Server configurations and setups
Being at the tail end of a hosting contract with GoDaddy, the renewal fees have gone way up, plus the Linux kernel and PHP interpreter are outdated – a rebuild is needed. I’ll use this opportunity to migrate my sites to AWS S3 and Cloudflare to save big money, save resources, have fine-grain server control, and squeeze out every drop of performance and get a nice SEO bump.
In Part Two, I show you how to handle the Htaccess file, use Cloudflare Workers to serve dynamic content, create cron jobs, protect your S3 buckets, cache hard, handle comments, and set up a WAF and firewall, and more advanced topics.
ODROID XU4s are awesome. They are 8-core, 2GHz ARM single-board computers (SBCs) with Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0 connections. They only have 2GB of DDR3 RAM, but when paired with a CloudShell2 case and a couple of HDDs (or SSDs), they become an impressive NAS, or better, dedicated network-activity drivers for other projects.
Let’s say I’m in a Starbucks or the airport (or both) and I want to connect to my Windows (or OSX or Linux) machine to check on things. Maybe I don’t want to take my primary computer with me on vacation; maybe I’ll just take a Chromebook. Behind a restrictive firewall all we have is port 80 and port 443 (no VNC or RDP allowed), so let’s make a secure web-based remote desktop gateway with a Raspberry Pi, Docker, and Cloudflare.
Let’s setup a remote Docker daemon on AWS and connect to it securely over HTTPS with PhpStorm. This will allow us to develop and administer Docker containers remotely with the PhpStorm IDE. Here we’ll create TLS certificates, configure the Docker daemon, verify the setup, and configure PhpStorm to even use Docker Compose remotely.
Here are few PHP web shell scripts I found in a production server in late 2016. I’ll show some of them, sneaky as they be, and then my efforts for securing a production server.
GoAccess web log analyzer is a beautiful tool to show real-time traffic and stats – including GeoIP information, bandwidth usage, and visitor time distributions – of my web projects and apps over and above Google’s Webmaster Tools and UA reporting. At a glance I can see current traffic and historic traffic just by adding a […]