We recently came across a problem with our file server where I was unable to write to a particular directory on Openfiler. It turned out that this directory was created on a Mac and I was unable to place any files in it from Windows. What's happening? Some Googling got me to various unanswered posts where people roughly described the same problem although not everyone ... [...]

So we had some issues using django-piston (a webservice framework for Django) in combination with HTTP Basic authorization. By default both Squid and mod_wsgi will not forward the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION headers to the next layer. So if you have a wsgi application that does its own authorization you need to do the following: In your squid.conf you need to add the login=PASS to the cache_peer entries ... [...]

We want to use SSH+SVN. However, access rights can be a pain with this protocol since we cannot use SVN's built-in access management. I explain how to use SSH+SVN and have proper access rights with multiple users and groups. [...]

We maintain all of our server's /etc directories in subversion repositories and just disabled password logins on our subversion server. So that means you actually need ssh-agent to work when using sudo. This can be done by editting the /etc/sudoers file and adding the following line: Defaults env_keep="SSH_AUTH_SOCK" [...]

Just as I wrote in Using a jumpbox in ssh it can also come in handy to use a jumpbox with subversion. A jumpbox is an in between server which you use to tunnel traffic through, because the end point is somehow not reachable directly. In this case we migrated to a new internet connection in our office. Which brought in a Zyxel modem/router. Our ... [...]

In my previous post, I went over the basic installation of Openfiler. In this final part, I'll describe how we configured Openfiler via the web interface to create users, partitions and shares. Services What is our NAS going to do? We can configure all that we need from the web interface. The Openfiler documentation, at the time of writing this blog post, was messy and ... [...]

Sometimes you will need to access a service on a client's machine from an untrusted network, but you don't want to expose this client's SSH server to untrusted IP's. If this is the case you can use a trusted machine (a so called jumpbox) as an intermediate to connect to the client's box. For example, to connect the user test (user available on both jumpbox ... [...]

Openfiler is an open source storage appliance software package. It can be installed like any other Linux distribution and allows us to manage groups, users and shares. We'll go over the set up of our 2x 1 TB disks as RAID-1 array and tweak the boot manager to set both disks as bootable. If one hard disk fails, the other can take over. Smooth. [...]

How often don't I just want to open a tunnel to some server (that I'm sure to have in PuTTY) without opening a full SSH terminal? Or, isn't it annoying that everytime you open a terminal session in PuTTY, all tunnels related to that session open as well? -- PuTTY Tunnel Manager is here! [...]