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
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.