Recent Posts

Better Whois

2 minute read

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 f...

Shell Secrets

1 minute read

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 ...

Secret Rails Configurations

2 minute read

Last time, I looked at keeping environment specific configuration using YAML files and Rails.application.config_for. One big issue with this approach is secu...

Custom Configuration for Rails Environments

3 minute read

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...

Quick and Dirty Rails Environments

1 minute read

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...

NGINX SNI

less than 1 minute read

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 runni...

HAProxy SNI

2 minute read

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 w...

Apache SNI

2 minute read

I covered Server Name Indication (SNI) a while back, but it still surprises me how little people know about it. So, it’s time to look at configuring Apache t...

These Are the Inodes You Are Looking For

2 minute read

Ever gotten a disk full error, only to run df and not see any full disks? After banging you head against the wall for a while, you remember to run du -i and ...

Importing Legacy Data into Your Rails App

3 minute read

Sometimes you have to write a new Rails app for old data. One approach is to keep the old format and carefully craft your ActiveRecord models to work with th...