Stuff

Home Assistant and Raspberry Pi Cam

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The documentation to install this is somewhat lacking. Assuming you are running Home Assistant as user “homeassistant”, you’ll need to do this:

Connect the camera and enable it as detailed here – https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/getting-started-with-picamera/worksheet/ don’t reboot it yet.

update the firmware: sudo rpi-update

reboot

give the homeassistant user permissions to read the device by adding them to the “video” group – sudo usermod -a -G video homeassistant

You’ll need to restart home assistant to pick up the group changes

 

 

 

 

 

IT

Intel ATM and SCCM

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I hate this. I can’t figure out how it works. It will install fine sometimes, and then not others. So far, after various amounts of fiddling I think I have it running. You’ll get the odd error messages, kerberos authentication will randomly work or not… But I think I’m in a happy place now.

Anyway, I plan to add error messages to this post that you may hit. So far, I’ve modified the task sequence so that error 42 is considered a success. This just indicates it didn’t have permission to save the log file for whatever reason. Another one I’ve seen is:
(0xc0002823). Call to function failed. DNS name does not exist. (0xc0000018)
The error code at the end actually means the exact opposite and that there are two IP addresses in DNS for this computer. This happens with us as people often connect via VPN which is in a different range. Delete the offending IP from DNS and try it again.

IT

Snapdrive Service won’t start

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Had an issue recently where a fresh install of SnapDrive (7.0.3) wouldn’t complete and gave the following error  “Product: SnapDrive — Error 1920.Service SnapDrive (SWSvc) failed to start.  Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services and check your Event Log for more information.”

The server is located in a DMZ on a separate domain and is isolated from the network and the internet. I spent ages looking at this and eventually decided to run a “netstat -ano” to see what the service was doing. For whatever reason it looks like it’s trying to connect to GoDaddy’s CRL server. It seems that as the package is signed by netapp, part of the install downloads a new crl to make sure that it’s valid. Temporarily allowing my host out to the net on port 80 fixed the install issues. Incidentally, as soon as it’s installed you can close that port. From what I can tell it doesn’t check the CRL again….

 

Stuff

Meike MK-910 Nikon Quick Review

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I bough the Meike MK-910 fro Ebay recently. I did have the MK900 but found it odd in some ways. It appeared to not fire the flash every so often. It would fire the TTL but then nothing. Seemed it was confused with the metering I believe. Forcing the camera (a d7100) out of auto-iso seems to make it work.

 

Anyway, the 910 does none of these things. It’s much better. The HSS Works well too. It works as a remote in Manual mode which I believe people had issues with on the MK-900. Not used it a great deal however, but all in all I’m pretty pleased. They seemed to have fixed the battery drain the 900 had too. This one doesnt instanlty drop to two bars the moment you put batteries in!