At the end of 2023, I wrote about how I had used a Raspberry Pi Zero to act as a machine to remotely turn on and off a media server that I had in my house. The idea being that it was unnecessary to have it on 24/7, consuming electricity when I was asleep for much of that time.
While I had a nice little web app from which I could trigger the start up and shut down I always wanted to be able to do it using voice commands via Alexa. Today I finally got round to doing that … Read the rest
NOTE: This post has been updated to include the requirement of mod_unique_id.
As part of some investigations at work I have been playing around with ModSecurity, the open source web application firewall (WAF), and the standard set of rules provided by OWASP. All our infrastructure is hosted with Amazon AWS so I thought that it would be useful to drop down the steps I took to get this working on a bare bones Amazon Linux box.
You can, of course, compile ModSecurity from the sources but it is easier to install via yum, however, it is part … Read the rest
You may have noticed that there haven’t many (any) posts for a while. This is due to the following email I received from my existing server host:
Thank you for your years of loyalty. We regret to inform you that VPS Unlimited will be closing permanently on November 17, 2014. All customers must move their data off to another provider before this date. This is a hard deadline. All data will be destroyed on November 18, 2014. There will be no way to access your VPS after this date.
Insert your own expletive here.
Given that I have about eight … Read the rest
One of the great services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack is Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). This is a properly managed database server that you can run alongside your existing application server instances allowing the load to be spread.
This all works well but management can be a little tedious especially if you have been used to managing your existing MySQL server through phpMyAdmin. However, do not despair as it is possible to manage RDS from phpMyAdmin running on a remote server and this post shows you how.
This article assumes that you already have both RDS and … Read the rest