Monthly Archives: August 2013

WordPress & SSL Fixes

I’ve been using WordPress for this blog for a number of years now – at some point I realised that whilst writing my own code is fun, there’s no need to reinvent yet-another-fucking-blog-platform and ended up selecting WordPress to use … Continue reading

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The Apache that wanted to be root

I’ve run into an issue a couple of times where some web applications on my server have broken following a restart of Apache when the application in question calls external programs.. What seems to happen is that when an administrator … Continue reading

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Awstats 7.2 + extras RPMs

I’ve been a long term user of Awstats for reporting on visitor traffic to my websites. Whilst it’s a little dated, it’s simplicity and reliance only on the web server logs makes it ideal for any application, including general websites … Continue reading

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A manifesto of freedom

We are living in an interesting time. A time where the strong moral bastions of freedom, free speech and civil liberties are under attack in such a strong, aggressive and global manner , arguably unseen for almost 70 years in … Continue reading

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Yeah, nah, you’re fucked as bro

Today the New Zealand government passed some rather nasty legalisation on a slim 2 vote majority, thanks to the current conservative National party and their political allies, despite strong public opposition and large number of submissions. This new legalisation is … Continue reading

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ELBs & Corporate Proxies

Following on from yesterday’s ELB post, it’s worth noting that there’s another common scenario where you can trigger issues when accessing ELBs – many corporates enforce the use of an HTTP proxy for all outgoing traffic, sometimes transparently, other times … Continue reading

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Russian roulette with ELBs and CDNs

In my day job, I look after a number of websites, all of which generally make heavy use of CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) to offload traffic to edge nodes near to an end user’s device. In our case we use … Continue reading

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SSL Intermediate CA Bundles with Amazon

When configuring SSL services, generally you need to set a certificate, a private key and the CA bundle containing the intermediate certificate(s), which is often a bundle of several different certificates. For example, https://www.jethrocarr.com‘s configuration looks like: SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile … Continue reading

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