YetI

I am very fortunate that one jflesch on GitHub decided one day to create Paperwork! This excellent program evolved very quickly and is still improving. I manage all my official documents, invoices, and such, in Paperwork. Scan by scan, PDF import by PDF import, I am slowly approaching the 2000 documents, or 5000 pages. This program has proved invaluable in the past year alone, both for speeding up the processing of new documents, and for looking for old documents.

Yet I miss one feature: the possibility to search the database of documents (which is on my home server) from any computer or mobile device, without having to launch Paperwork, which is only installed on the main family PC.

Besides, as I often connect to my server from distant places using OpenSSH, the possibility to do command-line searches would be a big improvement over my current use of find, grep, etc. Or I should rather say, my former use of find, grep, etc. Because…

J’ai recommencé à tenir mes comptes dans l’excellent GnuCash. Comme je n’ai pas le temps (ni l’envie) de tout saisir pour ensuite rapprocher les comptes, j’importe les données depuis les fichiers téléchargés sur Internet et je me contente d’affecter les revenus et dépenses, et vérifier que tout est normal.

Mais tous les organismes ne fournissent pas de fichiers directement exploitables. Beaucoup se contentent de fichiers PDF…

I recently began using ownCloud for file synchronization. All in all, although there are some minor hindrances, the experience is really satisfying. So much so, that I moved all my “personal cloud” data to ownCloud, from the previous NFS share. However, although the regular ownCloud client is just fine where available, it is not available everywhere. In particular:

• I carry around on a USB stick a lightweight Linux desktop based on TinyCore Linux, for which the client is not available.
• I also have an old laptop that is stuck with an obsolete operating system because the video chipset is buggy, and no newer OS will support it (even though the “same” chipset reference in another laptop works just fine…).

For these situations, I tried using DavFS, but this solution was much too slow; it is a great fall-back, though. Next I tried the Java program WebDAV-Sync, but although the initial download went fine, sync did not work all that well: the whole share was fully downloaded again each time!

So I created my own synchronization tool, the only dependencies of which are curl and bash, and optionally ssh. These dependencies are available everywhere, including Windows and some embedded systems ;-)

Cet article a été traduit en français.

My personal server only served a few real users to this day, which means that each of us had an account on the server, that owned files and could run commands, schedule tasks, and so on.

I just extended my hosting perimeter, but I only allow email usage for my new guests so far. With this in mind, I did not want to create new Linux accounts, which would have needlessly weakened my server by exposing it to attacks towards these new accounts. Thus I created my first virtual users, for electronic mail.

I found several configuration examples on the Internet, but those mostly addressed situations where all users were virtual, often in several domains, or where a given domain was targeted at real users while others domains were targeted at virtual users. My wish was rather to allow new, virtual, users into my existing domains, the users of which were so far of the real kind only. Still, by taking from all those readings, it was not that hard to get there.

Cet article existe aussi en français.