Testing Enterprise Infrastructure changes with brownouts

Decommissioning or migrating services in enterprise environments will frequently reveal previously unknown dependencies which result in changes getting rolled back, wasting a lot of time. To try and head these issues off you can test these changes with “brownouts”, shutting off the relevant infra temporarily (eg at a weekend) to expose any hidden dependencies. When …

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Enable or Disable pi-hole from Alexa

The easiest way to enable or disable ad-blocking from your pi-hole using Alexa is to install fauxmo – with which you can create fake Belkin devices that are Alexa-enabled. You then configure fauxmo with URLs like this: Get YOUR_AUTH_CODE from the WEBPASSWORD= line in /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf See example conf at GitHub

Resolving local hosts on Android

Google seem determined to break local name resolution on your home network on your Android phone, redirecting DNS lookups to their servers. Presumably this is partly to prevent solutions like pi-hole making a dent in their ad revenue and tracking. Easiest way round this is to install DNSChanger and specify your local DNS servers – …

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