Here’s the command list to quickly create a self-signed SSL certificate from the Linux command line. You can copy/paste each line to the shell to generate the key. It assumes you will place each set of SSL files under a directory assigned per domain; at the end you will have a directory that contains the [...]

You may (or may not) have noticed this site was down for the past few days, displaying a blank page no matter what URL was entered. After recalling that I had turned off PHP error onscreen outputting, I was presented with this lovely message: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to [...]

Today I had to make an Apache rewrite that redirected a custom URL not only to a different page, but also to a specific anchor link on the destination page. In other words, /foobar had to actually load /some/other/url#foobar. However, by default Apache rewrites will escape the hash (#) symbol, converting to its hexcode equivalent [...]

You run a Linux web server, and have painstakingly crafted custom backup processes for all your important data. Undoubtedly, the backup copies end up being stored in the form of a tar archive. Everything works great — copies are made, compressed, and sent off-site. There’s just one naggy little issue: whenever you open one of [...]

Here’s the scenario: You have a remote-hosted Linux server that you currently access via SSH by entering a username and password. You would like to use a public/private key pair so that you don’t have to enter a password every time you log in. You do most of your work from a Windows/Mac client, where [...]

PHP IDS is an intrusion detection system written in PHP. It allows developers to incorporate security analysis directly into their systems. Since it’s written in PHP, it can go wherever the site goes, and has minimal server requirements. Plus, since it works at the site level, a developer can pick and choose how and when [...]

This one has dogged me for quite some time, but I finally figured out how to force users to turn on Javascript when using sites with a lot of mission critical Javascript logic. Let me first begin by acknowledging that, yes, requiring Javascript flies in the face of site accessibility. Policy wonks for this sort [...]