Recently I was testing some web servers with the SSL Labs SSL web server test. This article describes the fixes I applied to Ubuntu Server 12.04 to get an A+ on the test. The SSL Labs Test Auditing the SSL certificates on your web server occasionally is a good idea, since you always want to […]
So you don’t know your MySQL root password but you do have the root password of the server. Here’s a quick way to reset your MySQL root password on the command line: 1. Stop MySQL $ service mysql stop 2. Start MySQL in safe mode without a password $ mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables & 3. Log into […]
Update 2015: Support and development of TrueCrypt have, of course, now ended, although an independent audit of TrueCrypt revealed no severe security problems. I’d suggest the TrueCrypt fork VeraCrypt as a replacement. Note: I’m using Fedora 19 here. Results will vary on different versions. If you’re trying to run the TrueCrypt virtual disk encryption software […]
Attempting to install Fedora 20 on an older i7 system recently produced a series of failures. For starters, after the installation allegedly completed, the system would hang after the BIOS screens at the point where the OS should start. That’s because Anaconda installed no bootloader. A computer isn’t very useful with no operating system. To […]
This notifies users by email (sendmail) when a particular file changes on a Unix-style filesystem. This was originally written for a page that was being modified by multiple people in the wiki software shipped with Apple’s OS X Server. This worked all right as a hack, but if you need extensive content management or granular […]
AbuseIPDB The Robtex – The Robtex Swiss Army Knife Internet Tool Norsecorp Cyberattack Map GeoTrace – Uses WHOIS, Hostip.info, LOC records, and TRACEROUTE to track IP address to physical location IP Chicken – A quick “what’s my IP” type of thing (or you could look at my page footer) Internet Traffic Report MX Toolbox – […]
Using Varnish and Pound together is a relatively easy way to ensure the Varnish cache works for both SSL and non-SSL web sites. Varnish is a general-purpose web cache that can make your web sites and applications run substantially faster for your visitors while reducing the overall load on your web server. It works by […]
By default most Apache web servers — at least prior to Apache 2.4 — run Apache’s Prefork MPM (multi-processing module). Prefork works OK and offers the greatest compatibility with existing Apache modules, but it consumes a relatively large amount of memory because it spawns many processes that each handle one connection at a time. Prefork […]
Note: This is an old article, and the APC Opcode Cache is now abandoned. Strongly consider installing Zend OPcache instead. APC is now effectively unsupported, although you can still install and use it. Furthermore, OPcache is included in the PHP core as of PHP 5.5, and OPcache is also available and fully supported for PHP […]
A simple bash script to back up MySQL databases. This backs up every database on the server to individual gzipped files in the directory you specify so that you can easily restore them separately. If you want it to run everyday, save it with an .sh extension and add it to the crontab of an […]