Tag: hosting

Giving Cloudbric A Try, But I Still Love Cloudflare

Going to try Cloudbric here for a while to see how exactly it compares to Cloudflare

Longren.io will be unavailable for possibly up to 48 hours. As soon as I’ve published this post, I’ll be updating my nameservers to point to Cloudbric, almost feels like cheating on Cloudflare, they’ve been very good to me.

I’ve been using Cloudflare for quite a while, nearly since it became available to the public. I love them and all the services they provide, especially with a Pro (or Enterprise) account. Cloudflare costs money though (if you want certain added protections), and many smaller websites don’t use a lot of bandwidth and aren’t provided the protections they should receive with Cloudflare.

Cloudbric aims to solve that by providing all the features Cloudflare provides (from what I’ve been told at least) for free as long as your site doesn’t use more than 4GB of bandwidth per month. I only have a few Pro sites with Cloudflare (longren.io being one of them), but am trying to cut back on the number of online services I pay for monthly, so this makes sense on a financial level if nothing else.

I’d never heard of Cloudbric until they got in touch with me via direct message on Twitter and introduced me to their services. They appear to provide everything that Cloudflare’s Enterprise service provides, glad they saw one of my tweets praising Cloudflare and decided to get in touch.

Cloudbric has been around for a while (15 years or so I believe) and I talked to one of their reps quite a bit about how what they provide is better than Cloudflare (other than the usage based cost, of course).

Here’s what he said:

1. Unlike other website protection services including Cloudflare, Cloudbric provides full-coverage website protection. Even though Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS Protection features are crucial for website protection, these options cost at least $200/month from Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s free plan does not protect web application layer 3, 4, and 7, which makes it pointless.

2. Our usage-based plan, rather than options plan, allows even free users to enjoy the most comprehensive security service. There are no charges for extra add-ons or features for more security. Users can enjoy all the features for FREE up to 4GB of traffic monthly.

Here’s a handy table from the Cloudbric website showing a feature comparison with similar providers like Cloudflare, Sitelock, and Incapsula.

FEATURESCloudbricIncapsulaSiteLockCloudflare
Advanced DDoS Protection(Layer 3, 4, 7)FREE$299 /moEnterprise$200 /mo
PCI-Certified Web Application Firewall(WAF)FREE$59 /mo$299 /mo$20 /mo
Global Content Delivery NetworkFREE$19 /mo$99 /mo$20 /mo
Web OpimizationFREE$19 /mo$99 /mo$200 /mo
OWASP Core Rule SetFREE$59 /mo$99 /mo$20 /mo
Reputation-based Threat ProtectionFREE$59 /mo$299 /moFREE
Board Spam ProtectionFREE$59 /moXX
Block Visitors by IP or countryFREE$59 /moXFREE
Login ProtectionFREE$59 /moXX
SSL SupportFREE$19 /moFREEFREE

Figured I’d try it out on this site as it gets the most traffic out of my personal sites, and if everything’s cool, I’ll eventually be moving all clients over to Cloudbric. Just wish they had a way to import existing DNS records, some of my domain names have at least 50 sub-domains.

Longren.io subscribers will get this post via email, but longren.io could be down for up to 48 hours while stuff updates. I’ll update this post or maybe write a new one after I’ve used Cloudbric for a few days. You should at least check them out, especially if you’re using Cloudflare for a site that doesn’t get enough traffic to make it worth paying for.

I really don’t want to leave Cloudflare, but if Cloudbric stacks up, I’m afraid I’ll have to.

Update: After updating nameservers for longren.io to Cloudbric, an SSL issue was found. I went back to Cloudflare immediately, and within about an hour Cloudbric’s engineering team had a solution worked out. It sounds like they’ll be rolling the fix out on Monday June 29. So until then, longren.io will be on Cloudflare. I’ll post info about the issue in detail after Cloudbric has officially announced it or made the fix active.

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SSH Private Key Authentication Tip

So easy to miss, but so important for SSH Private Key Authentication

I don’t allow password logins on any of my servers. Can only login via SSH key based authentication. No root login is allowed, and I specify every user that’s allowed to login via SSH, ie: me.

If you’re a regular here, you know I love DigitalOcean. They have a very nice tutorial on setting up SSH private key login, even walking you through creating SSH keys if you don’t already have one, and even adding that key to your DigitalOcean account.

None of that will be of interest to you if you already know how to generate SSH keys.

I’ll SSH into my new Droplet, only to be rejected. I immediately know why, because it’s happened so many times. It’s due to incorrect permissions on your Droplet, VPS, server, whatever.

For SSH private key authentication to work, the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file and the ~/.ssh folder need specific permissions: 

chmod 700 ~/.ssh && chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Run that, and then try logging in via SSH to your Droplet from your local machine. Should go this time.

If you still can’t login to your remote system, something else is likely wrong. If that’s the case, you’ll want to start at the top of the DigitalOcean post about setting up SSH private key authentication and just follow the steps.

After you’ve followed those steps, change permissions on the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file again and on the ~/.ssh folder again. Like so from your terminal: 

chmod 700 ~/.ssh && chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

I’m curious…

Do you allow password logins over SSH?

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If you do allow password logins, I’d love to hear what scenario causes you to need to allow password logins. Let me know in the comments if you don’t mind.

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Using Gmail SMTP Servers to Send Email From WordPress on DigitalOcean

Use Gmail SMTP Servers for Sending Emails from WordPress

After quite a bit of back and forth between sendmail, postfix, and exim, I’ve settled on using msmtp for sending emails from my servers/droplets at DigitalOcean (affiliate link).

MSMTP is very lightweight and has the ability to send emails via an existing SMTP server, like Gmail’s or Yahoo’s.

To get it working, there’s a few tricks. I’ve pieced this together from this post and this post. And when on DigitalOcean, there’s an IPv6 issue that causes major delays in sending the email, which there’s a fix for at the end of this post.

1. Install msmtp

sudo apt-get install msmtp

2. Configure msmtp to use Gmail

Open up /etc/msmtprc as root: sudo nano /etc/msmtprc, and add the following, removing whatever else is there: 

# Gmail/Google Apps
account  gmail 
host   smtp.gmail.com 
port   587 
from   example@gmail.com
user   example@gmail.com
password  enter-password-here!
auth   on 
tls   on 
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt 
 
# Default account to use
account default : gmail

You’ll want to replace the user directive with a valid Gmail email address, a Gmail account or a Google Apps email address will work, too. Don’t forget to change enter-password-here! to the actual password for the Gmail account your using.

Save /etc/msmtprc.

3. Remove Sendmail

Run this: 

sudo apt-get remove sendmail-bin

4. Setup Some Aliases

Lots of software on Linux systems uses the sendmail command. Instead, we’re using msmtp, so we’re essentially invoking msmtp when the sendmail command is run. 

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/msmtp /usr/sbin/sendmail
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/msmtp /usr/bin/sendmail
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/msmtp /usr/lib/sendmail

5. Tell PHP About msmtp

First, locate your php.ini file that’s being used by Apache. It’s typically in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini. If that’s not it, use PHP’s phpinfo() function to find the location of your php.ini file.

Find sendmail_path = in php.ini and replace it with this: 

sendmail_path = "/usr/bin/msmtp -t"

Now you should be able to send mail using PHP’s mail() function, which will use the Gmail SMTP server to send emails. Add this to a PHP file and access it through your browser to see if it works: 

<?php
if(mail("receipient@domain.com","A Subject Here","Hi there,nThis email was sent using PHP's mail function."))
print "Email successfully sent";
else
print "An error occured";
?>

6. Disable IPv6 If You Experience Slowness

Open up /etc/gai.conf like so: 

sudo nano /etc/gai.conf

Now, look for a line that looks like this: #precedence ::ffff:0:0/96 100. Uncomment that line (remove the #) and save /etc/gai.conf. An explanation of why this helps can be found in this comment at the DigitalOcean article.

All Done

That should be it. If you run into any issues please do leave a comment, I’ll do my best to help you out. I may have missed a part, so no guarantees this will work for you. It does however work wonderfully on a DigitalOcean droplet that’s running Ubuntu 14.04 with a pretty standard LAMP stack.

You should now be able to send email from WordPress on DigitalOcean.

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Simple Server Monitoring with Ping.gg

It really is the world’s most simple server monitoring service

Best of all, Ping.gg is currently free! Ping.gg will ping your server constantly, with an interval of 10 seconds.

Victor, the ping.gg creator, will be releasing all the Go code on GitHub eventually, but will keep the UI/PHP pieces to himself. It sounds like HTTP response checking is also in the works:

There is a ping daemon (Go app) that is listening for a couple of redis pub/sub channels for hosts to start and stop pinging. Each host is handled by a different goroutine. When something goes up or down, it publishes the host in another 2 redis pub/sub channels.

This is what I’ll release as open source, before I do I’d like to refactor it so it’s not tightly couple with redis, but rather have an interface there, so it’s easy to change the redis pub/sub interface with, for example, HTTP calls.

Monitor a Site with Ping.gg

To monitor a site (my.example.com), issue this command: 

curl ping.gg/me@example.org/my.example.com

I’ll let Victor explain how it works:

After you provide a hostname or IP and your email address, you’ll be sent an email with 3 generated URLs that you can to click to start, stop and delete your tracking. Every time you server goes down or back online you will receive a notification, which will also include the control URLs. BTW, check your spam folder… you know the drill.

ping.gg-down-email

Every time my.example.com is unreachable, you’ll receive an email at me@example.org. An example email is below.

That’s It

Issuing that curl command is all you need to do. You’ll receive an email after adding a site to monitor asking you to active the monitoring. There’s also a link in that email so you can stop or pause monitoring of a site if you wish.

Ping.gg allows 10 sites to be monitored per email address. Ping.gg considers your server/site to be down when it fails to answer 6 pings in a row.

Hoping that Victor builds this into a full fledged service with account dashboards and all, just because it’s sooo simple. The Terms of Service possibly indicate that a professional service may be available at some point:

As previously stated, this is not a professional service (not now at least) so by using this service you agree to the following:

  1. You use this service at your own risk.
  2. There is no warranty that the service will work properly or at all.
  3. Your alerts might be terminated without notice.
  4. The service can stop operating anytime without notice.

Go ahead and give Ping.gg a try, it’s been very reliable for me and I’ve had no issues with it. Keep the Terms of Service in mind, however.

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Passwds.io Source Available on GitHub

Now on GitHub

Took a bit longer than I wanted, but the source for passwds.io is up on GitHub now.

It’s extremely simple, using Twitter Bootstrap, straight PHP, jQuery, and the jQuery prettySocial plugin for the social buttons at the bottom of the site.

Passwords are generated using pwgen-php from Superwayne. pwgen-php was forked a couple years ago by Roderik van der Veer, which I was unaware of.

I’ll be updating to the somewhat newer pwgen-php library from Roderik at some point.

Basically, an AJAX request is sent to a PHP file, grabbing the requested passwords, and then the results are displayed.

Pretty simple. Let me know if you have suggestions or questions. Please be kind, I threw this together in about an hour one evening.

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