Categories
Generally Sysadmin

How to block site grabber bots even if they are using the tor network

If you are managing websites displaying data from non free third party APIs like stock exchange, geo location or travel agency data, sooner or later you will notice site grabbers trying to load that data from your website. Even more so if the data changes on daily bases. Blocking those can lead to a never-ending task.

Categories
Sysadmin Technologies

Certbot: New Let’s Encrypt client for easy creation of certificates

Certbot is the new Client from Let’s Encrypt. It’s the successor of the previews letsencrypt-auto Tool. With a simple Webserverconfiguration it’s easy to issue and renew certificates.

Categories
Generally Sysadmin Technologies

Webpages loading slow despite having a fast uplink. Searching for a faster name server might help.

In times were connection speed above 50 Mbit/s are normality, the transfer rate ist often not the issue when it comes to slow loading websites. Modern webpages often load many resources in the background slowing down the composition of the page on the screen.

Sometimes DNS server response times, can have a huge impact on this. Looking for faster name servers might help improve the load time of larger web pages significantly.

Categories
Generally Sysadmin Technologies

Let’s Encrypt: Public Beta – Starting with today, Let’s Encrypt is now open for everyone – Update

In the past Let’s Encrypt was only available via an invitation or by signing up to a waiting list. Starting with today Let’s Encrypt entered public beta meaning everybody can now start creating their own free certificates. General information regarding Let’s Encrypt and the differences over other CAs are covered in the article: “Let’s Encrypt initiative enters beta stage on December 3rd 2015“. Now we will start to create our own free domain validated certificates.

Categories
Generally Sysadmin

Installing the final PHP 7 as a php-fpm module on a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system.

A view months late, the PHP community finally released the final version of PHP 7. Planned on October the final Version is now available for Download via Github. Because there are no official packages to be installed for Debian or Ubuntu at the moment, we’ll create a PHP 7 php-fpm module by compiling the source code ourselves. That will also allow us to continue having PHP5 on our server as the main version but use PHP7 to test our projects for compatibility.

Categories
Generally Sysadmin

Php-cgi and suexec like configuration using NginX and php-fpm (LEMP Setup)

If we want to secure our own LAMP server or provide web space for friends or customers we would usually use php-cgi and suexec to let the scripts execute with different users. With NginX the setup somewhat differs but with php-fpm pools we can achieve the same sort of additional security.

Categories
Coding Sysadmin

Installing PHP7 Beta 1 as php-fpm variant on a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system.

After major parts of the PHP community were against releasing PHP6 as the successor of PHP5, the new official replacement of PHP5 will now be PHP7. A first beta version is now available and the final release is planned on October 2015. Because there are no official packages to be installed for Debian or Ubuntu at the moment, we’ll create a PHP 7 php-fpm module by compiling the beta 1 source code. That will also allow us to continue having PHP5 on our server as the main version but use PHP7 to test our projects for compatibility.

Categories
Generally Sysadmin

How to mount a encrypted drive from a ISP backupserver using encfs and autofs. (update)

ISPs often offer external disk space, together with their server packages, to store several GB of data for backups. Usually this storage space can be accessed via ftp/sftp , nfs or cifs (Samba / Windows shared folder). But that usually means that our data is stored unencrypted on an external server we don’t control.

But there is quite an elegant solution to this using autofs and encfs to automount and encryt that storage space.