Adventures in IT

I'm busy writing an application which is heavily dependent on personalized URLs.  Each visitor to the site will have a PURL which I need to communicate to the frontend so that my analytics tags can be associated with the user. Before I go any further I should note that I'm using  Piwik  as my analytics package, and it respects "Do Not Track" requests.  We're not using this to track people, but we are tying it to our clients existing database of their user interests. I want the process of identifying the user to be as magical as possible so that my controllers can stay nice and skinny.  Nobody likes a fat controller right? I decided to use middleware to trap all my web requests to assign a "responder" to the request.  Then I'll use a view composer to make sure that all of the output views have this information readily available. The only snag in this plan was that the Laravel documentation was a little sketchy on how to get the value of the ...

I'm busy migrating an existing server to the cloud and need to replicate the SFTP setup.  They're using a password to authenticate a user and then uploading data files for a web service to consume. YMMV - My use case is pretty specific to this legacy application so you'll need to give consideration to the directories you use. It took a surprising amount of reading to find a consistent set of instructions so I thought I should document the setup from start to finish. Firstly, I set up the group and user that I will be needing: groupadd sftponly useradd -G sftponly username passwd username Then I made a backup copy of and then edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config Right at the end of the file add the following: Match group sftponly ChrootDirectory /usr/share/nginx/html/website_directory/chroot X11Forwarding no AllowTcpForwarding no ForceCommand internal-sftp -d /uploads For some reason if this block appears before the UsePAM s...