Category «Blog»

All blog posts by James A. Chambers — focused on technology, hardware, SBC / Microboards, programming, scripting, gaming, and others!

Join Mac OS X Mojave to Active Directory Using Built In Tools

Joining a Mac to Active Directory has continued to get more and more difficult over the years. High Sierra and Mojave now require a Active Directory functional level of Windows Server 2008 or later and are still pretty tricky to get to join it.

When I started researching the topic I saw a whole lot of advice to install third party software to join a Mac to Active Directory. In most corporate environments installing third party software is frowned upon due to licensing and security considerations so I was determined to get the native Mac OS X tools to work.

This guide will walk you through the basic steps to join Active Directory without having to resort to using third party software.

Official Minecraft Bedrock Dedicated Server on Raspberry Pi*

One of the most requested features in my Raspberry Pi Minecraft server guide is support for the Bedrock edition of Minecraft. This is the edition that powers Minecraft on iOS / Android / Xbox / Nintendo Switch as well as the free Windows 10 edition.

There’s one big problem though. The official Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server is only compiled for Windows and Ubuntu X86_64. Without ARM support it seems impossible to run the Bedrock dedicated server on a Raspberry Pi. I couldn’t find a documented instance of anyone doing it anywhere.

So naturally today in this guide we are going to do the impossible. But right off the bat let me point out that there is an asterisk in my article title. Why you ask? That is because unlike my other guides this one will not yield you a well performing server. That is because we will be emulating a x86_64 processor on ARM. This is slow. VERY slow.

Minecraft Bedrock Edition – Ubuntu Dedicated Server Guide

Minecraft Bedrock Edition is the version of Minecraft that powers the iPhone / Android versions (formerly Minecraft Pocket Edition), the Xbox / PlayStation / Nintendo Switch editions and the free Windows 10 Minecraft edition.

Mojang has released a dedicated server which is considered to be in alpha testing. I have found it to be very stable and able to run on a wide variety of hardware.

This script and guide are written to help you get a robust Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server up and running in only a few minutes!

Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks 2019 + Benchmarking Script

Storage options continue to advance at a very fast pace. We’ve seen a lot of changes in the past couple of years with viable storage options for your Pi. Solid state drives are now so cheap that it can be cheaper to outfit your Pi with a SSD than buy a MicroSD card! MicroSD cards also continue to evolve with the new “Application Class” A1 and A2 certifications.

This year I wanted to do something more than just benchmark my ever-growing pile of MicroSD cards and solid state drives. Although I have a wide variety of storage to test I don’t have everything! So this time I created a benchmark that gives you a easy to compare score and anonymously submits the storage specifications and the results to this site.

Running the benchmark is a one-liner:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

Kali Linux P4wnP1 ALOA Guide – Setup / Usage / Examples

P4wnP1 A.L.O.A. is a tool for the Raspberry Pi Zero W that allows you to plug a Pi into a host computer and send remote commands and share networking with a host computer all without any user interaction. A.L.O.A. stands for “A Little Offensive Appliance”.

There’s practically no defense to this type of attack other than physically securing your USB ports. Let’s jump right in!