File Server

This article explains how to set up a Samba file server as an Active Directory domain member in a Docker container. This newer configuration differs from my earlier setup in one essential point: it uses POSIX instead of Windows ACLs, simplifying the administration and making it possible to modify files via other protocols than SMB. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up a Samba file server with Windows ACLs as a domain member in a Docker container. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up ownCloud Infinity Scale with OpenID Connect authentication to Authelia or authentik. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This post is a collection of my notes about my search for secure collaboration and communication tools for smaller organizations, specifically vast limits. I will update it from time to time.

As the Box IPO shows enterprise cloud file synchronization & sharing (EFSS) is a hot topic. Yet the hottest vendors do not “get” security. Kryha-Chiffriermaschine, Kryha-Encryption Device by Ryan Somma under CCWhat is Cloud EFSS? Everybody knows what a file server is. It stores any kind of document an organization needs to work with. As such its importance is similar to email. A file server’s main characteristics are:

I have wanted an energy-efficient multi-terabyte home file server for a long time, but until recently such a system was too expensive for my taste, in terms of both energy consumption and purchase price. But now with affordable 3 TB drives and low power Sandy Bridge CPUs the time has come to build the system I have yearned for so long.

I had an interesting little case to solve at home recently when my headless file server suddenly would not accept RDP connections any more. It still worked flawlessly as a file server, so I ignored the problem for a while.

Bugs and Annoyances ICA connections initiated over the ICA client object (ICO) SDK fail because 128-bit encryption cannot be enabled. Apparently, setting EncryptionLevelSession does not work. Annoyingly, this bug is more than a year old, was fixed in the ICA client 10.2 and reappeared in the current version 11.0. Bugs like this one are bad for the entire Citrix ecosystem, because they break cool tools like Citrix Quick Launch, xConnect and others I may not even know about. [Update 2009-09-30: this bug has been fixed in ICA client 11.2.]

Why does Windows 7 feel faster than Vista, although really it is not? Improvements to the graphics driver model (WDDM got upgraded to version 1.1) certainly add to this feeling and reduce the memory footprint of the desktop windows manager (DWM) process. Microsoft describes the changes in its Graphics Guide for Windows 7.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. The easiest way to assign user profile and home directories is via group policy. But that can only be done per computer. There is no (simple) way to point different users’ directories to different file servers. So what? No problem at all, until the number of users is too large for a single file server to handle. This article discusses what can be done to spread the user load.