Author: jason

  • I just donated to Wikipedia

    After reading a blog post from someone who donated to Wikipedia because they use it a lot, I realised I use it a lot too, so I decided to donate too. Unfortunately I can’t quite remember who’s post it was, but thank you whoever you are! I donated $30. You should too if you like…

  • Apache [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) does NOT match server name!?

    Apache was giving me lots of errors like this on my host that has multiple virtual hosts on it. After a little investigation it turned out the CN in the certificate was set to www.domain but the vhost’s ServerName was set to www-less.The solution turned out to be to ensure the vhost ServerName == the…

  • Using fail2ban to mitigate WordPress xmlrpc.php DDoS attacks

    Using fail2ban to mitigate WordPress xmlrpc.php DDoS attacks

    Use fail2ban with WordPress to prevent xlmrpc.php DDoS attacks

  • Howto quickly find your Beaglebone Black’s IP address

    Howto quickly find your Beaglebone Black’s IP address

    Whenever I connect my Beaglebone Black (BBB) to a network, I have to work out it’s IP address so I can ssh into it. This can be tricky. Some of your options are: connect to the serial terminal, or connect over the usb network interface which gives the BBB the address 192.168.7.2, log in and…

  • Facebook selecting wrong thumbnail for WordPress links

    Does Facebook keep selecting the wrong thumbnail for WordPress links for you? The solution is to give Facebook some extra instruction about what image to use for the thumbnail, using open graph. If you use a static frontpage, it’s a simple matter of adding something like: <meta property=”og:image” content=”http://samplesite.com/files/2014/05/web-thumb.png” /> to the Full meta tags…

  • Backup your Beaglebone Black

    Backup your Beaglebone Black

    Using a method I previously wrote about, it’s quite easy to backup your Beaglebone Black over the network. ssh root@bbb ‘tar cf – / 2>/dev/null’ | pv -cN tar \ | bzip2 | pv -cN bzip2 > bbb-backup-tar.bz2 It runs the bzip compression locally because presumably it will be faster than on the Beaglebone Black.…

  • Printing from Windows to a samba shared CUPS-PDF printer sometimes fails

    Printing from Windows to a samba shared CUPS-PDF printer sometimes fails

    I had this problem where prints to our CUPS-PDF printer sometimes failed to be processed on the server. The job would disappear as though it has been printed but nothing else would happen. Printing from the same application to a Windows based PDF printer, and then printing the resulting PDF via Adobe Acrobat to the…

  • automysqlbackup ERRORS REPORTED: MySQL Backup error Log Warning: Skipping the data of table mysql.event. Specify the –events option explicitly.

    automysqlbackup ERRORS REPORTED: MySQL Backup error Log Warning: Skipping the data of table mysql.event. Specify the –events option explicitly.

    I was receiving email error messages from cron like this from my autbackupmysql on a regular basis: ERRORS REPORTED: MySQL Backup error Log for somehost.com.dxa – 2014-05-01_06h26m — Warning: Skipping the data of table mysql.event. Specify the –events option explicitly. It turns out that mysqldump now warns you if the events table is not being…

  • increase wordpress Maximum upload file size beyond 8MB.

    There is at least three places you need to set the maximum upload file size in WordPress. First check your php.ini upload_max_filesize = 64M; post_max_size = 64M; Restart Apache after making this change. Then if you are using WordPress multi-site, you need change a setting in the backend. Visit My Sites -> Network Admin ->…

  • How to create debian init.d startup script

    How to create debian init.d startup script

    From time to time I need to create an init.d startup script for a program that is not part of the default debian distribution. I’ve always found it unnecessarily fiddly to create a new script. The other day I came across naholyr’s gist, a script to make init.d scripts. There were a few problems with…