Michael Ellerbeck

NtCreateFile(\Device\VBoxDrvStub) failed: 0xc000000034 fix

Posted on July 9, 2019 by mellerbeck

Went to the C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\drivers\vboxdrv directory, right clicked on VBoxDrv.inf and selected Install. I then went back to my console and typed ‘sc start vboxdrv’

From https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=66442

Balluff + PRTG +IoT

Posted on June 25, 2019 by mellerbeck

So the BNI EIP-508-105-Z015 (IO-LINK) has a nifty way of exposing the sensor data through some json provided on an internal web page. The article I read had this as webaddress/dprop.jsn

but in my version it ended up being http://webaddress/ports.jsn (go figure?)

I had previously read some PRTG articles where they discuss some simple IoT

https://blog.paessler.com/how-to-monitor-server-room-temperature-with-prtg-on-a-budget

Great, so how can we get the data? PRTG has a nice builtin python plugin system.

So, we get to go searching for the python ‘custom sensors’ directory. It happens to be

C:\Program Files (x86)\PRTG Network Monitor\Custom Sensors\python on my box.

So, I ran into a weird wrinkle. I wanted to read the json coming off the website, modify it and then return it through the plugin. Anytime I read some json data I think the plugin would think I was done and trying to return. So, my quick hack around this was to just use simplejson for parsing the json from the /ports.jsn and then json for the ‘result’

To install simplejson into the prtg python environment do this

Download https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py into PRTGs python directory
cd C:\Program Files (x86)\PRTG Network Monitor\Python34\
python.exe get-pip.py
cd Scripts
pip install simplejson

So now my hacked together plugin looks like this

Basically, read in the json from the Balluff using simplejson, iterate through the ports, split out the hex values, convert them to a temperature (in this case).

Then finally, add the device and sensor to PRTG