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Some of this may seem like a broken record, yet every single time you hear about a bank losing millions of customer data, or a company having a security breach they consistently have failed to implement and enforce the most basic security practices. Here are 7 simple security practices that you cannot afford to not follow. …

SSH is great and secure… Unless you need to automate it. Then it sucks because your only options are to create a passwordless key, or login add your key to ssh-agent, stay logged in forever. Here’s a quick guide to having the best of both worlds. A Secure SSH Connection that can be used in automated scripts. ( …

Git is a fantastic tool and is very useful for deployment. If you can’t install git system wide or don’t want to mess with installing it on the entire system here is an easy way to install it for a single user. This also works well on Mac OS X where installing git is more …

Image via Wikipedia If you use *nix, no doubt you’ve spent some time on the command line. Here are a few of the most helpful tricks you can use in the bash shell to really optimize your time, impress your friends, and make everyone else feel inferior… not to mention become more productive. People familar with …

Image via CrunchBase I was fortunate to be able to attend the Microsoft Launch Developer Preview meeting in NYC. Microsoft is holding these all over the country to prepare IT and developers for the upcoming launch. Overall it was a good meeting and Microsoft is delivering a great product. More importantly they have a really good …

pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; sendfile on; keepalive_timeout 75; proxy_buffering off; log_not_found off; error_log /dev/null; access_log off; proxy_connect_timeout 20; client_header_timeout 60; client_body_timeout 60; send_timeout 60; server { listen 127.0.0.1:80; location /nginx_status { stub_status on; access_log off; allow 127.0.0.1; deny all; } } server { listen in:80; server_name …

No question about it, choosing a good hosting partner is one of the most important decisions a CTO / CIO can make, especially in a .com company. I recently had to choose a hosting partner for the new portero.com. Since the space changes so rapidly the last provider you used may no longer be the best fit for you …

One thing that makes subversion such a powerful revision system is it’s ability to permit multiple methods of access. Https (webdav), SSH and svnserve. In spite of svn’s ability to support multiple access methods, doing so simultaniously can be quite challenging. Typically one will run into permission issues as the http(s) access will all be written to …

Luckily it’s 2009 and there have been a bunch of successful websites that have had to deal with large scalability challenges. Many have been kind enough to share their knowledge with the world. Here is a list of the best books, articles, presentations and practices from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more. Link …

One of the worst experiences you can have as a computer operator is to realize you (or something else) just did something and wiped out your files. The purpose of this article is to show you how to automatically backup your files often and automatically. I use this setup to backup my documents every hour (I save …