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Published on by Nayar

Playing with Microsoft’s Sharepoint REST API

I couldn’t get Sharepoint to be loaded as an External Storage in Nextcloud. I had find a way to use the old school `curl` to debug the problem.

To properly authenticate, you will have to add some extra parameters to curl

$ curl –ntlm –negotiate -u <Domain>/<Username>:<Password> “http://<url>/<site>/_api/Web/getfolderbyserverrelativeurl(‘%2F<site>/<Folder>’)?$select=Length,TimeLastModified” -v

Notice the `–ntlm –negotiate`. These parameters enable “NTLM Authentication Scheme for HTTP” rather that the usual HTTP Basic Auth. This in turns make lots of back and forth between the curl and MS Sharepoint.

The logs of my HAProxy looks like this. We can see that the curl request has made 3 HTTP requests.

web sharepoint/sharepoint 0/0/1/8/9 401 503 - - ---- 2/2/0/1/0 0/0 "GET /my/_api/Web/getfolderbyserverrelativeurl('%2Fmy/MeraDocs')?=Length,TimeLastModified HTTP/1.1"
web sharepoint/sharepoint 0/0/0/8/8 401 830 - - ---- 2/2/0/1/0 0/0 "GET /my/_api/Web/getfolderbyserverrelativeurl('%2Fmy/MeraDocs')?=Length,TimeLastModified HTTP/1.1"
web sharepoint/sharepoint 0/0/0/15/18 200 3314 - - ---- 2/2/0/1/0 0/0 "GET /my/_api/Web/getfolderbyserverrelativeurl('%2Fmy/MeraDocs')?=Length,TimeLastModified HTTP/1.1"

However I was getting a 404 response in the third response initially. Turns out the API endpoints are different for OneDrive, SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2016:

Since I was using SharePoint Server locally, I chose the 2nd endpoint and it worked perfect.

[1] http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/7005/get-a-file-from-sharepoint-with-curl

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15697157/using-curl-with-ntlm-auth-to-make-a-post-is-failing

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/developer/rest-api/getting-started/sharepoint-server-2016

Published on by Nayar

Kanasuk sugar

Brown sugar and white sugar are sold at the same price at the supermarket. Do you know why? Because the brown sugar is just white sugar with some added molasses to make it slightly reddish.

I saw Kanasuk sugar which was priced way above the usual sugars. Decided to give it a try.

When you open the packet, you have the pungent smell of sugarcane. It is real unrefined sugar. It tastes like sugarcane too. I used it to make my coffee only.

https://www.facebook.com/1844656215863308/videos/1937104419951820/

 

 

Published on by Nayar

Le Gall Butter with “Fleur de Sel”

With butter prices soaring in Mauritius, I found this butter at around Rs 100 on promotion. Decided to give it a try. It is made using traditional methods.

 

It was awesome. It is not made with normal salt but rather with fleur de sel. Fleur de sel “is a salt that forms as a thin, delicate crust on the surface of seawater as it evaporates”. It tastes really good. I ate the butter in less than 4 days. Some say eating too much butter is bad for health. But I just love butter <3

 

 

 

Published on by Nayar

PeerVPN

What is a VPN?
VPNs means Virtual Private Network. It is way to connect multiple machines located in different regions together as if they were in a LAN. For example, in Mauritius, if your have Orange’s MyT at home, your router’s internal IP would most likely to be `192.168.100.1`.

Your laptop, mobile phone or Smart Home Appliances will have an IP in the range `192.268.100.2` to `192.168.100.254`. You cannot access these devices outside of your home without doing some tricks on your router configurations. This is where VPNs come in. If you are at work or on the move, you can still access your devices as if you were connected actually at home.

This would make more sense for businesses who have multiple region of operations but would still like all there IT devices to freely share information among themselves as if they in the same building. Examples would be a Manager printing a document in the office’s printer while he’s travelling in bus.

The problem with popular VPNs
Popular VPN solutions are centralised – meaning they depend on a single point such as a known server. Problem is when the server happens to be off-service, the whole VPN goes down. Furthermore, all the traffic is routed to the single server before being dispatched to their respective recipients.

PeerVPN comes in
PeerVPN is a very lightweight peer-2-peer VPN. You can initialise it with 2 nodes. When more nodes join in, it doesn’t matter if the first 2 are still in.

PeerVPN is so small that it took less that 1 minute to compile on my Raspberry Pi 3. You can find the codes here: https://github.com/Nayar/peervpn

Performance
I noticed an increased of like 4-5ms when pinging between my VPSs’ servers on the cloud. However I noticed the ping to be 25ms faster when pinging my VPSs’ from my Raspberry Pi at home.

The HAProxy 75th percentile backend response time increased by 10ms. I think it’s not bad compared to the benefits of the encryption and ease which it provides.

Drawbacks
– The author hasn’t updated the code since 2 years now.
– Security might not be as updated.

I hope this project revives. I gotta test Meshbird to see how it compares to PeerVPN. Have you ever used any of these types of VPNs?