This was a team project for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, my alma mater and current employer. I was hired by UTC as web development specialist in late 2012, and worked with a cross-discipline team on the redesign, information architecture, 10,000 page migration to CMS and user training for over 300 web editors. The […]
VacantServer WordPress sites are getting hammered with bad logins and probes. We’ve implemented a plugin to log failed login attempts to syslog, and a Fail2Ban filter for the same. If you run these on RedHat, you’ll need some additional configuration info… here it is: WordPress login failure regex (error_log): ^%(__prefix_line)sAuthentication failure for .* from <HOST>$ […]
Fail2Ban is a very efficient daemon that scans log files for malicious activity, and offers several options to ban offending IPs and hostnames. Although it is highly configurable, it requires a depth of knowledge beyond that required for GUI-accessible firewalls such as ConfigServer Security & Firewall. Harden the Kernel Before do anything further, it is […]
I was recently searching for a form template that uses Twitter’s Bootstrap framework. PFBC, the PHP Form Builder Class, was recently refactored with Bootstrap, and it also supports validation and reCAPTCHA. PFBC does not include a form handler, but it does take the difficult and redundant work out of creating self-validating forms. Adding an auto-mailer […]
How to install phpMyAdmin on CentOS, Amazon Linux, or Redhat. Configuration instructions are provided for Apache and NginX web servers.
Trawire.com offers portable 4G MiFi and iPad rentals for visitors traveling to Iceland. Trawire’s CIO approached me for assistance after his systems administrator bailed and left him with a poorly maintained, self-hosted MacMini server running unoptimized WordPress installs. I migrated the site to Amazon Web Services, where it now can handle traffic spikes and can be […]
I recently upgraded my WordPress theme to WooThemes Canvas 5.x, and I found that some of the icons were not rendering, but were showing a letter or integer instead. I dug into the code and found that these icons are now delivered via @font-face webfonts. Meanwhile, I’m working on a client’s e-commerce site with Google […]
I have been working on a Varnish front-end for Apache, to be used with WordPress sites. I described the architecture in Load Balancing Virtualmin WordPress Hosting Server with Varnish on AWS. I now have a configuration that seems to work for all WordPress features, including logged-out commenting. This configuration also works well with W3 Total […]
Punktastic.com is a community powered site that covers punk music in Britain, but is poised to go worldwide. They cover punk and hardcore shows and festivals, and provide album reviews, video interviews and more. With a growing audience and user base, Punktastic needed a more reliable and robust web server, so they made the move […]
Virtualmin now includes support for Nginx web server. I deploy many WordPress sites with W3 Total Cache and APC Alternative PHP Cache, so I was very interested to see how Nginx performance compares to Apache for WordPress, and whether APC and W3TC would play nice with Nginx. I prefer to install WordPress in public_html/wordpress for […]