGPT really your new coder?

Is ChatGPT really your new coder?

Comments 0 Comment

ChatGPT is all the hype these days. Everyone is going on about how awesome it is and how it will take over the world. But is it really up to the hype? Can it take over my job as a developer today?

Using AI to aid in software development is not new. GitHub copilot is already well entrenched and speeds up development by predicting what you want to type next. It works, but it is not really that smart. So is ChatGPT the smart coder we’ve been waiting for?

…

Read More Read More

OpenAI
ChatGPT: Is it really the Future of Business Communication?

ChatGPT: Is it really the Future of Business Communication?

Comments 0 Comment

Are you tired of wasting time on mundane and repetitive tasks like responding to customer inquiries or creating marketing content? If so, then ChatGPT may be just the solution you’ve been looking for. In this blog post, we’ll explore what ChatGPT is, how it can be used by businesses to save time and resources, and the potential pitfalls of relying on this type of technology. Read on to find out more about the exciting possibilities of ChatGPT for your business, but be careful where you tread.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses a type of artificial intelligence called a language model to generate human-like responses to user input. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) model, which was developed by OpenAI and has achieved state-of-the-art results in a number of natural language processing tasks.

So why all the hype? How can it help my business?

…

Read More Read More