The era of downloaded and adapted designs is over. My first own design sees the light of day. I call it cperrin-hugo-theme. Poetic, isn’t it?

But that’s not the only new thing. I came up with my own brand-hot and ultra-creative logo to make the crowds scream.

The problem is quite old: A large number of servers need to be set up or homogenized, ideally with minimal effort. This problem has been solved several times. So-called orchestration tools execute specific commands on multiple systems based on predefined instructions.

Examples of such tools are Puppet, Chef, or CFEngine. However, these representatives have one major disadvantage for me: they require a client to be installed on the remote side for execution.

This is where Ansible comes in. Ansible uses only an SSH connection to execute scripts or playbooks on the clients.

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.

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