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As a system administrator, I’m frustrated by two things : * The existing backup tools, that are all hyper-specialized, all configured differently, all have sli

As a system administrator, I’m frustrated by two things : * The existing backup tools, that are all hyper-specialized, all configured differently, all have slightly different feature sets, and so on. You will likely have very different tools to backup, say, your /etc folder and your mariadb database * cron is cool, but its logging/alerts capabilities are… subpar, to say the least So I’ve developed tools to alleviate my pain in those two areas. I’ve just open-sourced the first one : https://github.com/sloonz/uback/ https://github.com/sloonz/uback/. Feedback is welcome ! I’ll probably make a Show HN post about it when it hit 0.5. For the second one, I’ve made some tools to monitor cron jobs. Not released yet, but open-sourcing it is on my TODO-list too. It will need way more polishing for it tho. On another shameless plug (but it’s the topic of this post, so let’s be shameless indeed), I needed something very similar to vouch-proxy but that could protect multiple unrelated domains and be configurable with a database (because I’m not the one who is going to configure the ACL, and the guy who is going to configure the ACL is perfectly able to use phpmyadimn). Since the guys behind vouch-proxy were not willing to accept the changes necessary to make this work, I decided to create my own alternative : https://github.com/sloonz/ngx-auth https://github.com/sloonz/ngx-auth

graderjs 5y ago
Nice, I hear you on the risks of depending on 3rd-party libraries where you can't get your changes merged. It's nice to be able to roll your own in that case. On the cron case, what are your thoughts on the email notifications? In what ways are the useful or useless? I'm not an expert in this stuff. And I really like the look of uback. I have the kind of sense (and pride) that maybe this thread I posted is going to be the place where some people (who were maybe previously laboring on something in obscurity) first posted it to the world, or mentioned about it. Or maybe were even encouraged by this Ask post, or seeing other people post work, to post their own work. I'd love it if that were the case, if this post of mine was something that contributed to people posting their work that went on to become something good. :) Not trying to give you pressure, but uback could be that. :) It's pretty fresh
- slooonz 5y ago
  > On the cron case, what are your thoughts on the email notifications? In what ways are the useful or useless? I'm not an expert in this stuff. I really dislike it. It’s probably the biggest pain point in cron IMO. 1. At the age of DKIM, DMARC and SPF, setting up a working MSA on every server that runs cron can be a real pain. Not always, it depends on the exact situation, but it can be. 2. The biggest issue is that it sends a mail whenever the cron job outputs anything, even if it is successful (exit code 0). This is batshit insane. 3. Nowadays, mail only notification are a bit limitating anyway.
  - graderjs 5y ago
    Yeah, I suppose you could send the mail to an intermediary and filter it. But I agree with you. I have a 5 minute cron on my server, and when I login to root. "You have 4487 messages". Thanks, cron! :P :) xx
  - pR0Ps 5y ago
    For 2, see chronic[0] (part of moreutils[1]). It runs a command, muting stdout and stderr unless the command exits with a non-zero status. [0]: https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/moreutils/chronic.1.en.html https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/moreutils/chronic.1.en.ht... [1]: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

graderjs 5y ago

Nice, I hear you on the risks of depending on 3rd-party libraries where you can't get your changes merged. It's nice to be able to roll your own in that case. On the cron case, what are your thoughts on the email notifications? In what ways are the useful or useless? I'm not an expert in this stuff. And I really like the look of uback. I have the kind of sense (and pride) that maybe this thread I posted is going to be the place where some people (who were maybe previously laboring on something in obscurity) first posted it to the world, or mentioned about it. Or maybe were even encouraged by this Ask post, or seeing other people post work, to post their own work. I'd love it if that were the case, if this post of mine was something that contributed to people posting their work that went on to become something good. :) Not trying to give you pressure, but uback could be that. :) It's pretty fresh

slooonz 5y ago
> On the cron case, what are your thoughts on the email notifications? In what ways are the useful or useless? I'm not an expert in this stuff. I really dislike it. It’s probably the biggest pain point in cron IMO. 1. At the age of DKIM, DMARC and SPF, setting up a working MSA on every server that runs cron can be a real pain. Not always, it depends on the exact situation, but it can be. 2. The biggest issue is that it sends a mail whenever the cron job outputs anything, even if it is successful (exit code 0). This is batshit insane. 3. Nowadays, mail only notification are a bit limitating anyway.
- graderjs 5y ago
  Yeah, I suppose you could send the mail to an intermediary and filter it. But I agree with you. I have a 5 minute cron on my server, and when I login to root. "You have 4487 messages". Thanks, cron! :P :) xx
- pR0Ps 5y ago
  For 2, see chronic[0] (part of moreutils[1]). It runs a command, muting stdout and stderr unless the command exits with a non-zero status. [0]: https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/moreutils/chronic.1.en.html https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/moreutils/chronic.1.en.ht... [1]: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/