Adventures in IT

Reverse Proxy diagram from Wiki Commons We're currently hosting client sites on a Rackspace server and using their Load Balancer feature as a way to terminate SSL and not have to have multisite certificates. We only attach one node to the Load Balancer so we're paying for more than we're using.  My proof of concept is to use Nginx to terminate SSL certificates and proxy to the Apache server.  This will save us £ 225 per load balancer, and since we're using ten of them that's quite a significant saving. My first step was to spin up a free tier EC2 instance running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.  I guess you can replace this with your favourite cloud or on-the-metal server. Then I installed my packages. These are the ones I remember so YMMV. sudo apt-get install nginx apache2 fail2ban php5-fpm mcrypt php5-mcrypt openssl php5-cli php5 libapache2-mod-php My network diagram is slightly different from the picture for this post in that the web server is hosted on the ...

Jenkins is pretty easy to secure with the help of some useful plugins. The first that I suggest using is an oAuth provider.  Our repositories are hosted on Bitbucket so I'm using their oAuth, but there is also a Github oAuth plugin.  The instructions to set up the plugin are very clear (see the plugin page ). When you're configuring your Jenkins to use the oAuth security remember to leave the Authorization setting to "logged in users can do anything" for now.  We'll change this later, but we don't want to get locked out of Jenkins when we apply the security settings. Now install the plugin Role Based Authentication Strategy (see the plugin page ). Add a new group called "Anonymous" and uncheck everything. When a user logs into the oAuth they'll be given a message by Jenkins saying that they don't have any permissions.  This means that not everybody with a Bitbucket account can access your site so thats a good thing. You just need ...

We have a number of domains that are secured by SSL and need to be able to automate checks for certificate validity and expiry. Luckily there is a script to do exactly this.  On Ubuntu you can apt-get-install ssl-cert-check but there are copies of the script online  in case your distro doesn't have it as a package. Create a file with a list of the domains you want to check and the port to check on.  It should look something like this: yourdomain.com 443 www.anotherdomain.com 443 www.yetanotherclientdomain.com 443 Lets assume you called your file domainlist.txt You can then run ssl-cert-check -f domainlist.txt to get the tool to run through it and display to console the status and expiry date of the domains you provided. Using the options shown in the help page for the script lets you use the script to send an email to you if a certificate is going to expire soon. ssl-cert-check -a -f domainlist.txt -q -x 30 -e yourmail@foo.com If you get a messa...