So I’ve installed a Raspberry Pi and it’s been running smoothly day in, day out. I’d like it to stay that way, but as the server is running it’s gathers lint in log files, databases grows and knowing how the load on CPU and memory is utilized through out time, I was looking for a tool which could help me to solve this problem.

As fun as it might be to build your own solution, I’ve learned to appreciate ready to use solutions, and it seems a nice little tool is available called RPi-Monitor. Assuming you run the Raspbian, the RPi-Monitor is available as a package ready to install through the standard package manager (once you’ve added the package repository).

Here’s a little trick, which is has proven itself just as useful as it is easy. To most companies handling domains is critical task, as losing your domain name may have catastrophic consequences. Handling domains isn’t particularly hard, but there are some tasks, that may be time-critical to handle in due time - luckily Google Calendar provides an easy way to help make sure these tasks are handled.

(In this little tip, I’m using Google Calendar as the reference, but Outlook.com, Office365 or any other online calendaring system can probably do the same.)

For some time the server running this site had been acting up. Page loads were slow, access through SSH seemed lagging and something was absolutely misbehaving.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly was going on, but nothing really made sense. there were plenty of disk space, memory was reasonable utilized (no swapping) and the CPU load seemed to be less than 0.1 at any time - there were no good reason the server was “turtling” along at such a perceived slow pace.

As mails bounch around some email programs (I’m looking at you, Microsoft), seems to encrypt package forwarded mails in attachments with the extension .eml.

On Linux…

While Mozilla Thunderbird should be able to read them (as should Evolution), it requires you have the mail application available on your machine, but I haven’t - I’m doing just fine with GMail in the browser. So far the best solution I’ve find - assuming it’s trivial non-sensitive, personal files - that an Online viewer seems to work pretty well. My preferred solution is the free one from encryptomatic. It handles the mails quite nicely, it restores the formatting to something quite readable and even handles embedded images and attachments within the eml-file.

When using Viscocity to connect to a corporate network or any other openVPN server, you’re probably using certificates with a reasonable lifetime, but sometimes the certificate expire and needs be updated. Replacing the certificate files through the Viscocity interface is quite easy - just edit the connection and replace the certificate files in the appropriate tab.

There is however another little trick, which may need to be applied before the new certificates work. Viscocity offers to save the certificate password in the Keychain and I choose to use this feature, which caused a bit of trouble when updating the certificate. While it ought to - Viscocity does not - clear the password, when the certificate is changed, so to get prompted you need to go into the Keychain access tool and delete the stored password.