The blog you're reading is produced by Ghost which previously I'd served in a pretty typical way - an AWS instance running Node and a local MySQL database server. This was fine for quite a while but recently, there has been a spate of security issues in, for instance, OpenSSL…
I've just been working on an AWS cloudformation stack which sets up the infrastructure for my project. I usually deploy the stack to eu-west-1 but this time, we're testing some multi-region functionality so I was launching into us-east-1. To cut a long story short, my AWS cloudformation stack kept bombing…
Nginx has a lot of system variables, this makes it really flexible which is great news. It also inevitably introduces some complexity, this is generally not a huge deal but in the odd place, the nginx docs are somewhat lacking which means you have to either google the issue you…
I'll prefix this short article with a statement that this is not in any way a criticism of NGINX, just an observation which I have not found documented elsewhere so I wanted to write it down in case it helps anyone else. Recently, in my day job, i've been working…
TL;DR The situation: background A while back, I wrote an article on strong SSL configuration for NginX which was the result of many hours of research and trial. I need to update that article as one of the articles I referenced is on raymii.org and has been updated…
I'm currently writing an authentication plugin for actionHero - it's a NodeJS module with a MongoDB backend. Usually, I'd use Mocha as a test runner and run my tests automatically (via Travis CI) when i commit/push to GitHub. In this instance though, I have some oddball issue which means…
As many others have in the past couple of days, I've spent a fair bit of time reading about, fixing and reassuring customers about the heartbleed bug in openSSL and GNUTLS. The openSSL, GNUTLS and Debian package maintainers acted quickly to fix the issue and most people will simply be…
In my day job, we have traditionally used Akamai as our content delivery network (CDN) of choice. For quite some time, Akamai was arguably the only true enterprise-ready CDN and our clients demand a high level of service, hence Akamai is/was a good fit in most cases. The CDN…
I use Splunk on a daily basis at work and have created a lot of searches/reports/alerts etc. A fair number of these use regular expressions (the Splunk "rex" function) and today, I absolutely had to be able to use a modifier flag, something of a rarity for me…
I have just migrated from an RDS instance to a local percona instance on a Debian server and encountered an odd issue... After installation, which all appeared normal at first, I tried to start percona and there was no init script (which would usually live at /etc/init.d/mysql…
tl;dr: Secure SSL cert config for Nginx (grade A-rated on GlobalSign SSL cert checker) UPDATE 8th July 2014: I have amended my config slightly to use OWASP recommended ciphers and some updates to Debian core libs mean this configuration now produces an A+ result. It's been quite some time…
I’ve been lucky enough to be working on an internal project the last few weeks which has a known set of modern browsers as the target audience. This means i’ve been able to ignore some of the older design/development issues. I am really liking document…
CSS 2.1 has some really handy selectors, one of which is the adjacent (next) sibling selector which has the form: el1 + el2 { color:#f0f; } The above would apply a tasty pink(ish) text colour to el2 where it directly follows el1 in HTML element order. Excellent, that can be…
One of the (perhaps) understandable but more irritating aspects of Apple Mac OSX upgrades which I just experienced is the fact that my upgrade from lion to mountain lion is that the Java runtime (JRE) is uninstalled…This meant that my usual code editor/IDE Netbeans was broken –…
I have been messing with NodeJS for a little while now and contrary to my preconceptions, I quite like it. NodeJS is not the right choice for every task (as with any development paradigm/language) but it has some great use cases for i/o bound tasks and is definitely…
I’ve recently been working on lots of trial-runs of software at work and got annoyed with having to rebuild servers all the time so i decided to join the rest of the world and go virtual. Our production VI at work runs VMWare (ESXi) but my trial stack…
AS I type, i’m setting up an Ubuntu server to use a virtual server host on my test rig. Slight problem though, after getting bored/frustrated with command line configuring (odd because usually command line is my preference) I got lazy and decided to install Gnome and virt-manager…
It’s been quite some time since I’ve had the pleasure of using BackupPC, a delightfully simple to use yet very effective, free, open source, cross-platform backup system. My test rig was sorely overdue some proper backups…So I decided to install BackupPC on a central…
I’ve recently been working on some very different parallel projects on a development server i have and came across a situation where i needed to have one vhost/site for the LDAP GUI GOsa on the server with the (soon to be deprecated) PHP feature magicquotesgpc enabled whilst…
This is a really quick post as i’ve been coding for a few hours and need to call it a day… So i was working on my new website which uses a lot of HTML5, CSS3 etc. and shows Youtube videos, so naturally I wanted to use…