Syncplify Developers Blog

Release notes and blog by the developers at Syncplify

Archives: August 31, 2021

Syncplify Devs
August 31, 2021

More than 100,000 attacks on V6. Zero hacks.

This is mostly an update to a previous post we published some time ago.

Our honeypot Syncplify Server! V6 has been up for about a month now, while we work hard on developing the management UIs, and it has received more than 100K attacks thus far: 114,671 at the time this post is being written, to be precise.

The good (very good, actually) news is that none of those attacks has yielded any result to the attackers. Nothing. Nichts. Nada.

They tried.

They failed.

Syncplify Server! V6 wins. 🙂

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Syncplify Devs
August 26, 2021

V6 installation/update/removal on Windows (preview)

Installation, maintenance, and removal of Syncplify.me Server! has often been a semi-manual process all the way up to version 5.x (current version at the time this article is being written).

Version 6.0 aims to change that. We are streamlining the entire process, making it easier, fail-proof, and much more automatic than the past.

Here’s a short video that shows a fresh/new install of Syncplify Server! v6:

Here’s a short video that shows the typical maintenance and/or minor update (ex: v6.0.1 to v6.0.2, or V6.0.1 to v6.1.5) process:

And finally, here’s a short video showing the full and clean removal of the software:

Thank you! Looking forward to upgrade you all to V6 when it’s released. 🙂

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Syncplify Devs
August 24, 2021

V6 silent and/or automated installation (Windows version)

One feature that our customers have been asking for rather frequently is the ability to deploy Syncplify Server! with a certain degree of automation. It would be nice and useful, in fact, to be able to install the software, configure it, create some VFSs and users (etc…) all with a single command-line.

Well, Syncplify Server! v6’s installer will allow you to do just that.

The first step is to have your “master deployment” of Syncplify Server! somewhere, maybe on a test/dev server, so that you can create your configuration, VFSs, users (etc…) visually in the web UI. Then take a full backup via the built-in backup function in the SuperAdmin UI.

Once you have a backup file, installing a new Syncplify Server! machine/node with an identical configuration is just a matter of running the installer with the appropriate command line. Here’s an example:

.\ss6-setup.exe /saname="sa" /sapass="XXXXXXXX" /nodename="some-node" /bakfile="C:\mybak.zip"

The only details that are not extracted from your backup are the node’s name (of course, you’re installing a new machine after all) and username/password for a SuperAdmin profile, to make sure you can access your SuperAdmin web UI once the setup is done.

And if you’re running a “core” version of your Windows (without a desktop experience)? No worries, we got you covered. Just add /verysilent to the command-line:

.\ss6-setup.exe /saname="sa" /sapass="XXXXXXXX" /nodename="some-node" /bakfile="C:\mybak.zip" /verysilent

Of course the /verysilent command-line option can be used also for fresh/blank installations, without necessarily having to initialize the software from an existing backup:

.\ss6-setup.exe /verysilent

This should cover most of the frequently required cases. 🙂

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Syncplify Devs
August 16, 2021

Syncplify.me AFT! v3.1.4 released

We have released version 3.1.4 of our automated file transfer client, Syncplify.me AFT!
This update features the following improvements:

  • Workaround: uploads now can be completed even when the SFTP server doesn’t accept certain standard file-open flags, this allows to use AFT!, for example, to upload files to S3 via AWS’s quirky S3-SFTP protocol handler.

Thank you.

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Syncplify Devs
August 15, 2021

Micro-introduction to V6’s PowerShell Module

Alright, so you are interested in managing Syncplify Server! V6 (the upcoming version, currently in development at the time this post is being written) via PowerShell.

You’re in luck. We have a PowerShell Module for that. But how do you get started?

Here’s a bare-bone micro quickstart for you. More will come with the official documentation when it’s ready.

Let’s take a look at the configuration first:

Pretty empty, uh? So, with Get-SS6Configuration you can see what’s in your PowerShell Module’s current configuration. Let’s populate it a little bit.

First of all, you’ll have to set your API base URL, your SuperAdmin (or Admin, it depends on what you want to do) username and password, and – if you’re using a self-signed certificate – you’ll also have to skip the certificate’s validation. You can do all of that with this command:

Set-SS6Configuration -Username "sa" -Password "your_password_here" -BaseUrl "https://127.0.0.1:6443/api/v1" -SkipCertificateCheck

Now let’s see what happens when we call Get-SS6Configuration again:

Good, but we still need an Access Token to call the actual server’s API, and in order to get such Token we need to log in (which returns the token) and then set the token in the above configuration. Fortunately PowerShell allows us to do so with just 2 lines of code:

$res = Invoke-SS6SaLogin
Set-SS6Configuration -AccessToken $res.token

We’re good to go. Since we logged in as a SuperAdmin (by calling Invoke-SS6SaLogin) we can now invoke any SuperAdmin API as documented. Let’s try to acquire our own SuperAdmin profile for example:

This, together with the documentation of every module function you find in our PowerShell Module’s GitHub repository, should get you started very quickly and easily.

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Syncplify Devs
August 9, 2021

The next WebClient! will be capable of displaying thumbnails

Another commonly requested feature for WebClient! is the ability to display thumbnails for image/picture files, especially for the most common formats.

We’re glad to announce that we have, therefore, included an API in the new WebClient!’s back-end to do exactly that. It currently supports PNG, JPEG, GIF, and TIFF. And, in time, it will be expanded to support more formats.

Here above you can see a screenshot of a thumbnail generated by the next generation WebClient! API. Please note that the screenshot above shows the naked result from the API itself, inside of a development tool called Insomnia, this is not WebClient!’s user interface (just for clarity).

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Syncplify Devs
August 6, 2021

Updated Syncplify Server! V6 PowerShell Module (Open Source)

Yes, you’re reading this correctly. As part of the new trajectory of our company, we have begun to open source some of the components and modules that are not part of our core intellectual property.

One of the first repositories we decided to publish is the PowerShell Module to administer an instance of Syncplify Server! V6 via command line.

You can find the module repository on GitHub here: https://github.com/syncplify/ss6powershelladmin

For those who don’t want to deal with source code, and just want to install the module in PowerShell, you can do this by typing a single line in your PowerShell:

Install-Module SS6AdminModule

And here’s a screenshot for the curious minds out there:

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