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I’m self-employed based in Germany and work on software development, security, infrastructure, and general IT consulting projects. I’m available for advisory or hands-on work. Interested? Please get in touch.
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A while ago I stumbled upon rust-script, a tool which lets you write single-file Rust programs and execute them as if they were standalone script files. This comes in very handy when you want to experiment with Rust code, write up executable examples or build small utility programs, but don’t always want to deal with explicitly setting up Cargo projects for every little script. Using rust-script Let’s have a look at how this works: ...
I’m currently in the process of setting up several cloud servers for a new project. The whole infrastructure will run on Hetzner Cloud and be codified. Since it’s the first time I’m using the Terraform provider for Hetzner Cloud, I want to write down some of the notes I took. I’ll focus on creating a small, simplified, self-contained example to create a server, set up a firewall, and get a public IP assigned (no private network). If you want to manage multiple stacks and/or multiple projects, it generally makes sense to create your own modules and shared configurations. This is, however, out of scope for this post and not really any different when using Hetzner Cloud vs. other providers. ...
A while back the FileMaker Server (FMS) installer for Ubuntu Linux started checking the currently installed web server versions and giving warnings and an interactive prompt (!) in case of outdated versions. This is rather annoying if you like to install/upgrade your FMS non-interactively. Using ansible, for example, your playbook would just hang and you would start wondering what’s going on. Let’s see what is actually happening, why it’s happening, and how to solve it. ...
With a few security features added to the FileMaker Server Admin Console in the last few versions, I decided to play around with them to see how they are implemented. In this article I want to highlight three of the issues I found last year (2023) and subsequently reported to Claris/Apple. TL;DR: Until version FileMaker Server version 21.0.1 you can bypass the IP restricions and until version 20.3.1 no administrator role privileges are respected on the server (every role can upgrade itself to all privileges). The latter issue remains only partially fixed. ...
I was recently asked if it’s possible to post a message to a Slack channel whenever the state of a monitor on allgood.systems changes (for example, a web server goes down, a job starts failing, etc.). The answer is “yes”, and it’s quite easy to set this up once you have a Slack app configured. All you need to do on allgood’s side is to add a web hook to your notification group, enter the URL you get from Slack, and define what message you want to send. ...