Server &Amp; Admin

Sometimes you are looking so hard for a solution, that you won’t even see them even if they punched you in the face. Email Subaddressing is one of those issues I couldn’t get fixed.

For a current project both me and a colleague are working on a big API system that authenticates through an OAuth system. Normally, such an API does all the necessary OAuth checking, handling of …

Hi there! This is probably one of the most visited pages of my blog, most likely because this post is very controversial. It's also an old post, and got much feedback on the post (both negative and …

So probably you are aware I’m currently exploring the deeps on the Apache source internals. One of the discoveries I’ve made was a (for me unknown) command in mod_dir that will make your …

Version 5.4 is soon to be launched as the next new stable release of PHP. Granted, there will not be major changes like we saw in version 5.3, but it will still have some nifty new features. Two of …

If you haven’t heard of MCollective, think of.. The Borg.. Except without the laser-eye, or the spaceship-cube, or the scary voices. Come to think of it,.. it doesn’t really have anything …

If you have read the book “Pulling strings with puppet”, a lot of this book might sound familiar to you already. Not really a strange thing since it’s from the same author. But …

When saying Apache, most developers immediately think of a web server. And this of course is true, Apache httpd web server is the most used web server today and the number of users keep on growing …

Last weekend I’ve visited the Loadays conference where I sat in the presentation of Thijs Feryn’s “Varnish in action”. Even though most of the talk was pretty familiar for me …

It’s going to be a few busy weeks for me concerning speaking at conferences and meetups. Not only will I be speaking at the March edition of the phpBenelux meetup, hosted at our Enrise office, …

TCP is one of the core protocols for the TCP/IP suite. It provides a reliable data connection without you needing to worry about errors, congestion and other communication problems that haunt the …

I have to admit it: grew up with unix “the wrong way”. Instead of having decent user-accounts for every employee, all our work was done under the root-account. The main reason for this is …

Linux, and other unices have an excellent system to centralize log events. This is done through syslog. This system removes the need for every application to maintain their own log files and let the …

From time to time I get amazed how people can setup their production servers. At the smallish development companies there is no real system administrator available to setup the systems and to keep …

I was on the verge of creating a post about the TSL/SSL handshaking, when I discovered a blogpost about the very same subject. Since I don’t think it’s of much use to blog about exactly …

Oauth is a very popular authentication mechanism used for a lot of web applications. And not without good reasons. It is relatively easy to implement, has different flavours (2-legged, 3-legged …

SSL and virtualhosting on 1 IP address? I can’t be done! Well, this might have been the case a few years ago but times has changed. Let’s explore the possibilites to have multiple hosts …

Did you know you can write a webserver in awk or that sed supports conditional jumps? Probably not… These tool (languages, actually) are much more powerful than most people know. The sed & …

Today I overheard two colleagues discussing one of my favorite subjects: encryption. The discussion was about that encrypting data (with a normal block cipher) was working perfectly in ECB mode, but …

I’ve just uploaded the new slides for my Public Key Cryptography 101 presentation. It consists of 84 (!) slides about the basics of encryption, public key cryptography and implementations. How …

Most developers who are working at the command line on a Linux system know the “basic” commands: ls, cd, cat, tail, head, sort, grep, find and others. More “advanced” users …

At almost every software company I’ve been involved in, used custom-made tools for various tasks. These tools range from simple shell-scripts for search&replacing data to large …

During this blog post I will talk about creating your own custom package repository. However, before you can setup a repository, you need packages. This previous post talks about setting up your …

I’ve just finished my LPI-201 and LPI-202 exams, which you both need in order to receive your LPIC-2 certification. Even though I’ve used Linux professionally since before 1998, I still …