Figured I’d write this one up quickly as it proved to annoy the hell out of me at 4:30am this morning getting it working on a live server.

Apache 2 can serve SSL content to multiple vhosts on your setup, provided they use different IP addresses, this post will give you a quick run down on how to do it.

First up we need to actually add the new IP to the machine in /etc/network/interfaces.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 10.1.1.7
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 10.1.1.1

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
    address 10.1.1.8
    netmask 255.255.255.0

Replace my IPs with your own.

Restart networking.

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Next task is Apache 2 to configure it to listen on both IPs.

/etc/apache2/ports.conf

My …

Server security is something I’ve always tried to keep myself up-to-date on. I have at least a dozen RSS feeds that I read daily to learn about the latest flaws, holes releases etc. That being said I am by no means an “expert”, I’ve learned what I’ve needed to learn over time. I like to think that over the years I’ve gained enough knowledge to almost completely secure servers with all the programs installed that I generally use.

The aim of this article is to introduce you to some of the programs I use for security and some config changes that can be made to other programs to make them more secure. It is aimed at web servers but other changes work anywhere, like the SSH changes.

Ah sudo, one of my favourites, funnily enough I’ve noticed a lot of Linux users use sudo (mainly because Ubuntu installs and configures your first user by default,) but very few seem to know that much about it. This can include not even knowing how to add a user to sudoers.

This article will give you some useful information on what sudo actually is, how to configure it and how to restrict it.

This is gonna be quite a simple tutorial that should be the same (excluding pathing and apt) across other Linux distros.

sudo apt-get install apache2

sudo a2enmod ssl

sudp mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
sudo /usr/sbin/make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

This is a quick follow up to a previous post about getting this blog running on nginx with a reverse proxy to Apache 2.

It seems the issue stems from 3 mods I had installed and enabled

1. mod-spamhaus
2. mod-evasive and
3. mod-security

The 3, when running together are a fantastic way to strengthen any web server from attack, be it DOS, injection, XLS etc. I’ve sworn by all 3 of them for years now and I thought I had them cracked for security:performance ratio, when it comes to reverse proxying requests from nginx to Apache 2 where WordPress is concerned, apparently I was very wrong.

The issue wasn’t so bad when the cache was full, but seeing as my cache is only alive for an hour that leaves an open point for the cache to be recreated when a user views the page. This in itself isn’t …

There is a much newer article on this subject `here`_ and covers DomainKeys and DKIM.

Mail and mail servers have always been my forté if I’m to be honest, my home mail server has been spam free for years now, nothing really gets past due to my love of all things installable and configurable.

Several months ago I started a new job and after a few weeks I was tasked with getting DKIM signing to work on our mail platform, DKIM was semi-new to me, I’d never bothered with anything but SPF before so I figured I’d give it a shot.

At work our servers are Debian based but are the evil that is Ubuntu, strangely though I was able to find an Ubuntu specific article that wasn’t absolute rubbish, which surprised me no end. I was able to get dkim-milter working with Postfix and …

This is a rather old article, for more up-to-date information please see;

1. /2010/02/07/nginx-proxy_cache-and-explained-benchmarked/
2. /2010/02/14/more-nginx-proxy_cache-optimizations-and-nginx-load-balancing/

I’ve started collecting a few blogs on my servers now and figured from this one on I would consolidate it in to one workable, usable location. Removing my need to update multiple plugins, themes and WordPress itself, over and over.

This time round I thought I’d do it properly, and properly in my book is as complicated and “awesome” as it can possibly be, without growing legs and running off to stomp a city.