Journald – a contentious subject in the Linux community. On one side, proponents tout advanced features and security. On the other, die-hard *nix users decry yet another move away from the simplicity of text files and more towards the Windows way of obfuscated binary file based systems. After using journald (and systemd) for a couple […]
For bleeding-edge non-production and experimental use, Fedora is a great choice of server distributions. For small non-enterprise deployments, Linode is our host of choice. As much as we’ve come to appreciate Linode, as Fox Mulder says: trust no one. This is especially true when no companies appear to be immune to the intrusions of the […]
Updated: January 2019 with latest suggestions and revised commentary. Updated: May 2016 with new cipher suggestions and revised commentary. We routinely use SSL Labs to verify systems we’ve configured. It’s a great service to verify that an SSL configuration is reasonably secure. It scores a site in four different areas: Certificate, Protocol Support, Key Exchange, […]
Updated 2018: Still working! xt_geoip_dl is now available and handles Geolite2 database downloading, simplifying our script. In the rare situation that we need to run a system that has SSH exposed to the world, we always install something to monitor and block SSH attempts. On the low end, we use fail2ban or sshguard, but our […]
We recently needed to migrate a large WordPress site’s comments to Disqus. Disqus offers two methods of importing comments: their plugin “export” function and a WXR import function. Unfortunately, neither worked for us. The WXR import process is horrible; if it fails processing it simply says “Error parsing import” instead of returning any useful information. […]