Storing Passwords Securely With A Pinch Of Salt
I'm sure we can all agree that storing passwords in plain text, in a database is a very bad idea. So, how should you store them? Encrypted or hashed? What does adding a salt do?
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MySQL Fabric on Debian Wheezy
MySQL Fabric manages a farm of MySQL servers and provides a base for sharding and high-availability. MySQL Fabric is written in Python and uses the XML-RPC protocol.
Website load testing with Apache Bench
For basic website load testing Apache Bench is a fantastic tool that is easy to use and can be integrated into your build/deployment processes. It is not limited to testing Apache webservers and can be used with any website.
Delete files older than a specified period
A common administration task is to remove old, unnecessary files to prevent disk space from running out. Using find with the -exec switch you can easily achieve this and even automate the task with a cron job.
FreePBX (Asterisk) Email Based Conferencing System
FreePBX is a feature rich administration GUI for Asterisk and the conferencing module is great for static conference rooms. How about dynamically creating conference rooms by email?
Automate EC2 (AWS) Backups with Python
Taking a manual backup of an EC2 instance is easy: You right click on the associated volume(s) and create a snapshot.
Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6, HAProxy and Debian Wheezy 7.0
Percona XtraDB Cluster provides fantastic performance, reliability and multi-master replication out of the box. XtraDB Cluster is a combination of Percona Server, Galera and Percona XtraBackup.
Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODCs) and Powershell
A feature of Active Directory from Windows Server 2008 onwards is Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODCs). As the name suggests they are Domain Controllers that host read-only copies of the AD database and SYSVOL. RODCs only cache the credentials of selected objects which make them very useful for branch offices where the level of on-site security may be less than desirable.
Dropplets blogging platform with Disqus
Dropplets provides a simple and lightweight blogging platform, but out of the box there's no provision for your readers to leave comments or discuss your articles. This is easily overcome in just three simple steps using Disqus.
Asterisk and MySQL on Debian Wheezy (7.0)
Extend your Asterisk setup with MySQL so you can better integrate your phone system with existing applications (not just for call record keeping).
Why 100% uptime is a myth
100% Uptime: We have all heard of it and we all (rightly) strive to achieve it. The services we provide are key to the success of our businesses and therefore we want them to be constantly available.
Auto-Scale Ghost Instances (AWS EC2)
Over the past week I have been testing Amazon’s AWS EC2 Auto-scaling with a few custom AMIs. Early today as I was cleaning up the auto-scaling configuration I encountered a bit of a conundrum – the auto-scaling API was returning a few instances that did not exist and was stopping me from removing an auto-scaling-group. After hitting Google I wasn’t any wiser, but it seemed that I did not dismantle my test setup properly, which was most likely causing the problem.
Finding and removing duplicate records (MS SQL)
Here are two very useful T-SQL queries for finding and removing duplicate records within a selected table.