Installing Smart Water Shut Off Valve

I took my smart home journey one step further today. I installed a smart auto water shutoff valve. Wow, what’s that? Well, this device mounts to your main water shutoff valve and automatically open or close it based on your command. Sounds magic! Yes it’s magic. Seriously, we now have Z-Wave devices that do this magic. I bought one such device called “Dome Water Main Shut-Off”. Dome’s device mounts to your main water pipe and …

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Cortana now supports Smart Home integration

I don’t use Cortana very much. I don’t have Cortana powered speakers. I don’t have Cortana app installed on my cellphone and I don’t use any Windows Phones anymore… but one thing that I have and majority of people do is a Windows 10 computer. If you do own that, then Cortana comes installed by default on it and you can actually use it to do some really cool stuff if you happen to have …

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Update: House Electrical Work

Late last year I started updating Electricals in our 1900s Foursquare. Over the 100+ years of this historical house, many families have lived and of course they have done their share of updates to the House’s electrical system. When I began, the house had approx. 70-80% of the wiring in the form of dreaded Knob & Tube wiring. Updates made by previous owners had resulted in a mix of all kinds of wiring – K&T, …

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Fixing Random Samba Share Lockouts Part 2 w/Docker

Continuation of my previous post about fixing random Samba Share lockouts. I discovered that Docker and Samba were fighting to gain access to the folders. If I set the label to samba_share_t, then Docker loses access. If I allow Docker (with “Z” option while running container), then Docker resets the label to “svirt_sandbox_file_t”. How can I make both use it? Turns out there is a solution. Credit to this Serverfault post: https://serverfault.com/a/881098/449814 Create a new …

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Fixing Random Samba Share Lockouts

Ever had Samba shares on CentOS become randomly inaccessible? If so, I might have a cure… Turns out the culprit is (yet) again SELinux. Thank you SELinux for your super sensitive security policies… It turns out that you might have lost extra important SELinux label on the share and sub-folders. Don’t ask me why and how? Perhaps a boot failure or power failure or random act of God?! OK, here’s the solution you are looking …

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