I’ve released qmpbackup 0.46 which now utilizes the image fleecing technique for backup.

Little side project this weekend:

I re-implemented the proxmox backup nbdkit plugin in C.

nbdkit is a really powerful NBD toolkit.

Yesterday i released a new version of virtnbdbackup with a nice improvement.

Due to circumstances:

In the last weeks qmpbackup has seen a bit more improvements.

A few weeks ago Tiziano Bacocco started a small project to implement a (golang) proxy that allows to store proxmox backups on S3 compatible storage: pmoxs3backuproxy, a feature which the current backup server does not have.

A few days ago i found this mail on the LKML that introduces support for userspace access to LVM thin provisioned metadata snapshots. I didn’t know this is possible.

Over the last weekend i had some spare time to improve qmpbackup a little more, the new version:

I needed to migrate an existing system to an Hetzner cloud VPS. While it is possible to attach KVM consoles and custom ISO images to dedicated servers, i didn’t find any way to do so with regular cloud instances.

If you want to test upgrades on virtual machines (running on libvit/qemu/kvm) these are usually the most common steps:

While running CI tests for a application that is implemented in C and Java, some configuration scripts set the current timezone. The C implemented parts catch the change just nicely, but the java related parts still report the default image timezone.

Just updated to bookworm. Only thing that gave me headaches was OpenVPN refusing to accept the password/username combination specified via “auth-user-pass” option..

I wondered if there is some tracking for differences between packages published on pypi, something that stores this information in a format similar to debdiff..

Been looking into some existant sshd implementations in go. Most of the projects on github seem to use the standard x/crypto/ssh lib.

Besides several bugfixes, the latest version now supports using higher compression levels and logging to syslog facility. I also finished packaging and official packages are now available,

Next year my son will turn 4. I have quit playing computer games for a pretty long time now, but recently i questioned myself: what will be the first computer game hes going to play? Why not create a simple game by myself?

Latest virtnbdbackup version now supports backing up remote libvirt hosts, too. No installation on the hypervisor required anymore:

Had some time to add more features to my libvirt backup utility, now it supports:

Everyone knows that an application exit code should change based on the success, error or maybe warnings that happened during execution.

fs.com s5850 and s8050 series type switches have a secret mode which lets you enter a regular shell from the switch cli, like so:

In my last article i showed how to use the new features included in Debian Bullseye to easily create backups of your libvirt managed domains.

The libvirt and qemu versions in Debian Bullseye support a new feature that allows for easier backup and recovery of virtual machines. Instead of using snapshots for backup operation, its now possible to enable dirty bitmaps. Other hypervisors tend to call this “changed block tracking”.

I depend on full provisioned virtual machine images for CI and unfortunately a major part of our customers still uses parts of the software i need to test on Windows 10. My environment uses vagrant for provisioning Windows 10 based images and then executes several tasks using the vagrant provisioning feature.

Running a CI testsuite on Intel (or ARM) based hardware is quite common these days. Most of the time the software stacks involved are containers (insert your favourite container orchestrator here) or other neat solutions such as vagrant that allow to spin up pristine test environments.

Github actions are a nice thing, spin up your preferred operating system and execute some tests. While implementing them in one of my projects, i had to trial and error and: waiting for the tests to complete is an annoying situation!

This story starts with me having to simulate a faulty disk device for testing. The Linux Kernel Device mapper is a good solution for this, so i created a faulty device with a simple file backend: