Monthly Archives: December 2015

A20-OLinuXino-MICRO 5V SATA MOSFET repair

Honey I Fixed It

I have an Olimex A20-OLinuXino-MICRO board that I use for running embedded Linux (armbian). It is a very nice board with an Allwinner A20 dual core ARM processor, 1GB RAM and a lot of connections. The features I like the most are the SATA connection and the integrated LiPo battery charger. It is like a uninterruptible power supply on board!

Unfortunately both the 5V connection for the SATA drive and the LiPo battery connection are close to each other and they have exactly the same female JST connector. You  can probably guess what went wrong: I connected the LiPo battery to the 5V SATA connector and I plugged the 5V cable from the SATA drive into the LiPo connection on the PCB 😮

Luckily all Olimex hardware is open source and that is yet another reason I love this Bulgarian company! On the A20-OLinuXino-MICRO wiki page you can find a lot of information, including a link to their github repository that also includes the full schematic!

So let’s digg into the documentation and get this thing repaired… Continue reading A20-OLinuXino-MICRO 5V SATA MOSFET repair →

Enabling HSTS in Apache 2.4

Linux

After securing one of my servers with Let’s Encrypt, I was a bit disappointed that my website only got an A result on the Qualys SSL Server Test. Why did I not get the much sought-after A+?

Browsing the Protocol Details of the report, I discovered that my website was lacking Strict Transport Security (HSTS) support. This is how I enabled it on my Apache 2.4 web server running on Debian 8… Continue reading Enabling HSTS in Apache 2.4 →