tiBackup – An intelligent desktop/standalone backup system

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I was long time looking for an easy to use desktop/standalone backup system on Linux without writing weird udev scripts or so on. My requirements where just easy: Define a Backupjob, plug in your USB-backupdrive and the backup begins, when the backup is finished get some notification of the status. Also i wanted a GUI to configure this steps. There were some opensource attempts to provide this feature (okay, nothing with GUI), but nothing i was satisfied with.

So as with many projects i come to the point to say: Write your own. I worked now about 5 days on this new project, mostly in my spare freetime. I call it now in alpha status, some features are still missing but the most are working. I had already some backups running with success on my systems. But it still need a lot of testing, also on different systems.

The concept is as follows.

I wanted to split the project in 3 parts:

  1. tiBackupLib – Core library providing functions to GUI and Daemon
  2. tiBackup – Backup daemon in background listening to udev/backup events
  3. tiBackupUI – GUI tool for configuring the program (optional)

I wanted to design the project that there is no GUI required, means you can still configure the program on a console only (no X) system. For this i decided to save the configuration files in a .ini file format for easy editing on console with text editors.

Also the daemon itself requires no GUI because its a seperate binary. The GUI is only needed for nice and easy configuration and maintanance, like configuring the program or viewing log reports. An approach which is rarely used in the opensource world i think but is important to end users who are used to Windows administration.

The project itself is hosted on github, you can access it on https://github.com/theinvisible/

For more details and tryout please visit my project page: tiBackup

Forticlient SSLVPN .deb packages for Ubuntu

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As i use Ubuntu as my main system and must use Forticlient SSLVPN to connect to our customers, i wanted to build my own debian packages.

As Fortinet doesn’t provide any .deb packages but only generic .tar.gz packages, i decided to build my own Ubuntu packages for easy install and maintain. You also get a nice “Launch Icon” in your Start menu do start the program.

This should also work on Debian systems, but i did not test this. There are 32 and 64bit packages available.

For download and more information visit my project page

lilac-reloaded 2.0.8 released (PHP)

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An new update has been released with mostly bugfixes.

Changelog:

lilac-reloaded 2.0.8:
– on installation timezone selection for australia and africa is enabled
– added new cgi-field nagios_check_command
– cannot delete escalation in hostgroups -> fixed
– exporter fails with no error when job name is blank -> fixed

See the project site for downloads:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lilac–reloaded/

Resetting MySQL root password on Windows

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Recently i got the nice task to reset the root password for a MySQL server running on Windows. As i know from Linux some time ago i thought i could use the mysqld_safe trick, but the binary was not existing under windows.

So i tried several howtos on google but nothing worked. When i started mysqld.exe on the command line without any options all was fine. But then the default mysql.ini was used and so the database was empty because he could not find the mysql data dir.

So after some time i found the solution for me, sticking together pieces from every how-to on the web.

  1. Stop the MySQL server using “Windows services” or task manager
  2. Create a textfile (C:\mysql-init.txt) that is executed on MySQL server startup, example content: 
    UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('1234') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
  3. Start the MySQL server using following command (Please adjust to your path and settings): 
    "C:/Programme/MySQL/MySQL Server 5.6/bin\mysqld" --defaults-file="C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\All Users\Anwendungsdaten\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\my.ini" --init-file=C:\\mysql-init.txt
  4. The “root” password is reset now. You can now stop the manual started MySQL server (task-manager) and start again the service. You can login now using your new password.

The “trick” here is to use the right parameter order. I tried first to use the “–init-file” Parameter before the “–defaults-file” parameter, but that didnt worked. I dont know if this is a specific windows problem, maybe someone knows?

Linux ACLs and moving files

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One of my workmates was just about to play around with Linux ACLs on desktops with enduser-usability. He tried to setup network shares via NFS and standard Linux ACLs to the LDAP users.

He told me then he has a weird problem with moving files into this share and keeping the right permissions. He expected that when moving a file into this network share the file get the ACL permission of the parent directory (default ACL set on parent directory). This was true when you copy a file, but when moving a file in this share it just keeps the old permissions.

This was a big problem for us for the enduser usability. You cannot expect that endusers dont have to moving files but instead copy them and then delete on the old location. We also couldnt find any information or workaround to fix this problem.

So my idea was to write a small program in python that observes this special directories and sets the ACLs as expected. As first testings gives feedback this seems to work very well. It uses standard Python 2.7 and the inotify kernel extension. You also have to setup the “sudoers” file if you dont want it to run as root.

If you are interested or have the same problem you are welcome to test this program on your own. I have setup a bitbucket project to host this program.

Update: I have also setup a small project page now with some usage information: Linux ACL-Observer

https://bitbucket.org/renehadler/acl-observer 

My website moved again…

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I was looking for a more easy to use system for posting news and grouping information and i think i found it. : )

Along with this movement i also enabled https as default for all my sites.

Have a lot of fun on the new website.

Cheers
Rene

lilac-reloaded 2.0.7 released (PHP)

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An new updated has been released again with lot of bugfixes and features.

Changelog:

lilac-reloaded 2.0.7:
– added support for new Nagios 4 fields, marked deprecated options
– added new CGI fields
– added additional checks to avoid PHP flooding the logs
– marked fields that are deprecated in Nagios 4
– reenabled “restart nagios” function on export, added notice how to implement
– better error handling on database errors
– many bug fixes, see git log

See the project site for downloads:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lilac–reloaded/

lilac-reloaded 2.0.6 released (PHP)

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An new updated has been released again with lot of bugfixes and features.

Changelog:

lilac-reloaded 2.0.6:
– added support for custom object variables for hosts, services and contacts (and templates)
– fixed typo in fruity importer for NagiosHostContactGroup (should be NagiosHostContactgroup)
– improved autodiscovery feature, bugfixes and display enhancements

See the project site for downloads:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lilac–reloaded/