Notes

Came across this food order terminal at McDonald's in Rüdesheim:

Nothing special, just a Windows 10 (or maybe 8) with a Blue screen of death.

We didn't want to expose our MS Exchange servers directly to the internet, so we decided to use a reverse proxy.

We wanted to use free software. I always wanted to do something with nginx, so I gave it a try. The configuration was mostly based on this article. At first it seemed to work fine, the Connectivity Analyzer showed good results (except for RPC, but this is OK, because it is deprecated).
But after a while, we faced some strange problems: From time to time, clicking on OWA's menu items did nothing. Connecting to Exchange using MAPI over HTTP worked in the beginning, but after a while, it ceased to work.
But it worked fine for ActiveSync and that was the most important thing.

Because of the small shortcomings of the nginx reverse proxy, I wanted to give Apache a try. I created a configuration based on this german tutorial, but it didn't work. I never figured out the reason, but somehow, requests passed to the Exchange were denied by the Exchange. So I abandoned the idea of using Apache very quickly.

Despite its small shortcomings, the nginx reverse proxy worked fine for nearly two years. But in 2023 it was suddenly broken. I had to reboot it every few hours to make it work again.

So I tried HAProxy on a virtual machine with OPNsense. I have to admit that I'm impressed. It just works :) Everything is fine for the Connectivity Analyzer, even MAPI over HTTP works (although it is a little bit slow).
I used a german tutorial for creating the basic config and made some enhancements like using ACLs and monitors.

When my config is mature enough, I will publish it here.

So, I think HAProxy is the best way to go for our Exchange servers. No offense to nginx and Apache, I guess they work fine for most environments. I don't know what is wrong in ours.

Django 4.2 has been released.

I wanted to upgrade PCDENotes to this new version. In my development environment (using the builtin server), everything was fine.
But after installing the new version on the production server, the application crashed with HTTP error 500. After turning debug mode on, I noticed that Django 4.2 required MariaDB 10.4, but on the production server, there was only MariaDB 10.3. After upgrading to MariaDB 10.4, the application came up.
Additionally, I noticed that the admin interface was broken. After a ./manage.py collectstatic, it worked properly again (I did this once while installing it on the production server - but never again).

I finally added a (small) new feature to DSMonRot. It is now possible to exclude files and directories from the Backup. This feature makes use of Drive Snapshot's --exclude parameter.

Thanks to Michael Klein for requesting this feature!

Just as a note for me (and if you are searching for this):

You can update a bare Git repository using the following command (whereas origin is the remote and main is the branch):

git fetch origin main:main

Found this at: Stack Overflow: how do I pull to a bare repository?