This is going to be a pretty high tech article, but the benefits outweigh the work that it requires. I’m going to talk about using cloudflare.com to cache your website and offer IPv6 compatibility. For this to work you have to be using your own domain name and have access to change the namerservers for your domain. If you cannot do this, then you can’t take advantage of cloudflare.com.

Caching

To speed up access to a website, the larger sites around the Internet cache data as close as possible to the end user, usually using some sort of content delivery network (CDN). For the enduser, that speeds up access to the website, since instead of a US user having to transfer data from a UK website, the US user would only need to pull it from a closer server. There are also other tricks that CDNs use to lower bandwidth usage and increase speed. Cloudflare acts like a CDN on your behalf, automatically caching your website around the world.

IPv6

IPv6 is the next version of the Internet addressing protocol, set to replace the current IPv4. If you have an IPv4 address you can’t talk to a user with an IPv6 address and vice versa. Most clients now support both at once, but until all the connections between you and a website upgrade their equipment and software to IPv6, you are still going to be using IPv4 addressing for awhile. This isn’t true in Asia, where they’ve exhausted their IPv4 addresses and there are users there that are only getting an IPv6 address. If you only have an IPv6 address, then you only have access to about 10,000 websites that are set up for IPv6.

Enter Cloudflare

Once configured, Cloudflare manages connections to your website, caching the content. And with a simple switch on their website, you can turn on IPv6 access to your website. ryancollins.org is now on Cloudflare’s network and should be accessible over IPv6.

Should you sign up?

I’m going to run it for awhile and see if any issues crop up. I just noticed the “Threat Alerts” on my dashboard, where Cloudflare already has blocked a couple of botnets from accessing the site. I’ve played around with different caching plugins for WordPress, but Cloudflare seems like a lot better solution, especially since it doesn’t require any work.

Yes, I let my WordPress installation rot. And it’s entirely my fault. WordPress makes it so easy to keep it up to date now that there is no excuse, so I do accept full responsibility! I’m lucky in the fact that all the hacker
did was rewrite my .htaccess file to redirect visitors to a malware hosted site.

After examining the WordPress database, it appeared that it hadn’t been changed by the attacker, so I went about installing a new copy of WordPress. It went pretty smooth, and for right now I’m going for a minimum amount of
plugins and keeping the design pretty basic. As I was restoring, I began to think of what the hacker might of had access to and what I needed to do to protect myself.

1. I don’t know if the attacker had access to the filesystem or could only append lines onto the .htaccess file. Why is this important? Your MySQL password for your WordPress installation is listed in the wp-config.php file. If you allow access to your MySQL server from the outside world, an attacker armed with this username and password is free to make changes to your database, even making themselves an administrator. So before doing the installation, I changed my password to MySQL.

2. One plugin I use with WordPress is Automatic WordPress Backup. This makes daily backups of my WordPress installation and stores them on Amazon S3. What I realized after this hack was that if the attacker had gotten access to administrator privileges, he could have wiped out every single backup I have. Worse yet, they could gain access to my access keys for Amazon S3. I went in and changed my Amazon S3 access keys.

What I’m doing differently

1. I will be keeping up on WordPress updates!!!

2. The wp-config.php file, which contains some very important information on your WordPress installation does not need to live in a web accessible directory such as your main WordPress installation. I moved it up a directory. For example, if you installed WordPress in ~/public-html/, you can put wp-config.php in ~/.

3. Once my installation was completed, I created a user for myself and made it an administrator. I then logged in as my new administrator account and deleted the default administrator. This protects against hacks that target the default admin account.

4. I switched to Disqus for comments. The blog only had one user, and I didn’t want to worry about being hacked giving up reader information. By using Disqus, I let them handle it.

5. I installed the CHAP Secure Login plugin for WordPress. This protects logins by encrypting the password. Since I don’t have an SSL certificate, my password would be “in the clear” without this plugin.

6. I will be automating the download of my backups from Amazon S3.

This past week as I was working on a presentation, I had a slide where I asked the participants to discuss among themselves. I wanted to set a time limit, but I didn’t want to have to switch out of Keynote, I wanted it on the slide. It took me a couple of minutes, but I finally came up with a quite clever solution, if I do say so myself.

The first thing I needed was a little countdown video that would count down from 10. I started a new Keynote project, and created a ten second countdown. Originally I used ten slides, with the transition taking a second, so that when played it would count down in ten seconds. The problem came when I wanted to export the movie. The minimum amount of time I could show a slide was two seconds, and since I didn’t want to count down by two a new solution had to be made. So I deleted all the slides in my presentation save one, and put 11 text boxes on it (10-0). I then did a pop build in and out, and set the time for the build to be one second. The out build would happen concurrently with the in build of the next number, so I got a pretty cool effect as a bonus. I exported this out as a Quicktime movie.

Now in my presentation, I added a question text box with a build in transition to occur after a click. Next, I added my movie with a build in transition to appear. The secret is to set the movie to appear however many seconds you want to wait. I set it at 60 seconds, so participants actually had 70 seconds until it finished. It doesn’t appear until the 60 second mark has passed, and then counts down to 0.

Works better than I had hoped! You can download the movie here. (right click and use Save as…)

My problem was when I wanted to post the current page I’m reading to either account. Ping.fm offers a bookmarklet, but it uses the current logged in ping.fm account, so I would have to continually log in and log out. I decided to put together my own bookmarklet that starts up a new mail message in my default email client addressed to the correct Ping.fm account. To get started, drag the following link to your bookmark bar:

Ping.fm

Once there, right click on the link, select edit and replace YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address (just the part to the left of the @). Would you like to do it with GMail? Drag this link:

Ping.fm

And once again, right click on the link, select edit, and replace YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address.

You can drag the links multiple times, editing the email address and the name of the link so you can associate each one with a different Ping.fm account.

photo credit: ekurvine

Facebook has begun rolling out new settings for who can see your Facebook profile and what they can see on your profile. I suggest you double-check what is viewable about you. I try to keep my personal FB totally separate from my Facebook Page, so my profile is pretty much locked down. Over at Digital Inspiration they’ve written an article on How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings.

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I struggled with this one for about a month before I finally dug into what was wrong and how to fix it. It all started when I reinstalled because I couldn’t get BootCamp installed because of volume fragmentation. Since then, my applications, specifically Mail.app and Adium, weren’t remembering passwords even if I checked the little “remember” box.

Basically, for some reason, the keychain file at ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain was now owned by root instead of by me. To check and fix from the commandline ($ is the command prompt):
$ ls -l ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
-rw-r--r-- 1 ryan admin 781380 Apr 8 11:17 (*deleted...*)

My username is ryan. If it says anything else, use the following to change the ownership:
$ sudo chown ryan ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain

It will ask for the administrator password, and then change the ownership of the file. I don’t think repair permissions in Disk Utility would fix this problem.

Today’s topic is vi. Vi may be the only editor installed on a new unix based system, and a few commands will get you to the point where at least you can edit a few files before installing something a little more user friendly such as pico (or nano).

Vi has two modes, command and insertion. It was designed this way because sometimes the keyboard you would be using might not necessarily have all the keys we take for granted today, especially when it comes to the arrow keys. In command mode you can move the cursor around with the arrow keys or hjkl keys. To do an editing, you’ll need to switch to insertion mode. Vi defaults to command mode when it is started.

i – Switches to insertion mode
<ESC> – Switches to command mode

In a nutshell, you’ll start the editor with a file:

vi somefile

Once the file is open, you’ll press i to switch to insertion mode. Make the changes to your file. Press <ESC> to switch back to command mode. To exit you’ll press the following (these all start with the colon):

:wq – Write the file and then quit
:q! – Quit the file without saving the changes. A great way if you mess up and just want to not save your changes

These preceding commands should at least get you started. For more info, you may want to visit the following pages:
vi – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vi Cheat Sheet
Mastering the VI editor

• We already had it.
• I didn’t need anything that fancy.
• We also had FMP Server and FMP Unlimited (version 5.5) so I could easily publish the database onto the web, that way it can be updated from anywhere with a web connection.

I’m not a big fan of using barcodes on our equipment. Our asset tag numbers are only 5 digits long, it doesn’t take time at all to easily type them. We do use a barcode reader when inventorying new equipment. It cuts down on errors when entering serial numbers or MAC addresses. The barcode reader can read the barcodes right off of the box.

To enter new equipment, we use a spreadsheet. Once the spreadsheet is filled out, it is imported into the FMP database.

I don’t track help desk requests along with hardware. We have approximately 700 machines, and it’s very rare that a piece of equipment will have one hardware failure, let alone multiple failures that need to be tracked.

Stealing Alvin’s Efficiency Tips idea, I want to post little tips, tricks, ideas to help the technology support staff in the education sector. Some of my ideas may seem to be esoteric (such as learning vi), but others should have more common appeal (imaging machings). There are conversations that happen on the Technology Coordinator’s listserv that also need to be condensed and posted.

Does this seem like a good idea? What about also creating handout sheets to help with professional development?

Tags: RCTips