Ever since I joined my new company two years ago, ZFS has been part of my work every day. And every day, I am amazed how great it is. So naturally, I wanted to move my existing Linux Mint 18 installation to boot off of ZFS. Why, you may wonder? Well that’s easy. Because now I can snapshot my root file system, I can roll back if I need to, and I can restore individual files in a heartbeat.

It took a bit of fiddling in the beginning, but once you know how it works, it’s a piece of cake. This short post shows you how to move your existing Linux installation to ZFS on root (preferably Ubuntu 16.04+ based, may work for others).

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I was using dyndns.org and no-ip.com for a long time, and because I’m too cheap to buy the premium version for a simple service like this, I finally decided to set up my own dynamic DNS server for my various systems.

This is a short tutorial describing how I did it. It’s really not rocket science, so don’t expect too much.

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At my work, we use JSON-RPC based APIs very heavily, in particular with our PHP JSON-RPC library php-json-rpc. While JSON-RPC is not as wide spread as REST, it fits our needs quite nicely. In particular, it is protocol independent and can be used over HTTP, SSH or as local CLI. With our library and its numerous extensions (HTTP, SSH, authentication, validation, request-to-class mapping and logging), development is super fast and incredibly easy.

In this post, I’d like to demonstrate how to set up a PHP based JSON-RPC API, with authentication, validation and logging.

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