Web Servers

Previously we added ssl to an Nginx server. On this example we shall enhance our security by adding mTLS to Nginx. Apart from encrypting the traffic between client and server, SSL is also a way for the client to make sure that the server connecting to, is a trusted source. On the other hand mTLS is a way for the ...

Nginx is a versatile tool that has many usages, can be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer etc. A common usage is to handle the SSL traffic in front of applications. Thus instead of handling SSL from your application layer you can have nginx in front. In our example we shall generate the certificates and make Nginx do the ...

When I’m setting up a new computer, one of the tasks I need to do is set up new SSH keys to access different servers. It’s good practice not to use the same key for different services. Keys are useful so you don’t need to type your credentials in all the time when working on a trusted PC. Instead of ...

In a previous tutorial, we talked about expect command and we saw how to automate scripts in Linux using its scripting language. Today, we will take a step further in our automation techniques and talk about a tool that automates tasks more professionally and for different platforms, this tool is Ansible. We will also talk about some Ansible features such ...

In a past role I helped put together a rather expansive travel agency booking project to show some of the more interesting feature of JBoss BPM Suite. The project continued to expand over time, adding on not just a bookings process, but also a payment process that included advanced features like compensation (rolling back bookings), integration of traditional web services in service tasks ...

In a recent article, I covered how to tune the NGINX webserver for a simple static HTML page. In this article, we are going to once again explore those performance-tuning concepts and walk through some basic tuning options for HAProxy. What is HAProxy HAProxy is a software load balancer commonly used to distribute TCP-based traffic to multiple backend systems. It ...

Spawning services across multiple Docker engines is a very cool thing, but those services need to connect each other and be found by public-facing nodes in order to be routed to users. A way to achieve that is to use NGINX as a reverse proxy by defining one or more public-facing nodes. These nodes are going to have NGINX configured ...

SSL is CPU Intensive If you haven’t already enabled SSL session caching, do that NOW. But what if you have many unique requests and your load balancer is maxing out it’s CPU? That was the case with WakaTime’s load balancer, because as you use the WakaTime plugins you are constantly making requests to our api saying you’re still working on ...

Sometimes you find yourself in a weird predicament. A third party application that you’ve slapped nginx in front of insists on using internal IP addresses or ports despite your reverse proxy passing all the correct headers and other pieces required. Or maybe you’ve found yourself in the situation I found myself in last week where you have a third party ...