Let’s Encrypt ALL THE THINGS
Got my first domain using a cert from Let’s Encrypt in under ~10 minutes, including setting up Let’s Encrypt itself. Yes, this is rather game changing. Now to write ansible playbooks around it, and figure out how to get it working for proxied domains automatically.
On interviews and looking back at the future
Posted by in Personal on November 2, 2015
I don’t think I’ve published a post on my job searches as part of my time in the SoftEng program at UWaterloo, even though I’ve got a few in my drafts. Since I’ve had my last interview (and Jobmine has closed & matched), here’s some fun stats without naming companies: Favourite interviewer line: “So our […]
Generating a SSL key + CSR
Posted by in Sysadmin on September 17, 2015
Because I’ve had to look it up multiple times Generate the private key openssl genrsa -out domain.tld.key 2048 then, generate the CSR openssl req -sha256 -new -key domain.tld.key -out domain.tld.csr I’m certain there’s a one liner to do this, but didn’t find anything while looking (briefly).
Cloudflare & Python’s urllib
Posted by in Programming on August 23, 2015
TL;DR: Trying to diagnose why my copr builds were abruptly failing, I found an interesting thing: Cloudflare’s Browser Integrity Check apparently doesn’t like Python’s urllib sending requests. The symptoms in Copr were weird: builds would try importing, and then fail with no log output. To me, trying to diagnose the problem made no sense – […]
nginx-pagespeed
Posted by in Sysadmin on March 26, 2015
Just bundled it into copr, so now there’s a yum repo for fedora 20, 21, 22 and rawhide & CentOS 6+7 – copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/kyl191/nginx-pagespeed/ Amusingly, Rawhide changed the ABI, which the configure script had problems with. But I found a solution, which is going into ngx_pagespeed – github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed/issues/942. Documentation fix until the code is brought up […]
Building Nginx SRPMS
Companion to my earlier post, this actually has commands
Path to building Nginx Mainline RPMs for Fedora & CentOS
Posted by in Linux, Programming, Sysadmin on February 13, 2015
Or: How I spent an afternoon doing a deep dive into the RPM spec and solving a problem for myself tl;dr – Nginx Mainline packages are being built for Fedora & CentOS at copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/kyl191/nginx-mainline/ My webserver’s running nginx 1.4.7, a version that hasn’t gotten non-bugfix attention since March 2013, according to the changelog. Oddly enough […]
My State of Serving, aka VPS recap
So I wrote a bunch about VPSes a few months ago, and what I thought my future looked like with them. Well, a bunch has changed since then, and will going forward, so let’s go: Full out cloud hosting Still good for buy-as-you-need systems, still not right for my usecase. Other than reading about price […]
Ansible gotchas
Tasks do not like having the remote_user changed mid-playbook if you specify a SSH password Specifically, having an ‘ansible’ user created as the first task, then using that for everything in the rest of the playbook doesn’t work because ansible will always attempt to use the declared password for the newly created user, which promptly […]
My state of VPSes
The VPS market is really really interesting to watch. Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of being able to get a year of a decent system for the price of a pizza is fascinating – and somewhat dangerous to my wallet. At my peak, I had 4 VPSes running at the same time – and […]