I was cleaning up some Nextcloud directories and found an ugly bug that somehow led to Nextcloud deleting nearly all of the 2 GBs of data. That was the perfect time to go for some restore drill of my multi-level backup concept.

I adopted the “3-2-1” backup strategy a bit and spread my backups to local disks (Synology Diskstation and the Homeserver) and two remote targets: Wasabi and Amazon Cloud Drive. Currently I still enjoy the unlimited storage plan, let’s see how long this will last.

Needless to say that all backups are encrypted, even these in my house.

I backup all data of the Windows PC since this is the main computer. My Mac is configured to backup a selective subset of the data using Arq and a full backup via Time Machine to my Diskstation. The Homeserver is also scheduled to backup important data using duplicity-backup.sh to Wasabi.

The Diskstation is configured to backup itself on a external disk connected via USB and also to backup the important stuff via the AWS S3 Integration to Wasabi.

Total cost of Wasabi: about 10$ a month for about 2 TB  of data.

So, how is your backup strategy going?

All you need is:

• A EC2 account
• A Keypair, stored under ~/.ssh/keypair.pem
• An availability zone “public” with SSH access allowed

Install the tool with

pip install beeswithmachineguns

and start having fun. Please keep in mind to shut down all EC2 instances after the test to avoid high bills.

Get the sources and docs on GitHub.

AngularJS – Perceived Performance: In a traditional page, measuring the page performance is quite easy; a request is made, the server responds with some HTML and the browser renders it. Done. In a Single Page Application, things get trickier.

YSlow for PhantomJS: PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. YSlow for PhantomJS is a command line script that allows page performance analysis from live URLs, unlike YSlow for Command Line (HAR) where a pre-generated HAR file is needed in order to analyze page performance. – Tags: performancetesting

collectd – The system statistics collection daemon: collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning).

BigQueri.es – Tags: performancetesting

HTTP Archive: The HTTP Archive tracks how the Web is built. – Tags: performancetesting

HOWTO setup your very own Jabber server…: Nice howto. I am also reachable via Jabber now

Hyperfox – HTTP and HTTPs Recording: MITM-Proxy for HTTP debugging. Hyperfox is capable of forging SSL certificates on the fly using a root CA certificate and its corresponding key (both provided by the user). If the target machine recognizes the root CA as trusted, then HTTPs traffic can be succesfully intercepted and recorded. – by CyberPunk

sametmax/0bin · GitHub: 0bin allows anybody to host a pastebin while welcoming any type of content to be pasted in it. The idea is that one can (probably…) not be legally entitled to moderate the pastebin content as he/she has no way to decrypt it.

During the last days I learned some weird stuff about this component, especially regarding user agent HTTP headers.

According to MSDN, the control “duplicates” Internet Explorer Web browsing functionality.

The WebBrowser control provides a managed wrapper for the WebBrowser ActiveX control. The managed wrapper lets you display Web pages in your Windows Forms client applications. You can use the WebBrowser control to duplicate Internet Explorer Web browsing functionality in your application or you can disable default Internet Explorer functionality and use the control as a simple HTML document viewer. You can also use the control to add DHTML-based user interface elements to your form and hide the fact that they are hosted in the WebBrowser control. This approach lets you seamlessly combine Web controls with Windows Forms controls in a single application.

Remark: All my tests were done using Windows 7 x64 Professional and Internet Explorer 10.0.9200.17148.

This is where the fun starts: By default, the control is in compatibility view and sends a IE7.0 User Agent header. Both normal and XMLHttpRequests use the same header. There is no way to override this from server side e.g. by sending a X-UA-Compatible header! This means that if you have a web application and suffer from these problems, you need to modify your customers registry which is very bad.

A helpful batch file can be found on Github. Further information can be found in this helpful thread at Stackoverflow and here.

But be careful! As soon as the control is using IE8 or IE9 mode, the User-Agent starts switching between the “fake” User-Agent and the “original” User-Agent when sending AJAX calls with XMLHttpRequest. This can be very painful especially when you depend on the header for session pinning or security token generation.

Only in IE7 mode the User-Agent stays the same when using XMLHttpRequests:

From my point of view this is a severe bug that should be addressed.

Furthermore, that whole compatibility view thing was a totally bad design decision. But this is nothing new

Update: I posted a bug at Microsoft Connect. Hopefully this will be fixed – I think it came with the IE10 update.

Update 2, 12.02.15: Microsoft posted a comment that they are investigating the issue.

Update 3, 02.03.16: Microsoft closed the bug without fixing it.

musicForProgramming();: Some nice tracks for concentration

Wickr’s self-destructing secure messages are now on OS X, Windows and Linux: The Wickr mobile apps for iOS and Android are known for incredibly secure messaging that feature a self-destruct option for text, images and videos. Now those messages are available on your desktop. – by Roberto Baldwin

The astonishing rise of Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world.: A summer afternoon at the Reichstag. Soft Berlin light filters down through the great glass dome, past tourists ascending the spiral ramp, and into the main hall of parliament. Half the members’ seats are empty. – by John Lanchester, George Packer

Mantis: Netflix’s Event Stream Processing System: Another great techonolgy by Netflix – by Danny Yuan

Shodan Add-on for Firefox: It’s now possible to see what information Shodan has available on a server from within Firefox thanks to the new Shodan add-on created by @PaulWebSec and @romainletendart! It’s a minimalistic yet powerful add-on to see what the website you’re visiting is exposing to the Internet. – by achillean

Facebook redesigned the data center network: 3 reasons it matters: Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new data center networking architecture that it calls, fittingly, “data center fabric.

Scientists predict green energy revolution after incredible new graphene discoveries: Researchers have discovered that graphene allows positively charged hydrogen atoms or protons to pass through it despite being completely impermeable to all other gases, including hydrogen itself. – by Steve Connor

A new startup in San Francisco where is making it possible to develop apps in virtual, cloud-based computer environments. Even if you haven’t already heard of it, chances are you’ll soon be hearing about nothing else.

more…

IE Edge mode in Windows Developer Preview and RemoteIE builds is a new “living” document mode designed for maximum interoperability with other modern browsers and contemporary web content

more…

ASP.NET 5 Overview: ASP.NET 5 is a significant redesign of ASP.NET. This topic introduces the new concepts in ASP.NET 5 and explains how they help you develop modern web apps. Introduction to ASP.NET 5 ASP.NET 5 is a lean .NET stack for building modern web apps. – by Tom FitzMacken

Introducing Gulp, Grunt, Bower, and npm support for Visual Studio: Web Development, specifically front end web development, is fast becoming as complex and sophisticated as traditional back end development. Most projects don’t just upload some JS and CSS files via FTP. – by category

Feedback-Centric Development – The One Hacker Way: Erik Meijer got something right in his talk “One Hacker Way”. There’s a lot of bashing and ranting… but at the core there also is a precious diamond to be found. It’s his admonition to be driven by feedback.