Welcome to workaround.org
Good to have you here. Look around and feel free to comment on any page. I'm always interested in feedback.
If you are looking for my blog about the Motorrad-Führerschein please check out my personal site: christoph-haas.de.
Debian Buster guide is online
After weeks of research, testing and writing the new guide for Debian Buster is finally online!
The famous ISP-style mail server tutorial lives here. Learn how to set up your own fully-functional mail server using Postfix, Dovecot IMAP/POP3 and MySQL backend on a Debian server just like your favorite mail or website hosting provider. This guide is a voluntary project with no profit in mind. Go ahead and learn to run your own mail server.
(more…)Thoughts blog
My daily work leads to various discoveries and insights. Some were petty but others really brightened my day.
- Limiting your childrens’ internet access effectively using OpenDNS
- Reverse social engineering
- Moving contacts and calendar entries from Google to OwnCloud
- Trust over security in today’s internet
- Your privacy checklist for the post-cloud era
- Desktop despair – Gnome 3 risked too much
- Getting help on IRC
- MySQL to PostgreSQL – a Bacula conversion odyssey
- setuptools versioning – wtf?
- Security by Obscurity isn’t necessarily bad
My projects
I am a system administrator and programmer. In my nerdy spare time I work on web applications, Python and Ruby programs, write articles or explore new software technologies. On workaround.org you can find news, solutions and hints on my findings and get help. Of course your feedback is welcome.
These are some projects I am currently working on:
IRC – Internet relay chat
- IRC is a great medium for getting instant help (at least on the freenode IRC network). I have collected some tips about Getting help on IRC to help you get help instead of getting barbecued.
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knoba's factoids
I run a bot called knoba (short for knowledge base) on the freenode IRC network. Two channels I visit frequently are #postfix and #squid. So I have fed the bot with lots of factoids that you can query using !foobar in the channel. These are the factoids understood in #squid and #postfix. Please don't play with the bot publicly. Send it a "/msg knoba help" and learn how it works.
Linux tips
My daily work leads to various discoveries and insights. Some were petty but others really brightened my day.
- Updating the BIOS on Lenovo laptops from Linux using a USB flash stick
- Moving contacts and calendar entries from Google to OwnCloud
- Docking and undocking Linux laptops with nVidia GPUs using disper
- Backups with rsnaphot to external USB drives
- Renaming multiple files
- Pipes and redirection
- NFS: sec=sys or ruin your day
- Using tcpdump and Wireshark to sniff and analyse your network traffic
- Mounting flash sticks or memory cards on Debian
- Bareos/Bacula Cheat Sheet
- There are even more articles...
Regarding the Squid web proxy
Squid is a powerful open-source web proxy. I was responsible for a large Squid installation at a former employer. Maybe the following articles help you save time in your daily work.
Padrino web framework
Padrino is an lean Ruby web framework. It is an interesting alternative to the heavier Ruby-on-Rails. I spent quite some time with it and created a couple of articles about it:
Zabbix monitoring
Zabbix is a mighty open-source monitoring software. If you need a serious system for your organisation and manage to condone its creepy web interface it is hands down the the most superior software I have ever seen. And I have been dealing with monitoring software since Nagios was called Netsaint.
These articles should help you in your daily work maintaining a monitoring system: