My name is Philipp C. Heckel and I write about nerdy things.

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  • Jan 01 / 2017
Administration, Linux

zfsu: ZFS utils for offsite backup, retention and maintaining a slow mirror

My laptop runs ZFS as its root file system (see this blog post) — meaning that I can snapshot my root file system and I can send it to another machine as a backup very easily. Unfortunately, while ZFS provides the raw functionality, there is no great tool to manage offsite backups and retention. To ease this pain, I wrote/forked and packaged a few helper scripts which I called zfsu, a collection of ZFS utilities.

It consists of the following tools: zfsu tx (aka zfstx) maintains a mirror of a ZFS pool over the network. zfsu ret (aka zfsret) is a simple script to apply local retention (destroy snapshots) of a file system and its snapshots. zfsu res (aka zfsres) is a script to resilver a slow mirror, e.g. a HDD disk if mirrored with a SSD.

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  • Dec 31 / 2016
  • 19
Linux

How-To: Move your existing Linux install to ZFS on Root

Ever since I joined Datto 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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  • Jan 05 / 2016
  • 7
Programming

How-To: PHP based JSON-RPC API, with authentication, validation and logging

At Datto, 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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  • Dec 04 / 2015
  • 4
Administration, Code Snippets, Linux, Scripting, Security

Snippet 0x0D: Let’s Encrypt – 5 min guide to set up cronjob based certificate renewal

Let’s Encrypt was officially released to the open public today. That means the Internet can finally get free, trusted SSL/TLS certificates. This quick guide shows how to set up Let’s Encrypt with auto-renewal through a cronjob — using the simp_le client, an alternative client developed by one of the same authors who develop the official client.

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  • Oct 18 / 2015
  • 8
Administration

How-To: Create a Debian package and a Debian repository

Debian packages and repositories are everywhere, yet many people don’t understand that creating them is actually pretty easy. While there are dozens of tutorials out there, none of them seemed to really show a good step-by-step. This is a quick tutorial on how to create a Debian package from scratch, and how to create a simple Debian repository.

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  • Aug 22 / 2015
  • 1
Code Snippets, Programming

Snippet 0x0C: Load multiple composer.json files at runtime

Remember the times when we copied PHP “libraries” into our project folder, or we copy and pasted code from some random site into our project? Those times are over. Composer and Packagist are the modern way to manage PHP dependencies. They are great. Almost as good as The Maven repos and their build tools in the Java world. However, while Composer is really good at managing the dependencies of a single project, i.e. one composer.json file, it does not play well if you want to plug different projects together at runtime. And by “does not play well” I mean it simply doesn’t work if you have two or more composer.json files. This quick post demonstrates a way around this limitation. Quick and dirty. Just like the foundations of PHP :-)

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  • May 04 / 2015
  • 3
Linux, Programming, Security

OpenSSH ‘AuthorizedKeysCommand’ with ‘fingerprint’ argument (Patch for OpenSSH 6.6p1)

Many of us developers or system administrators use OpenSSH’s public key authentication (aka password-less login) on a daily basis. The mechanism works based on public key cryptography: By adding a RSA/DSA public key to the authorized_keys file, the user with the matching private key can login without a password. The mechanism works great for a couple of hundred, thousands and even 100k thousand users (tested, login takes ~2sec).

But what if there are more keypairs, say, a million users, or a more flexible approach is desired? Maybe with an LDAP or a database backend? Think of GitHub and how they do their ssh git@github.com ... login! This blog post shows you how to do that by patching OpenSSH’s AuthorizedKeysCommand option to support an additional fingerprint argument.

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  • Mar 24 / 2015
  • 2
Code Snippets, Linux, Scripting

Snippet 0x0B: Bash completion with sub-commands and dynamic options

Every system administrator, most programmers and countless of command line surfing Linux/Mac users use it every day without thinking twice. Hitting the tab key twice, [TAB][TAB], has become the most common thing in the world. Bash completion is the magic behind the tab key. It’s easy to use, but it’s a pain to write. This tiny post demonstrates how to write scripts for bash completion, with sub-commands and dynamic parameters. A working script is embedded in my open source file sync software Syncany.

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