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openssl unable to read/load/import SSL private key from GoDaddy

Enterprise IT, Linux, Mac, Web Applications / craig

openssl is the standard open-source, command-line tool for manipulating SSL/TLS certificates on Linux, MacOS, and other UNIX-like systems. I recently ran into an interesting problem using openssl to convert a private key obtained from GoDaddy. Someone else used GoDaddy’s “wizard” interface to generate a certificate signing request (CSR) and private key, and saved the files […]

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Nginx default user changed in RedHat/CentOS package nginx-1.16.1-1.el7

Enterprise IT, Linux, Web Applications / craig

The latest Nginx rpm (nginx-1.16.1-1.el7) from EPEL for CentOS/Redhat is a fairly major update, from version 1.12 to 1.16, and includes some very important fixes to address multiple CVEs. There is another small but critical change in the latest RPM that isn’t mentioned in the bug report. RedHat had configured nginx to run as user “apache”

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mount.cifs error 13 after update (CentOS/RedHat Linux 7.6)

Enterprise IT, Linux, Windows / craig

How to fix “permission denied” error when attempting to mount a CIFS share on RedHat/CentOS Linux 7.

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Secure, Automated Network Device Backups

Enterprise IT, Linux / craig

You probably have at least a few business-class switches and routers silently do their job, year after year. Network devices can be so reliable that we configure them once, and then forget that they exist. However, forgetting them is a really bad idea, since they require regular OS or firmware updates to patch vulnerabilities, and

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Another Reason to Enable Private IP Addresses on Google Cloud SQL

Enterprise IT, Google Cloud Platform, Google Compute Engine, Web Applications / craig

Google Cloud SQL recently introduced the capability for an instance to have an IP address within the private address space of your VPC network. Previously, all Cloud SQL instances had IP addresses within the address space of the public Internet. Obviously, the public IP was a security and privacy concern, as well as a potential

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QNAP NAS: Backup & Sync to Google Cloud Storage

Enterprise IT, Google Cloud Platform / craig

I have a QNAP NAS at home which I use for file storage. It shares several folders with the family’s Mac, Linux, and Windows computers. Many of these files are are irreplaceable, especially our digital photos, so I back them up to the cloud. QNAP provides the Hybrid Backup and Sync application, which supports multiple

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Disk space utilization monitoring in Google StackDriver

Enterprise IT, Linux / craig

Setting up disk space utilization alerts in Google Stackdriver is almost unbelievably tricky. It’s easy to think that you can just choose the metric “Disk Utilization” and add a condition to alert when disk utilization crosses some threshold for some length of time (such as over 55% for 1 hour). File System Type Filter Your

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Managing remote servers with salt-ssh

Enterprise IT, Linux, Web Applications / craig

I love using Salt to configure and manage servers at scale. Typically, a Salt master server manages an army of servers which are on the same private network. A salt-minion daemon runs on each client server and communicates with the master. Sometimes you need to manage a server which is outside of your internal network,

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Find Last Login Time for WordPress Users in the SQL Database

Linux, Web Applications / craig

Question: What are the timestamps for the last login for every WordPress user in this WordPress site? Most answers say to install some plugin, and there are dozens that will show the date and time when each WordPress user last logged in. However, plugins are a problem, because they always need to be kept up

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MySQL replication fails with WSREP error after restart

Enterprise IT, Linux / craig

Scenario A single Percona MySQL 5.7 server replicates asynchronously with a cluster of Percona MySQL 5.7 servers. After rebooting the single server, replication failed with the following symptoms: mysql> show slave status \G**************************** 1. row ************** Slave_IO_State: Waiting to reconnect after a failed registration on master Master_Host: my-replication-partner Master_User: repl Master_Port: 3306 Connect_Retry: 60 Master_Log_File:

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