Software

I have written or contributed to the following software projects, for which I can also offer commercial support upon request. All my software is Open Source and I am always happy to hear stories about how my software is useful for you.

Websites

Chromebooks in Deutschland is a market overview for Chromebooks in Germany, listing specifications and current prices for all Chromebook models that can be bought in Germany on the free market.

Software for Google Workspace

I am a Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) admin and user. That led me to write several extensions which you might find useful.

Smart Quotes Localizer

Replace American typographical (curly, curved, book or smart) quotation marks with their correct form based on the document’s language, supports almost all languages supported by Google Docs.
Deutsche typographische Anführungszeichen in Google Docs.

Install Smart Quotes Localizer for yourself or your Google Workspace Domain from the Marketplace

Set A* Page Size

Easy way to configure the page size in Google Docs to any of the A sizes: 4A0, 2A0, A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10 and also important DIN envelope sizes: DIN lang (DL), C4 C5, C6, C6/5.

Install Set A* Page Size for yourself or your Google Workspace Domain from the Marketplace.

Set Zebra Page Size

Easy way to configure the page size in Google Docs to any of the Zebra label printer sizes.

Google Docs does not support custom page sizes, with this addon you can set any of the Zebra page sizes. The height (page length) can be set between 1 inch and 13 inch. The width is always 4 inch / 10 cm, but you can toggle between portrait and landscape as well. The margin is set to 5 mm.

Install Set Zebra Page Size for yourself or your Google Workspace Domain from the Marketplace.

Linux Software

Kiosk Browser

Turn an Ubuntu or Debian system into a web kiosk or dashboard. Supports both Raspberry Pi and Laptop/PC.

Source: github.com/schlomo/kiosk-browser

Rsync Backup Made Easy

My version of an rsync-with-hardlink script. Main features are RPM and DEB package, storage management (disk space & free inodes) management with automatic storage balancing between multiple hosts, multiple hosts supported, enterprise-compatible cron-job mode, email reports for errors, infos or verbose output.

Source: github.com/schlomo/rbme

Relax and Recover

Fully automated Linux bare-metal disaster recovery with integration into backup software. Create bootable rescue media that optionally also contains the backup data. This is a very mature Open Source project that is actively used in many data centers and also ships as part of many Linux distributions as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension

ReaR is the standard solution for bare metal desaster rocovery for Linux.

Project Homepage: relax-and-recover.org

Discontinued Software

Business Continuity Visualization Toolkit

Map technical and business dependencies in a data center into a management compatible graphical representation that aids in budget decisions and sharpens the eye for outage scenarios. See the BCVT homepage for details, downloads and screenshots.

Source: bcvt.sourceforge.net

Lab Manager Light

LML is a glue framework to turn a VMware virtualization environment into a self-service provisioned cloud. Target audience is everybody who operates a VMware infrastructure and wants to stop dealing with user requests for new VMs, changed RAM etc. but rather have the users help themselves. Of course this should be wrapped so that nobody can harm the network or create incompatible machines.

LML is the software that enabled the self-service VM environment at ImmobilienScout24 as described in my talk "Viele Server, wenig Arbeit - Betriebsautomation bei IS24": Folien, Video

Source: github.com/Scout24/lab-manager-light

YADT- An Augmented Deployment Tool

RPM-based deployment and configuration management for data centers. Use RPM packages for software and configurations management through storing configuration files and templating variables in a SVN. Manage multiple systems through understanding their interdependencies.

Project Homepage: yadt-project.org

Yum Repo Server

The yum-repo-server is a server that allows you to host and manage YUM repositories using a RESTful API. Packages are stored in a distributed object store and metadata generation is lightning fast.

Source: github.com/Scout24/yum-repo-server

setnodename

LD_PRELOAD library to change the nodename reported by uname(2) and gethostname(2) calls to another value. Mostly used in chroot environments or similar. Nowadays one would rather use docker run --hostname SOME-NAME.

Source: github.com/schlomo/setnodename

easyVCB

Backup software to be used with VMware Infrastructure 3 or vSphere 4 and VMware Consolidated Backup. The purpose of easyVCB is to create a full image backup of (all) Virtual Machines in a farm of ESX 3/4 servers. To this effect easyVCB provides the backup logic and storage management missing with plain VCB as shipped by VMware. See the easyVCB homepage for details.

Source: easyvcb.sourceforge.net

Ancient Software

In the years before 2001, while working at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I also wrote a lot of software for Novell Netware environments, Linux servers, and Windows desktops. All of that can be found at my HUJI archive.

Like this content? You could send me something from my Amazon Wishlist. Need commercial support? Contact me for Consulting Services.

Popular posts from this blog

Overriding / Patching Linux System Serial Number

Image
I'm a big fan of test driven development  (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode...
Read more

A Login Security Architecture Without Passwords

Image
Following up on Lifting the Curse of Static Credentials and Eliminating the Password of Shared Accounts , I have many discussions about why we would benefit from removing password prompts for website logins. Let's dig deeper into the details and show why removing password prompts leads to a  safer security architecture . Update 11.03.2022: Added more details about business vs. consumer websites and additional security suggestions surrounding WebAuthn Problem Space For context, imagine a website that needs to identify online users via their email address. We assume that the website in question is not the primary email system of a user but some other website, e.g. an e-commerce shop system or a collaborative productivity tool. As a User As a user of that website I want to easily sign up for an account have an easy way to login into the account be sure that my account is protected from others or attacks be able to easily recover access to my acco...
Read more

Fixing Chrome Color Printing on Linux with HP Color LaserJet M880

Image
It seems like I can't get a printer that "just works". I recently decided to replace our HP X476 printer with something nicer and bigger, an HP Color LaserJet M880 ( background story & review in German ). And of course there is something that needs fixing: The Chrome browser on Linux wouldn't let us print in color, even though all other applications had no problem to print in color. Even with Chrome color printing was possible, if one used the system printing dialog instead of the built-in Chrome print preview. This strange behavior of course piqued my curiosity. After some digging around I found out that the Chrome browser needs to parse and understand  the printer driver PPD! Chrome tries to find out how to configure color or grayscale printing in order to offer the user the choice. If Chrome can't understand the printer driver then it simply doesn't offer the choice between color and grayscale — and then some printer driver default can ch...
Read more