I spent quite a while Googling around looking for a good, quick guide to check for and sort the POODLE bug on my client VPS. I found bits and pieces on multiple sites, but no one single post.
Hopefully, this sorts that. This will provide no background into the issue, just how to fix if you run NGINX on Ubuntu. This should also get you to A+ on the SSL Test.
Website Uptime Monitoring – UptimeRobot.com
When it comes to building and hosting websites, you need to know they are not online. Every minute a client site is offline could mean lost sales, users going back to Google for the competitor or general frustration. To mitigate this, I use UptimeRobot.com to notify me when things start to go wrong. I like it so much, I built my own public facing status page which you can also download and host yourself (See below).
Hide yourself when browsing LinkedIn
Sometimes, you don’t want people to know you’re checking them out on LinkedIn. To hide yourself from their ‘Who’s viewed your profile’ section, follow guide after the break.
NCA’s ‘Two-Week Opportunity’ – What you can do now
This is not like my ‘usual’ posts, but something that I think is very important and not overly obvious to your usual computer user. I issued similar guidelines like these to all staff at at my employer today, feel free to use this for yours if you are in a similar boat.
As part of the NCA efforts to combat some pretty nasty ransomware being distributed I have some quick things you can do to help secure your computer(s).
Battlefield 4 Issues (Xbox 360) – Resolve Initial Crap Performance
BF4 has been out for just over a month and a half, and anyone following it will be aware of the nightmare DICE have been trying to dig themselves out of, and the Class Action Lawsuit being filed against EA!
When starting Multiplayer, the game downloaded the Multiplayer Update 4, installed itself and played. Then lagged, crashed mid game, and finally started locking up the entire console mid session losing all progress.
Raging, I took to Google and after a while finally resolved my issue. You need to MANUALLY INSTALL UPDATES 1,2 AND 3!
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Digital Ocean and some free hosted apps to manage your business
Update 8/1/14: Free DO $10 promo code: 2014SSD
Well thats 2013 nearly wrapped up. In the last 6 months I have been working on some pretty large projects and have come away with a full set of hosted applications that I am using to manage my day-to-day workload. I had planned to get a post written sooner for all the apps I am using with decent free tiers, that will now come in the new year!
One service I do want to get a blog out about now is Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is the fastest growing VPS provider in the world right now, and every experience I have had with them in the 4ish months I have been using them has been excellent. Before using them, I was 100% shared cPanel hosting. Now I am migrating everything over to self-managed VPS’s at Digital Ocean. Why?? $5/mo, 20GB disk space, enough memory and CPU speed to run NGINX and mySQL very comfortably.
Keep reading for a a bit more info and my first list of free applications that have made my life easier! This list is no where near exhaustive, and over the next month or so I will be writing about a few of the key services I think you should start using if you don’t already!
I have a bookmark folder called ‘To Implement / Research’ that takes about 5 seconds to scroll through, so watch this space!
ownCloud + Bit Torrent Sync = Dropbox Clone!
ownCloud is a very good self hosted solution to host all your contacts, photos, documents etc. Now, ownCloud does provide its own file sync application, but I believe using BitTorrent Sync is much better solution to keep your files in sync between your local machine and your ownCloud installation.
This post won’t cover installation of ownCloud, or BitTorrent Sync (see my post here for BTSync setup) and shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes!
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Install BitTorrent Sync on Debian (Raspbian)
BitTorrent Sync was released last month and I’ve been playing around with it for the last couple of days. I currently have it syncing data between OwnCloud and my personal machine, effectively creating my own fully fledged DropBox replacement (more on that in another post!).
Today I am going to cover installing BitTorrent Sync into your copy of Debian (I am using Raspbian on my RasPi), so that when you restart the machine, it starts up with you. Hit the jump for the detailed instructions!
Secure Public Wi-Fi on Mac OS using SSH and Raspberry Pi
If you are a regular user of a public Wi-Fi access point and have a Raspberry Pi being used as a web server, you can secure your connection in these areas using SSH.
First of all, you need to have your Raspberry Pi (or any server with SSH installed) running and accessible from the outside world (I’m not going to guide this, there is plenty of help on google if you want to get this running). A basic installation will have this.
Next, go to http://chetansurpur.com/projects/sidestep/ and download the application (and check out the rest of Chetan Surpur’s website, its pretty good!). When this is installed, follow the steps and your away.
When ever you are on a public wifi, click connect!
Sidestep.
Keep HDMI Powered off on Raspberry Pi
On the debian based OS’s (Raspbmc / Raspbian), if you run the device headless most of the time you can ensure the HDMI port is powered off by editing /etc/rc.local and adding the below line above exit 0:
/opt/vc/bin/tvservice -o
(notice its the same line that I posted in the script to turn XBMC off and on in Raspbmc).
Reboot and done. Not sure how much you gain from this but its a nice little trick.