I seem to be spending a lot of my time recently hacking around RouterOS bugs. Here's a script that monitors the state of the PPP interface for a GSM modem and does what it can to get it back up and running if necessary.

The script checks three times (10 seconds apart) to see if the PPP interface is connected. If it still isn't, it resets the USB power to try and kick the communication back to life. It waits 30 seconds after doing this then, if it's still not up for two more checks, it reboots the whole Routerboard.

RouterOS has no native concept of fallback PPPoE credentials. You can only enter one username and password per interface. Sometimes you would like to enter a fallback set that are tried if the primary credentials don't work, for example to prepare for a migration. Here is a RouterOS script to handle fallback PPPoE credentials that will be tried one after another until one set succeeds.

Acrobat's automatic form generation is atrocious. It inevitably gets almost everything wrong, meaning you have to recreate it by hand. It boggles the mind that it's had the ability to create forms for 20 years now, and still has no way of automatically creating the form from a Word document without a buggy and and half-hearted attempt at auto-detection. You'd think at the very least it would be able to turn Word form elements into PDF form elements, but no.

qmail-remove provides a means to easily remove messages from the Qmail queue, but restoring messages is rather more complicated. Here is a quick shell script that will allow messages to be correctly restored, undoing the yank.

Customers wishing to use their own router with VDSL2 (FTTC) services in Germany are hampered by the CPE not supporting PPPoE passthrough, as Telekom limits the line to 1 PPPoE session. The CPE therefore needs to be replaced entirely. This article describes how to extract the login information from an O2 Homebox and then configure a Cisco router as a replacement CPE.

For my new NAS, I wanted newly-connected USB disks to be automatically mounted and then exported over Samba. Debian's usbmount program is used to handle the mounting, and a couple of scripts handle the Samba export.

HP's integrated lights-out management is a godsend, and has saved the day on more than one occasion. But for installing new servers, it's a pain to have to present the media: (a) insert a physical CD into the enclosure drive (b) attach a USB CD drive (c) use the virtual media applet or remote console virtual media over a slow connection, or (d) find a local Windows machine and use the remote console RDP.