Tutorials

This is the seventh and final part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This section deals with firewall configuration. Here you will find Uncomplicated Fire Wall (UFW) and iptables rules to prevent transmission from sending traffic using your normal wifi interface, as well as a few extra rules to secure the server against traffic from the VPN side.

This is the sixth part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This section covers configuration of an openvpn client connection to an external server, to anonymise traffic to and from the Kodi box and prevent bandwidth throttling of torrent traffic by your ISP. You will also find some additional configuration to ensure the VPN does not break secure SSH connections from the public internet via your router, and some scripts to make sure Transmission binds to the local IP address of the VPN interface (so it doesn't try and send traffic out over your public connection if the VPN goes down).

This is the fifth part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This section covers Transmission daemon's installation and configuration, and some tips for controlling it using the commandline as well as enabling administration on the local network using the web interface.

This is the fourth part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

This is the third part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This part of the tutorial sets out a few different methods I've tried for auto-mounting known external hard drives, and the working solution I arrived at. My hard drives contain the media files in my library, so I need them to be mounted at consistent locations to avoid breaking Kodi's file indexing and the NFS shares.

This is the second part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This part of the tutorial concerns the use of the Network File System (NFS) protocol for sharing files on your network.

This is the first part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This part of the tutorial deals with basic Kodi installation and network configuration for the server. It sets out some basic configuration to get the system to load Kodi straight away when it boots up, make the media database available to other Kodi clients on the network, enabling the power menu within Kodi's interface, and making sure automatic updates are enabled.

Sometimes when I'm learning I like to print source code on paper because I find it easier to read, and nicer to annotate. I had a rummage online to see if anyone had come up with a nice way to generate PDFs of source code, and improved what I found into this useful BASH script. The script searches for source code in the current directory and its subdirectories, and uses the typesetting software LaTeX to create a PDF of the contents with syntax highlighting.

This is part 2 of a 2 part tutorial on Prosody, which will show you how to install and configure extra modules to extend prosody's functionality. Part 1, which deals with basic installation and testing of prosody, is here. Here's an overview of the important additional functionality we will add to prosody:

• Multi user chats (XEP-0045)
• Server side message storage (XEP-0313 Message Archive Management)
• File and image transfer (SI File Transfer and Jingle signalling; in-band and out-of-band methods)
• Stream Management for surviving connection interruptions and switches - particularly useful on mobile (XEP-0198 Stream Management)
• Synchronising messages between multiple devices (XEP-0280 Message Carbons)
• Battery Saving techniques for mobile clients (XEP-00352 Client State Indication)
• User Blocking (XEP-0191 Blocking Command)

Not all clients support all of these XEPs. I consider the Android client Conversations (F-Droid | Google Play) to be pretty cutting edge in this respect - it's pushing forward a lot of XEPs that are required if we are going to see XMPP compete with the features of proprietary chat clients, particularly on mobile.

At the end of 2013, I wrote a series of tutorials explaining how to run an email server at home on a raspberry pi, which turned out to be very popular. I'm now aiming to do the same for instant messaging. This tutorial will:

• Introduce the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), formerly known as "Jabber"
• Discuss some of the pros and cons of XMPP vs some other proprietary protocols
• Give instructions for the installation and configuration of Prosody, a free and open source XMPP server.
• Discuss various important XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs) and how to enable them
• Cover transport layer encryption (i.e. client-server and server-server TLS) and end-to-end encryption for clients
• Recommend client software for different platforms

Along the way, I'll expose the underlying protocol to give you the tools you need to debug the problem yourself, instead of relying on obscured error messages from GUI applications. This is part 1 of a 2 part tutorial. Part 2 can be found here.