I own and manage 30+ domains at INWX, a large and professional domain registrar. Although INWX has a somewhat decent web interface, it became a burden for me to keep an overview of each domain’s sometimes dozens of records. Especially when e.g. changing an IP address for more than one domain, it caused multiple error-prone clicks and copy/pastes that couldn’t be reverted in the worst case. This is why I created INWX DNS Recordmaster which I will shortly present here.
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.
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.
In the recent weeks and months, the FSFE Web Team has been doing some heavy work on the FSFE website. We moved and replaced thousands of files and their respective links to improve the structure of a historically grown website (19+ years, 23243 files, almost 39k commits). But how to do that most efficiently in a version controlled system like Git?
In our scenarios, the steps executed often looked like the following:
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.
A few days ago I’ve sent an announcement email for today’s I Love Free Software Day to a large bunch of people. Most of the remarkably many replies have been positive and a pure joy to read, but some were a bit sceptical and critical. These came from Free Software contributors who are maintaining and helping projects that they think nobody knows and sees – not because these software projects are unused, but because they are small, a building block for other, more popular applications.
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.
We are facing a EU regulation which may make it impossible to install a custom piece of software on most radio decives like WiFi routers, smartphones and embedded devices. You can now give feedback on the most problematic part by Monday, 4 March. Please participate – it’s not hard!
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?
Alles begann, als mein Mitbewohner Lars und ich uns eines morgens fragten: „Mit wem würden wir lieber ein Bier trinken gehen, Thomas de Maizière oder Jens Lehmann?“.
Zu de Maizière hatten wir beide eine recht eindeutige Meinung, aber bei Lehmann waren wir uns nicht sicher, ob wir uns mit ihm verstehen würden. Lars meinte sich zu erinnern, dass er ein merkwürdiges Gesellschaftsbild hätte, allerdings zeigte ein Blick auf Lehmanns Wikipedia-Artikel, dass er gemeinnützig sehr engagiert ist. Was nun? Würden wir uns mit dem Ex-Nationaltorwart bei einem gemütlichen Bier gut verstehen oder schon nach wenigen Minuten in einer heftigen Diskussion über Geschlechterbilder enden?