I’ve been working on a post about using JWTs JSON Web Token (JWT) when you can’t use HTTP cookies for sessions. As I dug into it, I came to realize that understanding the risks of using JWTs requires a bit of understanding about how HTTP...
A quickie this week. When I’m wearing my Ops Hat (I totally need to make me an “Ops Hat”, something with lights and a grappling hook), I often find myself setting up servers for other people. That requires getting them SSH access to the ...
JSON Web Token (JWT) have come in to my life. I like them and you will too… Pronounced “jot”, the short version is that they are cryptographically signed blobs of JSON. They pass data around that can be viewed, but not tampered with. The...
whois is a command line tool to look up registration information for domains, things like owner, location, and contact info. WHOIS (all caps) is a protocol for querying databases of domain registration (and other related) information. Ea...
Speaking of secrets, here’s how I keep them in the shell. Why do I have secrets in the shell? Typically, they are things like API keys and passwords for web services that I use in scripts. For example, I have a script display issues that...
Last time, I looked at keeping environment specific configuration using YAML files and Rails.application.config_for. One big issue with this approach is security. It’s very common to have different sets of API keys and API settings for d...
Previously, I looked at the simply way of creating Rails stages that shared same configuration with Production by simply importing production.rb into the new stage:
A quick tip — When I’m deploying Rails apps to Staging or Beta I try to keep the configuration as close to Production as possible. I’ve gotten bitten one too many times by things that only break in production due to configuration (assets...
Well, I might as well round out my Server Name Indication (SNI) sort of series by taking a look an nginx. Does your nginx support SNI? You can check by running nginx -V, but unless your nginx was built when dinosaurs roamed the earth, yo...
Last time, I looked at configuring Server Name Indication (SNI) with Apache. It just so happened I needed to set up SNI with the HAProxy Load Balancer last week, so let’s take a look at that. Typically, when you are hosting multiple site...