Guide to securing apache
I stumbled upon a helpful guide to securing an apache server via Reddit’s /r/netsec subreddit. Without further ado, here’s a link to the guide:
Apache web server hardening & security guide The guide covers the simplest changes, like reducing ServerTokens output and eliminating indexes, all the way up through configuring mod_security and using the SpiderLabs GitHub repository to add additional rules.
If you’d like a more in-depth post about installing mod_security, I’d recommend this one from Tecmint.
Changing your ssh server’s port from the default: Is it worth it?
Changing my ssh port from the default port (22) has been one of my standard processes for quite some time when I build new servers or virtual machines. However, I see arguments crop up regularly about it (like this reddit thread or this other one).
Before I go any further, let’s settle the “security through obscurity” argument. (This could probably turn into its own post but I’ll be brief for now.
Survive the Google Reader exodus with Tiny Tiny RSS
It’s no secret that Google Reader is a popular way to keep up with your RSS feeds, but it’s getting shelved later this year. Most folks suggested Feedly as a replacement but I found the UI quite clunky in a browser and on Android devices.
Then someone suggested Tiny Tiny RSS. I couldn’t learn more about it on the day Google Reader’s shutdown was announced because the site was slammed. In a nutshell, Tiny Tiny RSS is a well-written web UI for managing feeds and a handy API for using it with mobile applications.
Performance and redundancy boost for icanhazip.com
It’s been a few years since I started a little project to operate a service to return your IPv4 and IPv6 address. Although there are a bunch of other sites that offer this service as well, I’ve been amazed by the gradually increasing traffic to icanhazip.com.
Here’s a sample of the latest statistics:
Hits per day: 1.8 million (about 21 hits/second) Unique IP addresses per day: 25,555 Hits per day from IPv6 addresses: 1,069 (a little sad) Bandwidth used per day: ~ 400MB The site is now running on multiple Cloud Servers at Rackspace behind a load balancer cluster.
mysql-json-bridge: a simple JSON API for MySQL
My quest to get better at Python led me to create a new project on GitHub. It’s called mysql-json-bridge and it’s ready for you to use.
Why do we need a JSON API for MySQL?
The real need sprang from a situation I was facing daily at Rackspace. We have a lot of production and pre-production environments which are in flux but we need a way to query data from various MySQL servers for multiple purposes.