This tutorial assumes two sites, varnish.chris.example.com and web.chris.example.com. Both of my test sites will be created on DigitalOcean but on separate instances. Both will be running basic Ubuntu 14.04. On web.chris.example.com Install Nginx Add the dev repo so that we can get to 1.7.x: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nginx/development sudo apt-get update Verify…
Elasticsearch
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Nginx as a frontend for Elasticsearch on Ubuntu 14.04
Many of these steps come from this wonderful blog post here. Follow steps one through six here for installing Nginx. Install Java, either OpenJDK (#1) or Oracle Java (#2) apt-get install openjdk-6-jre sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java apt-get update sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer Test that Java is installed: java -version Download the deb file…
Uncategorized
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SHA-1 SSL Certs
Google announced recently that they will start giving minor and soon nasty warning for 100% valid certs expiring in 2016 that use the SHA-1 hash. This is great from a security perspective but could be a headache for sever administrators, especially for ones that decided to purchase a long-expiring cert in order…
PHP
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How to unit test with PHPUnit + Ubuntu 14.04 + WordPress – Part 1
The below is pretty much directly from the online manuals for PHPUnit and WordPress but copied here for my personal usage. Install PHPUnit Download: wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar Make executable: chmod +x phpunit.phar Move globally: sudo mv phpunit.phar /usr/local/bin/phpunit Test phpunit –version Optionally, if you want to verify the signature, between steps…
nginx
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Nginx Optimal SSL settings on Ubuntu 14.04
Below is how to configure Nginx for optimal SSL settings. These settings are directly from Mozilla’s recommend best practice page and were current as of the date of this post. Please refer to that site for the most current settings. This post assumes that you already have a and you…
HTML
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Using SVGs in HTML
I’ve been using SVGs in websites for a long time now but always as files on disk linked either via img or image tags. Recently, however, I started to use them in-content as if they were actually HTML tags. By doing this you have easier access for color changes as well as…
nginx
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Nginx variable expansion in error_log for virtual hosts/servers
If you’re hoping to use an include for logging of virtual hosts (servers) in Nginx : include global/logging.conf so you can just do this in your server blocks, don’t keep your hopes up. access_log /home/me/sites/$server_name/logs/access.log; error_log /home/me/sites/$server_name/logs/error.log; According to this email thread, variable expansion for the error_log directive is not supported….
HHVM
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HHVM White Screen of Death
I’m bringing up a new server and decided to give HHVM a shot for PHP processing. Having watched WordPress’s trac for several years now I’ve seen a couple of small and some very large things that needed to be changed in order for WordPress to run without issue. But now it seems to be…
HHVM
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Ubuntu 14.04 + Nginx 1.7.1 + HHVM 3.2
This is very similar to my previous post except I’m starting from a raw Ubuntu 14.04 server install. Download and install Ubuntu 14.04 Server and don’t install any additional packages (you can and they’ll probably work but I didn’t and this tutorial assumes you didn’t). Update sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade Add a…
Uncategorized
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The Relative Cost of Bandwidth Around the World
This post from the CloudFlare blog comparing the price of bandwidth around the world was very interesting. Also, I need to find some internet direction stickers. http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world