Upgrading thousands of servers is challenging and filled with uncertainty. This article describes how we leveraged Ansible to build automation that increases confidence in our upgrade process.
Rebooting Ubuntu is hard. I don’t really know why, but in my twelve years as an Ubuntu user, I’ve encountered countless “stuck at reboot” scenarios. Somehow, typing reboot always comes with that extra special feeling of uncertainty and the thrill of danger. This post describes the short story of how we managed to make Ubuntu machines reliably reboot using Linux watchdogs.
Learn how Datto manages the rollout of trusted root certificates to a fleet of hundreds of thousands of devices without causing a single failed backup!
Datto has a lot of great products in its arsenal that only keeps growing as we acquire more businesses. Because of this, integration is very important and a key item of that is user experience. To accomplish this, we knew we had to streamline our user interfaces. As product designers, we are advocates for the user and have a proclivity for good aesthetics. So for us, this was not only a time to stretch our visual design muscles but to also improve the usability across our products.
Tutorial on how to construct ROP chains from difficult ROP gadgets in ARM assembly.
Over the past 2 years, Datto has been working on how we could collect consistent data from our entire fleet of hosts. In this post, we'll discuss how we leveraged OpenTSDB to collect nearly 1 million metrics a second across our infrastructure.
A few years ago, Datto released its very own Linux backup agent. In this post, we reminisce about lessons learned from developing and supporting the Datto Linux Agent (DLA) shortly after its production release.
Understanding how Wi-Fi roaming works is key to a successful Wi-Fi deployment. This post focuses on the most difficult Wi-Fi environment, the enterprise business, and explains how to fix problems and why things sometimes don't work.
Configuring and managing Vault isn't too difficult, but integrating it with our existing configuration management tools provided a unique challenge. We wanted to ensure that we could continue using Puppet, our config management tool of choice, to automatically handle the day-to-day operations of our new Vault deployment.
chkdsk is a utility from Microsoft that tries to fix a volume’s file system without losing data. It checks for both logical and physical errors. chkdsk usually checks the file system metadata information first and applies file system repair functions if necessary. At Datto, we mostly deal with NTFS, so in this post, I'll only discuss the NTFS file system.