Tyklings blog Witty but descriptive text goes here

Ansible and Unix File Permissions

by Tykling

19. nov 2016 13:35 UTC


Background

Earlier this week I was pretty surprised to see some weird permissions on some nginx config files on my servers. The servers are managed by Ansible so I suspected some changes I made to my ansible roles a few days prior. I only made syntax changes so I didn't expect anything to change. But sometimes the rabbit hole goes deeper than you imagined :)

So I looked at the Ansible task that creates an…

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Fun with FreeBSD Listen Queue Overflow

by Tykling

02. oct 2016 12:22 UTC


I spotted a listen queue overflow error message in /var/log/messages on one of my jailhosts today.

I have no idea what could be causing this. This jailhost is busy so it could be a lot of things. Seems to happen about every hour, perhaps some scheduled job?

Most results when you search for the error mention TCP services that can't keep up with the connection rate to the TCP port. But since I didn't know which TCP port I had some detective work to do.

The error f…

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Cleaning up Django migrations

by Tykling

17. mar 2016 10:48 UTC


Background

Djangos database migrations system greatly simplifies the task of keeping multiple databases in sync (the schema, not the data) as the schema evolves over time. Formerly known as South, Djangos migrations system is also a good example of how Django embraces and includes 3rd party packages when it makes sense.

Over the last year I (and colleagues) have been developing a Django-based provisioning system for an ISP. The system has grown rather large with a lot of …

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PostgreSQL "hot standby" - replication from FreeBSD master to Ubuntu standby

by Tykling

23. jan 2016 20:08 UTC


Background

I was asked to provide a replica of a postgresql server running on FreeBSD. The replica was for reporting purposes, so it must be possible to run read-only queries on it, and it needs to be up-to-date at all times. In postgres land this is called a Hot Standby. Almost the same as a warm standby, except that it accepts connections and read-only queries. The replication had to be done to an Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS machine running on Amazon. Both postgres servers are version 9.3…

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New blog software

by Tykling

27. sep 2015 10:56 UTC


This blog used to be based on Django Mezzanine which stopped working for some reason. The whole thing was stupidly complex anyway.

I've written a small Django project to run the blog in the future. The sourcecode can be found on Github.


OCSP Stapling in Nginx

by Tykling

22. oct 2013 23:24 UTC


Background

This post is about getting OCSP Stapling to work in nginx. OCSP is short for Online Certificate Status Protocol and is a close to realtime method of checking an TLS certificates validity.

This blogpost is based on nginx 1.4.3 (you need at least nginx 1.3.7 for OCSP stapling to work) compiled against OpenSSL 1.0.1e in a FreeBSD 9.2 jail. To compile ng…

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