With today’s widespread use of cloud computing due to low cost and ease of use, the entry level hacker has found an easy playground to pray on the unexperienced and unprotected. It’s just amazing how many attack scripts are running against a new AWS EC2 instance as soon as it’s started. So what to do? How to protect against intruders and hackers and reliably prevent denial of service attacks?

While there are different kind of attacks, in this article we focus ...

Dealing with different versions of Java Virtual Machine or Java Runtime Environment (JRE/JVM) has always been a bit of a pain, especially on Linux, where we have not only different versions, but also different vendors. To make matters worse, some application require the original Sun/Oracle version, while others are perfectly fine with open source version.

In the past, Sun provided an installer for deb and rpm based distributions, but since Ubuntu 12.04, there is no luck. However, installing Oracle’s JVM manually is actually straight ...

I recently was called for help by a WordPress based site owner, suspecting that her site was hacked and cpu utilization of her Ec2 instance was pegged at 100%. She rebooted to remedy the situation, hence I initially could not find anything wrong, no suspicious processes running and network socket connections seemed fine.

The next day she contacted me again, this time right away while her site was bogged down. Despite extremely high cpu utilization, I was able to ssh into the instance ...

Git has gotten a lot of hype recently, especially among smaller development teams and contractors, for its flexible, distributed environment, ease of use and while Subversion is the old kid on the block, there are pros and cons for each. This article assumes that you already know the intrinsics of the different version control systems and you’ve decided that Git is for you.

Gitolite is a package that allows us to host our repositories using one dedicated user that has restricted ...

Creating different versions of a WordPress site is no easy task, especially for the blogger who also becomes an occasional theme developer. A proper mobile version should start out at site planning, theme design and user behavior.

But what if you already have a nice looking site but don’t want to spend the time and money? At least there is a solution, WPtouch.

WPtouch is a WordPress plugin for self-hosted WordPress websites that shows a well-designed mobile theme version of your site ...

We often get questions like: What is the difference between Apache Prefork vs Worker Threads? Is it wrong to have set the configuration values the same for both? Or is it wrong to have them different?

In this quick article I will shed some light between the two modules and assess what real world circumstances, a certain os and application would call for which solution.

It all goes back to the old NCSA server where Apache 1 grew up in a UNIX ...

Ever wondered why the MySQL command line tool don’t have any sort of progress bar or information or status update? Well, you’re not alone if you do. Especially importing a GB sized dump file can take a long time, especially if the table engine was InnoDB.

There are some clever utilities which can be used to accomplish just that, by giving the user simple, yet useful information about the progress of their process. Let’s look at how to show progress of ...

Help: WordPress iFrame and Embed not working! The issue where in WordPress iFrames not working, or simply disappear was introduced with version 2.2  There seems to be a known problem with iFrames in posts and pages, starting with WordPress 2.2.1 to be exact, which happens when editors use the internal WYSIWYG editor. A lot of users have reported this issue in frustration.

Initial saving of the content was fine, but subsequently editing and re-saving is would strip iFrame tags. A less ...

With new releases of Firefox coming out every few weeks, we thought it’s time for a fresh list of most powerful, top Firefox extensions for web developers. Even though couple of our mentions are not yet compatible with this latest release, we’re convinced they’ll be available in no time.

While the latest releases also include some HTML 5 enhancements, we like to see some new extensions to help developers with canvas, forms, local storage and other new features in the future.

In ...

Basic http authentication in Apache (mod_auith) has been available for a while, but one major downside still exists, which is the exchange of plain text user name and password information over a possibly unsecured network. That is where Apache Digest Authentication takes over and provides us with MD5 encrypted values, using the mod_digest Apache module.

Here are the steps to create a password file to store all account information, install the apache module mod_auth_digest and the necessary configuration parameters to enable security ...