the ramblings of a crazed IT administrator
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Setting up WordPress on Nginx
0
Just a quick post with a handy link for anyone looking to get WordPress running under Nginx (an awesome and much faster alternative to Apache!), one of the big differences between Nginx and Apache is the lack of .htaccess files and a different way of handling re-write rules which can cause headaches if you are used to using the “pretty” links in WordPress, or any other plugin that relies on Apache mod_rewrite rules (such as WPSuperCache).
Thankfully (and after many hours of googling and trying various less than ideal configs), I found the perfect setup guide in the most obvious place (and the last place I looked), possible – the WordPress Codex section, so for anyone struggling with Nginx and WordPress, or wanting to streamline their configuration, give this guide a read:
New Year, New Host
2
Well, its 2011 already so I guess its time to start my promise to post more often (and even finish part 3 of my SSL guide!).
My first job for the year has been completed successfully as the site has been moved onto a new host, I finally cracked and moved back to managing my own server, this time I am using the highly recommended Linode who so far have been pretty awesome, for a small 512MB VPS everything has been flying along, even when compiling (yes, I run Gentoo on a server). So far everything feels a bit faster and at least I now have the freedom to fix problems that I find such as the annoying mod_security problem I hit where it was preventing me from having the words /etc/ssl together because it thought I was trying to hack the server rather than write about a linux configuration file!
Hopefully everything got moved over successfully, I haven’t been able to spot any problems but if you see anything let me know in the comments!
How to Speed up your RAID array’s
0Quite simple really, just add wolves to your server room (care of XKCD)
New look – maybe even some new content too
0
As you might have noticed I’ve given my blog a bit of a new look, hopefully it is nice and easy to navigate and it should load quite a bit faster than the old theme I was using, it’s also about time I posted up the final part of my SSL guide and I may even force myself to find time to blog a bit more about other things too, go me!
Damn you mod_security!
1So I was
attempting to write this series of SSL guides last week when I hit upon a problem, after playing around with Cygwin for a while I decided to update the first part of the series to use a different path to store the certificates as it made more sense and would be pretty common for anyone with any linux experience. Upon trying to save the updated posts however I kept getting 404 errors from WordPress, very odd as I hadn’t changed anything.
To cut a long story short and to avoid boring too many people it turns out that apparently including the text /etc /ssl (without the spaces obviously), appears to send my webhost into a security frenzy and drop the request! Yes, apparently my webhost decided to enable Apache’s mod_security feature and to then enable seemingly every part of it, including filtering all POST requests for anything slightly dangerous such as me even mentioning certain paths!
This just another reason why I want to ditch my current host and move back to managing everything myself using a VPS (probably linode), at least then I can make my own decisions on what balance of excessive security/actual usability I want to have.
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