Mod_Security rivals Mod_Rewrite in the amount of features it provides. I decided to go ahead and post what I learned about it today, even though its tough to give away such awesome htaccess and apache tricks.. Learn how to control spam once and for all, conditionally log/deny/allow/redirect requests based on IP, username, etc.. Mod_Security is so fine!
Implementing an effective SEO robots.txt file for WordPress will help your blog to rank higher in Search Engines, receive higher paying relevant Ads, and increase your blog traffic. Get a search robots point of view... Sweet!
3-Part article covering practical implementation of 3 advanced .htaccess features. Discover an easy way to boost your SEO the AskApache way (focus on visitors), a tip you might keep and use for life. Get some cool security tricks to use against spammers, crackers, and other nefarious sorts. Take your site's error handling to the next level, enhanced ErrorDocuments that go beyond 404's.
These are a few of the mod_rewrite uses that BlogSecurity declared pushed the boundaries of Mod_Rewrite! Some of these snippets are quite exotic and unlike anything you may have seen before, also only for those who understand them as they can kill a website pretty quick.
Google's mod_pagespeed speeds up your site and reduces page load time. This open-source Apache HTTP server module automatically applies web performance best practices to pages, and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images), all transparently like a Squid Proxy.
With TMPFS you can dramatically improve the speed of mod_pagespeed and the webpages served by it. TMPFS will store/serve the optimized PageSpeed output directly from RAM!
A first-time visitor to your page will make several HTTP requests to download all your sites files, but using the Expires header you make those files cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views.
Learn how to setup, configure, secure, optimize, and create a low-maintenance website the AskApache way. I'm piecing together all the hacks, tricks, methods, and ideas discussed throughout this blog and all across Netdom and glueing them all together to show you how to have the most optimized, crazy fastest, and best website setup I can think of.
Well what can I say, other than this is sooo DOPE! Here is a list of the modules this plugin (version 4.7 unreleased) will automatically detect. I compiled the list myself using every module included with any default Apache installation for ALL the versions listed below, 1.3 to 2.2+
Want to know something else I'm including in this plugin? For each and every module that is detected, this plugin can then detect ALL of the modules .htaccess Directives! For instance, RewriteRule, AccessFileName, AddHandler, etc.. are each a directive belonging to a module that is allowed to be used from within .htaccess files.
Talk about sick.. these tricks have the diamond disease!
SetEnv, SetEnvIf, and SetEnvIfNoCase directives conditionally set environment variables accessible by scripts and apache based on HTTP Headers, Variables, and Request information.
Enter your DOMAIN_ROOT and the location of your wp-config.php or config.php, and this script finds all the mysql settings by parsing the phpbb or wordpress config file, then creates GPG encrypted backups, and saves your settings for future automation.
I am almost ready to publish the final tutorial on using ssh tunnels from a truecrypt partition on a Windows machine. Of course I choose to go way overboard in my research and the tutorial is full of some pretty awesome windows tricks.. I will come back to this post soon and post all the other advanced tools I use for debugging windows, for now though you MUST know how to debug the kernel and use these basic debugging tools.
If you examine the preferences dialog of any modern Web browser (like Internet Explorer, Safari or Mozilla), you'll probably notice a 'cache' setting. This lets you set aside a section of your computer's hard disk to store representations that you've seen, just for you. The browser cache works according to fairly simple rules. It will check to make sure that the representations are fresh, usually once a session (that is, the once in the current invocation of the browser).
As a security nut myself, and also a Linux admin, one of my biggest pet peeves is when I've taken the time and care to segment all the users on a server into separate home directories, and then some developer comes along, logs in as root, and changes the ownership of files. Other things can cause this, like Apache, PHP, Mutt, etc.. So I've always used a cron job that executes daily (and on demand) which automatically fixes all the permissions back to what they should be.
Search all files in a directory, replacing all occurances of string with a replacement string.
Grab the latest php.ini developmental version and discover new or previously hidden php runtime configuration settings... ahead of everyone else!
Just a very brief look at speeding up form submission by delegating the processing and bandwidth to your server, not your client.
As an example, here is the boot line that I am using at the moment on an older Dell Desktop, just to illustrate module parameters and environment vars.
title Arch Linux X-256 linux /vmlinuz-linux root=UUID rw rootfstype=ext4 elevator=noop selinux=0 plymouth.enable=0 raid=noautodetect ipv6.disable=1 video=DP1:d rcutree.rcu_idle_gp_delay=1 i915.panel_ignore_lid=-1 i915.modeset=1 TERM=rxvt-256color
Advanced Web Development by AskApache is a Firefox Collection I created since I'm always trying new Addons out and using multiple computers and I wanted a quick and easy way to install my favorite's and keep a running list. Firebug, YSlow, LastPass, and Web Developer are the only ones I always use regularly.
I like the idea of the last.fm but it's not as powerful as the site, which is awesome. Lately listening to Kings of Leon Radio...
Using Cache-Control headers you can specify which types of proxies can cache certain content, and how long files should be cached.
What if you'd like to send a 200 OK response instead of the default 404 Not Found response using Apache .htaccess files or httpd.conf? One use would be to make sure upstream caches cache any request on an api server, as 404's are not cached.
Links to htaccess tutorials and howtos in the htaccess forum
This amazing bash linux prompt does more than meets the eye. If you want to know how to become really good with technology, linux is the secret sauce behind the AskApache articles. Open Source is elixir of the web. Thanks to everyone who helped me for the past 20 years. I use linux/bsd because homey don't play, so this is geared to be as productive a prompt as I can make it.
Don't have much time.. or just don't care? Not a problem, here are the 3 lines to copy and paste - you can just paste them right in your shell to test it, or add to a startup script.
export AA_P="export PVE=\"\\033[m\\033[38;5;2m\"\$(( \`sed -n \"s/MemFree:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\` / 1024 ))\"\\033[38;5;22m/\"\$((\`sed -n \"s/MemTotal:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\`/ 1024 ))MB\"\\t\\033[m\\033[38;5;55m\$(< /proc/loadavg)\\033[m\";echo -en \"\""
export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;((\$SECONDS % 10==0 ))&&eval \"\$AA_P\";echo -en \"\$PVE\";"
export PS1="\\[\\e[m\\n\\e[1;30m\\][\$\$:\$PPID \\j:\\!\\[\\e[1;30m\\]]\\[\\e[0;36m\\] \\T \\d \\[\\e[1;30m\\][\\[\\e[1;34m\\]\\u@\\H\\[\\e[1;30m\\]:\\[\\e[0;37m\\]\${SSH_TTY} \\[\\e[0;32m\\]+\${SHLVL}\\[\\e[1;30m\\]] \\[\\e[1;37m\\]\\w\\[\\e[0;37m\\] \\n(\$SHLVL:\\!)\\\$ " && eval $AA_P
SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLRequireSSL
SSLRequire %{HTTP_HOST} eq "google.com"
ErrorDocument 403 https://google.com
Some of the Ins and Outs of using SSL Connections with Apache.
After many years of using any and all terminal emulators out there, from xterm to the Gnome terminal, to KDE Konsole to xfce4-terminal, lxterminal, vte, yakuake, rote, roxterm, sakura, terminator, and putty I finally I settled in for the long-haul with rxvt (rxvt-unicode).
My BOX: Slim -> Ratpoison -> URxvt -> Tmux -> Bash
I really really wanted to run the latest MariaDB with LZ4 Page Compression.. it is a game changer for many types of large databases I deal with. So I compiled it manually in a way that is repeatable and follows best-practices and it's now powering this site. Now I can use InnoDB Page Compression with lzo, lzma, bzip2, snappy, or my favorite algorithm: LZ4.
Thought this would be a good chance to post a howto, and show that there is a lot you can do by compiling software yourself and breaking the package management one-click install shackles.
I used to have a problem of controlling flash elements on my sites.. On one site we have 6 different flash flv movies that are all the same size and are in the same position on the page. But only 1 is displayed at a time based on what the user wants to watch. So the selected flash movie needs to have the highest stacking order/zIndex.
Thought I'd give you all the tips and tricks that I've learned and use when developing WordPress plugins.. which can be quite fun!
While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.
Today I successfully learned how to compile and run multiple custom php installations for a DreamHost account, and to get it working I came upon a simple shell script that I made a couple changes to.