Innovating With Open Source at BitLeap

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Innovating With Open Source at BitLeap

• Ian Berry
• Lindsay Snider

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Who We Are

• Startup company that provides a managed Linux
  appliance (called the LeapServ)
• Offsite backups
• VPN services
• Utilize open source software (PHP, Apache, Cacti,
  OpenVPN, Gentoo, etc)

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Deploying LeapServs

• Product relies on having a server at each
  customers location
• Provisioning must be automated to ensure
  maintainability

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Building a LeapServ

• Physical materials
• PXE boot build base system
• Attach customer write down configuration
  information
• Ship box to the customer

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Maintaining LeapServs

• Use Gentoo
• No monolithic upgrades
• Actively maintained and community driven
• Excellent package management
• Internal portage tree for custom packages,
  patches, and modifications
• Application for writing down customer-specific
  configuration (configd)

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Maintaining LeapServs

• Each LeapServ has two outbound tunnels and a
  secondary HTTP-based system for management
• Requires no inbound ports
• Assigns globally addressable loopback IP for
  monitoring
• Graph all LeapServs in Cacti

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Offsite Backups

• LeapServ uses Samba, CIFS, NCP, NFS, FUSE/SSHFS,
  etc to connect to a customers files
• Application traverses files looking for changes
• Compresses, encrypts, and transfers changes
  offsite
• All data sent to two locations and filed on each
  file server

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OpenVPN

• Moved from vtun to OpenVPN in October
• Windows client
• Custom scripting
• Public/private key-based authentication
• Bridged tunnel to allow customers to connect
  remotely to their networks
• Benefits / problems

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Encryption

• Offsite backup data encrypted using AES-256 and
  RSA-1024
• Generate keys using a central server that runs a
  special daemon (keyd)
• Distribute keys to clients using the
  configuration management tool (configd)

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Why We Use PHP

• Fast and Easy
• Same code base across LeapServ, server, and
  website libraries
• Lots of functionality
• mcrypt
• pcntl
• socket
• gmp
• etc