Use Fail2ban to Block Bot Attacks
You’re probably already using the Fail2ban service to protect your web server against common attacks. Fail2ban monitors your server logs and temporarily adjusts your firewall rules to block IP...
View ArticleWeb Server Performance for Drupal and WordPress, Part I
This post discusses methods for improving web server performance for Drupal and WordPress, or really any LAMP setup. First we’ll talk about getting better performance out of Apache, and in later...
View ArticleWeb Server Performance Part II: Varnish and Pound
Web Server Part I: General Caching and Apache Connections In part I of this series, we talked about setting up an Apache server with a smaller memory footprint and PHP caching system. This helps the...
View ArticleWeb Server Part III: WordPress and Drupal Performance
Part I: PHP Caching and Connections Part II: Varnish and Pound So now that you have your web server tuned up for optimal performance, what about Drupal and WordPress themselves? Here are some basic...
View ArticleIs This a Bug? Varnish Client IP Address Appears Twice
If you’re running the Varnish caching system, you may have noticed that the client’s IP address is duplicated, like “10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.1”, in your server logs. One of the standard recommendations for...
View ArticleInstalling Drush Without the PEAR Channel
So it appears that the PEAR Drush channel is going away. (It seems to be working at this moment, but occasionally of late I’ve been getting “Discovery of channel pear.drush.org failed” messages. That...
View ArticleApache MPM: Which One To Use?
I’ve been using Apache with different Apache MPM (multi-processing module) configurations for some time now. I use Worker in most of my Apache environments, but there are circumstances where Prefork or...
View ArticleRecompile Nginx Installed With Apt-Get
So you’re running an Ubuntu server with the latest version of Nginx that you installed with apt-get. One minor inconvenience with Nginx (compared with Apache) is that it has no hook for dynamically...
View ArticleNginx + PHP-FPM + APC + SSL + Varnish + Drupal
So, you want to set up Nginx and Drupal with all the bells and whistles on Ubuntu Server 12.04. You want caching for both PHP and Varnish and you need it to work for both SSL and non-SSL. Here’s a...
View ArticleUbuntu 14 with Apache, PHP-FPM and MySQL
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been out for about a month now, and it promises some nice enhancements in its default repos: Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, and MySQL 5.5. Starting from a bare server image, here’s how to...
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Installing Drush 8
Previously I discussed how to install Drush 6.x for use with Drupal 7. Here we’ll install Drush 8 for Drupal 8, specifically using Ubuntu 16.04 Server. The recommended method is to install using PHP’s...
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Your First Steps in WordPress
Once I’ve set up your WordPress blog, I recommend that you take the following steps: 1) Change your password to something secure and useful. There are various random password generators that you can...
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WordPress: Optimizing Nginx and WP Super Cache
Today we’re going to compare the performance of a WordPress site before and after we install and optimize the WP Super Cache plugin. We’re running Ubuntu 16.04 Server, Nginx 1.10, PHP 7 with the Zend...
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Install WP-CLI
The wp-cli command-line utility allows you to manage your WordPress sites without going through the WordPress dashboard, much like Drush does for Drupal. To install Composer and wp-cli on Ubuntu 16.04:...
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Bash: Make a Web Site Index
An old Bash script that uses awk to construct an index with hyperlinks from the .html files in a web tree. Attempts to use the <title> tag to name each link. To use, change your directories in...
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Perl XHTML Validation
Fixes some common XHTML validation errors, to make a web page pass the W3C markup validator. Does this still work? I have no idea, I never build web pages by hand anymore. #!/usr/bin/perl -cw # # Clean...
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jQuery Reading Progress Meter
On my Amazon reading list page I wanted to add a progress bar and ahead/behind schedule counter similar to that on Goodreads. For their reading progress meter, you enter how many books you plan to...
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Perl Hyperlink Relativizer
This was written to strip local domains from hyperlinks in text files, e.g., www.geoffstratton.com/mylink.html will become /mylink.html. #!/usr/bin/perl -cw # # Strip local domains from link urls. #...
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Installing an SSL Certificate on Nginx
Update April 2018: I’d suggest using Let’s Encrypt for this instead. How to create and install an SSL certificate for Nginx 1.10 on Ubuntu 16. (Apache setup here.) This setup also gets you an A on the...
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PHP: Implementing the Amazon Product Advertising API
This is the code for my basic implementation of the Amazon Product Advertising API. Update 9/2016: Switched to using ASIN due to too many conflicts in ISBN/EISBN numbers. Both methods are provided...
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