Anyone who has read my post about OwnCloud will know that I strive to store my data, if possible, not with Dropbox & Co. In the past, OwnCloud was the best and simplest solution, but for some time now, there has been an alternative that is worth seeing: Seafile.

Seafile offers free sync clients for every common platform (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS).

In the background, the application, written in Python, works in two parts. The seafile application controls the saving and syncing of data. It uses a filesystem based on git, which means that by default, all files are versioned. The other part is seahub, which provides the web interface to Seafile.

I have long maintained a WordPress blog and rarely posted anything. In the process, I repeatedly noticed how slow WordPress actually is. Additionally, I need PHP and a database to keep everything running. This, coupled with the fact that there were recurring security vulnerabilities in WordPress, led me to search for an alternative.

Since I don’t need much dynamic content on my website, I looked for a static site generator and came across Hugo.

Through my work, I faced the problem that we wanted to authenticate users centrally via MySQL. This is not inherently a problem thanks to libnss-mysql and pam-mysql, but unfortunately, there is a lack of programs to manage users effectively.

Therefore, I have written tools that imitate the Linux programs user{add,mod,del} and group{add,mod,del} and published them as PAMMySQLTools on PyPI.

The field of high-availability in the web area is often complicated, large, and hard to grasp. But it doesn’t have to be, thanks to CARP and HAProxy. The combination of these two techniques makes it possible to distribute requests to multiple servers and thereby avoid the single-point-of-failure problem. For this, we only need at least 2 computers with FreeBSD (or another BSD system with CARP support) that are in the same subnet and some time to set up the following software:

Dropbox is one of the most practical tools that help me in my daily work. Whether it’s just synchronizing data or even sharing it with others, it’s possible with just a few clicks.

Unfortunately, the whole thing has a serious drawback: My data is no longer with me! Although data in Dropbox is reportedly encrypted, you can NEVER be sure what might happen to your own data.

For this dilemma, there is now a solution: OwnCloud