Thoughts about tech, politics, and more
(Tag: server)
Seafile Mirror - Simple automatic backup of your Seafile libraries
I have been using Seafile for years to host and synchronise files on my own server. It’s fast and reliable, especially when dealing with a large number and size of files. But making reliable backups of all its files isn’t so trivial. This is because the files are stored in a layout similar to bare Git repositories, and Seafile’s headless tool, seafile-cli, is… suboptimal. So I created what started out as a wrapper for it and ended up as a full-blown tool for automatically synchronising your libraries to a backup location: Seafile Mirror.
Docker2Caddy - An automatic Reverse Proxy for Docker containers
So you have a number of Docker containers running web services which you would like to expose to the outside? Well, you probably will at least have considered a reverse proxy already. Doing this manually for one, two or even five containers may be feasible, but everything above that will be a PITA for sure. At the FSFE we ran into the same issue with our own distributed container infrastructure at and crafted a neat solution that I would like to present to you in the next few minutes.
System Hackers meeting - Lyon edition
For the 4th time, and less than 5 months after the last meeting, the FSFE System Hackers met in person to coordinate their activities, work on complex issues, and exchange know-how. This time, we chose yet another town familiar to one of our team members as venue – Lyon in France. What follows is a report of this gathering that happened shortly before #stayhome became the order of the day.
The 3rd FSFE System Hackers hackathon
On 10 and 11 October, the FSFE System Hackers met in person to tackle problems and new features regarding the servers and services the FSFE is running. The team consists of dedicated volunteers who ensure that the community and staff can work effectively. The recent meeting built on the great work of the past 2 years which have been shaped by large personal and technical changes.
The System Hackers are responsible for the maintenance and development of a large number of services. From the fsfe.org website’s deployment to the mail servers and blogs, from Git to internal services like DNS and monitoring, all these services, virtual machines and physical servers are handled by this friendly group that is always looking forward to welcoming new members.
FSFE Planet has been refurbished
If you are reading these lines, you are already accessing the brand-new planet of the FSFE. While Björn, Coordinator of Team Germany, has largely improved the design in late 2017, we tackled many underlying issues this time.
So what has changed under the hood?
- The whole system runs in a Docker container now, with all code accessible on our Git. Yes, Docker has drawbacks, but in this case it eases maintenance for our volunteers and makes contributions to design and code very simple.
- The old planet ran on a very old Debian server which had issues with modern TLS versions. This basically erased a few blogs from the planet whose webservers do not support older encryption standards.
- The design has been improved once more. It now more closely aligns to the design of our main page fsfe.org and feels more natively to use and browse.
- Many blogs which were not accessible any more have been removed, and those which redirected to other URLs have been updated accordingly.
So with the migration to the new system you will probably find a few new blogs and unread posts in your RSS feeds now. So please do not be confused about it but look forward to even more useful and interesting bits from the FSFE community!
splitDL – Downloading huge files from slow and unstable internet connections
Imagine you want install GNU/Linux but your bandwidth won’t let you…
tl;dr: I wrote a rather small Bash script which splits huge files into several smaller ones and downloads them. To ensure the integrity, every small files is being checked for its hashsum and file size.
That’s the problem I was facing in the past days. In the school I’m working at (Moshi Institute of Technology, MIT) I set up a GNU/Linux server to provide services like file sharing, website design (on local servers to avoid the slow internet) and central backups. The ongoing plan is the setup of 5-10 (and later more) new computers with a GNU/Linux OS in contrast to the ancient and non-free WindowsXP installations – project „Linux Classroom“ is officially born.
I love Taskwarrior, therefore I love Free Software
“It’s Valentine’s day and you’re writing a blog post? Are you nuts?” you might ask. Well, but it’s not only Valentine’s day but also I love Free Software day. This day is proclaimed every year on February 14 by the Free Software Foundation Europe to thank all developers and contributors of Free Software (software you can use for any purpose, which source code you or others can analyze, which can be modified and distributed).
Yourls URL Shortener for Turpial
Maybe you know Yourls, a pretty cool URL shortener which you can set up on your own server very easily. Link shorteners are nice to have because
- you can share long links with short urls and
- you can view and organise all links you ever shared (incl. statistics and so on).
There are many alternatives like bit.ly, ur1.ca and so on, but Yourls belongs to YOU and you don’t have to pay attention to ToS changes or the provider’s financial status. AND you can use whichever domain you own, for example in my case it’s s.mehl.mx/blabla.
Sharing is caring – my Git instance
Some days ago I noticed another time that I have far too little knowledge about Git.
„Time to change that!“, I thought and set up my own Git instance and also installed gitweb for better usability.
Upside 1: I can keep track of the many (mainly bash) scripts I wrote in the past and all the changes I will adopt in the future.
Upside 2: You can hopefully benefit from using and reading my code. All code is licensed under GNU GPL v3 so please feel free to use, study, share and improve my work!
Birthday Calendar with ownCloud via CalDAV
Not a big issue in this blog post but an important one. Maybe I can save you some valuable time if you ever look for such a function.
As you know I’m a heavy user of ownCloud and you also might know that synchronisation is a big topic for me. And the third thing you should know that forgetting a good friend’s birthday really su… well, it’s no good style. This almost happened to me some days ago because I couldn’t check it on my Notebook with Thunderbird. My setup looks like this: All contacts (with birthday tags) in ownCloud, and these CardDAV address books are synced with my Android phone and Thunderbird/SOGo-Connector on my notebook, as well as the CalDAV calendars with Lightning.