Update your NGINX Config to fix POODLE Vulnerability

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.

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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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ownCloud + Bit Torrent Sync = Dropbox Clone!

owncloudbtsync

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

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!

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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.

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.