Sometimes you need to SSH to a server, but port 22 is blocked by a firewall in your path. Typically in these situations you can set sshd service to listen on port 443, and bypass the firewalls, which are generally open on this port. But what if the same machine is also hosting your websites, which need to listen on port 443 for HTTPS traffic? Do you have to choose one or the other – your website running secure or your machine being accessible from behind firewalls? Read more… Accepting SSL and SSH traffic on the same port with sslh
Graphic designers! Enter your design for the logo of our new product, WebAppManager!
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Contest ends Wednesday, Sept. 14th, 2011.
Our Ruby on Rails applications use a very nice gem called
Devise to handle authentication on our websites. Devise is well supported, and thus gets updated quite a bit. They recently upgraded to 1.2.x, which requires a few fixes if you come from 1.1.x . Here are the steps I took to migrate from Devise 1.1.7 to 1.2.1.
Read more… Upgrading Devise from 1.1.x to 1.2.1
I recently had a need to set a maintenance page with Nginx. The process was simple to redirect everything and return a 503 (Service Unavailable), but a problem developed when the maintenance page needed access to the stylesheets and images of the main site. So we could no longer use a simple ‘redirect everything’ rule. I searched for an answer and couldn’t find anything that seemed right. Most of the answers were everything from ‘use inline stylesheets’ to ‘serve the images and css from another server.’ After a bit of tinkering, I came up with a very simple solution.
Read more… Setting a maintenance page with Nginx
I recently faced the requirement of monitoring resources for a Bluehost-hosted account using the open source, python-based monitoring platform Zenoss. Seems like a simple enough requirement, and eventually was, but Bluehost’s shared, locked-down model makes it a bit more challenging.
What typically makes Zenoss so easy to use is it’s reliance on SNMP for agentless monitoring. The most difficult part is configuring SNMP on the client, but once that is done (and typically once you have it configured, you can reuse that configuration on most of your other servers), Zenoss really does make the rest of the work easy. Read more… Monitoring Bluehost with Zenoss
Where we stand
In the first part of this post, I discussed some of the issues web-oriented companies face when they decide to upgrade the software technologies they rely on, taking the example of updating our development framework from Ruby on Rails version 2.x to version 3. I highlighted issues linked to code deprecation, time consumption, evolution of programming practices (greater emphasis on JavaScript programming for example) or compatibility between old and new libraries. However, keeping up with technology is essential to improve the quality of products and services you deliver to your customers, and to make your life easier in the process. Read more… Can living on the edge throw you over the edge? Part 2: Coming of Edge
Walking the edge
Rails 3.0, HTML5, Unobtrusive JavaScript, Grails, No-SQL databases…These are some of the web technologies that have exploded recently, and with them the promises for better, stronger, faster tools that will improve the end user experience. However, from the programmer’s perspective, transitioning to these new technologies, which usually happens shortly after you start telling yourself “I think I finally got a hold of this previous release”, can be time-consuming and may, at times, drive you to reconsider career choices. Read more… Can living on the edge throw you over the edge? Part 1: Looking down
The tech world ceases to exist without innovation. The rate at which technologies evolve and eventually become obsolete will sink your tech-reliant business if you’re not constantly reevaluating and retooling. To keep up, unless you are satisfied with lagging mediocrity, you have to create an environment that is conducive to innovation.
Read more… The Relationship Between Trust and Innovation
I am frequently amazed at the low priority that some businesses and IT teams seem to place on defining and managing enterprise-wide architectural and configuration standards. It seems to be common sense, but it is not uncommon for me to come across a cluster of application or web servers that are serving the same code, but are using different directory paths, naming conventions, environment variables, etc. and I’ve even found a few that are running different versions of the same software on different servers within the same cluster.
Read more… The Importance of Defining and Implementing Enterprise Standards
Recently, we were faced with a situation where a Weblogic admin server was failing to start, but was leaving very little info in the logs to point to the reason why, so we had to dig a bit deeper to find the cause.
This is the error message as it appeared in the weblogic log:
Read more… Troubleshooting Weblogic Authentication with the Truss Command
