Category: Technology

We woke up today with a nest thermostat was showing “dead battery”. After some googling around we realized we could take it off the wall and plug it into a USB cable to charge it. So we did that and 10 minutes later it was showing the message “connect to base”. So we put it back on and still no luck, it showed wiring error E74. After some more searching around we came across a nest support page that explained when the weather gets cold there is sometimes a safty shut off switch on your AC that activates preventing the nest from getting power. The solution is to simply unplug the Y1 power and plug the nest back into the base. The Unit should instantly kick on and start heating again:

Link to nest support page documenting how to remove the Y1 wire: https://nest.com/support/article/Troubleshooting-Nest-Thermostat-power-errors-when-it-gets-cold-outside

If you keep running into this issue, you can change the ground wire into a commmon wire buy following the instructions on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R039DH7HASg

So this is just a quick post, essentially notes from setting up offsite backups using SFTP (formally FTP, but upgrading for security).

1.) Open a port in your rourter to all SSH connections to pass through (Wan > virtual server/port forwarding)
2.) Pick a non standard SSH port to limit your networks exposure to unwanted connection requests
3.) Connection to your local machine, in my case a Freenas machine and turn on SSH and allow tcp port forwarding (this option allows for the FTP connection to piggy back on your SSH connection, allowing the SFTP connection)
4.) If FTP connections are not turned on yet on your Freenas machine, turn those on
5.) Test your SSH connection using putty on your local network (use your ip, and port # then connect with your username/password)
6.) Test your SFTP connection using flash fxp or filezilla (again enter in your IP/hostname and proper port then user/pass)

If everything goes as follows locally, the next step is to test the connections from an external network. Again if all goes according to plan then the last step is to connect manually from the host machine you will be downloading files from.

**This last step is important. You need to do this in order to “save the keys” from the external machine. If you notice when you first made the SFTP connection through flash fxp it asked if you wanted to “save the key” for the server as it was new.

this is a really helpful little code snippet to limit logins to your wordpress site.  You put this .htaccess file in your /wp-admin/ directory:

# Limit logins and admin by IP
<Limit GET POST PUT>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from YOUR IP ADDRESS
</Limit>

I ran into an issue today where a new laptop could not connect to remote resources even after connecting through a VPN.  This laptop has windows 8, and by default windows 8 and as it turns out by default windows 8 does not look for or load resources from the VPN connected network.  There is an easy fix for this however:

1.) Click on the internet connection bars in the lower right hand corner of your screen (the 4 bars in the bottom task bar)

2.) Click view connection settings

3.) Click on the VPN connection you want to edit, then hit “edit”

4.) Turn on the top option “find devices and content”.

After you toggle “find devices and content” on then you will be able to discover any shared resources on your remote network 🙂