Sysadmin

Chrome apps … mind blown!

Don’t ask me how, but I’ve ended up in the Google Chrome Web Store, where I spent the last three hours – especially in the Productivity -> Developer Tools category. I knew, there were plenty of apps to make Chrome OS / Chrome Browser super awesome, but it seems it’s been a while since I looked in there … My mind is officially blown!

I don’t need much from my Fedora laptop – a browser, a terminal, and some instant messaging apps. But these days apparently that’s too much. A lot of the things I do through the regular day can be handled right from the browser apps.

Here are some examples.

Text editors. There is a slew of them! Simple and complex, specialized and generic, fast and … not so much. Have a look at Caret for example. It’s Sublime-like editor, based on the Ace editing component. It offers a selection of themes, syntax highlighting for all the major languages, multiple tabs, project settings, and more!
SSH client. Yup, that’s right. You can connect to your remote servers right out of the browser, using, for example, ServerAuditor.
MySQL clients. Choose between a simple command-line one, like MySQL Console. Or a full-featured one, with ERDs and database browser, like Chrome MySQL Admin.
Git, GitHub, and Gist tools. Which there is a variety of…
Web server (yes, really, a web server running in the web browser!) – Web Server fro Chrome, debugger (Xdebug), and compiler (Compiler.work).

Most of these offer session saving, networking synchronization, Google Drive data saving, social network integration, etc.

Wow! The browser world has come a long way since Netscape 3 …

Deploying with git

Git is an excellent version control, but it’s more than just that. A lot of people use it to deploy their projects as well. Most suggestions (for example, this tutorial from Digital Ocean) around the web employ the post-commit (or other) hooks to push the code to a remote server. While this works well, I prefer to do it differently. I like the pull model better, where the deployment is triggered outside of git, and relies on git to fetch the code updates and run some sort of a build script, which handles database schema changes, cache resets, filesystem permissions, etc. Such approach also allows to limit remote access to the servers (especially the production ones), and separate responsibilities of a developer and a deployer.

With the many pull, merge, fetch, and update options that git provides, it is sometimes difficult to choose what’s the right set of commands to use. I’ve figured it out via a rather lengthy trial-and-error process. But if you don’t want to go through all the pain of that, here’s a nice blog post that tells you exactly how to do that. I’m copy-pasting the commands here just for the future reference.

cd "${DEPLOY_TREE}"
git fetch --all
git checkout --force "${TARGET}"
# Following two lines only required if you use submodules
git submodule sync
git submodule update --init --recursive
# Follow with actual deployment steps (run fabric/capistrano/make/etc)

And I suggest you read the full article for the explanation of why this is a better way and what are some of the issues with other strategies.

Explain Shell

Here’s a good resource for all of those who is trying to learn shell and/or figure out complex commands with lots of parameters and pipes – Explain Shell.

You just paste the command and hit the “Explain” button, and the site will decompose the command into parts, providing relevant parts from the manual pages. There are a few examples to try it out on too.

28 Ways to Secure WordPress Website

28 Ways to Secure WordPress Website covers, as the title says, quite a few ways to make your WordPress website more secure. There is no absolute security, and there are always more that you can do, but this is a good start. Apart from all the useful advice, the article also tells you why you should care:

“Why would anyone hack my site?” – you ask

Let’s be clear. Your site is likely not special. Unless your firm’s name is CNN.

The fact is that most – or the great majority, rather – of attacks are automated. This means that various bots (pieces of software) developed by hackers crawl the web and look for vulnerable sites.

Then if they’re successful, the site gets added to the hacker’s portfolio, so to speak, and can be used for various purposes.

In other words, your site by itself is no special, but 10,000 sites just like yours is pure gold for a hacker. Such a network of hacked sites can be used for things like black hat SEO, mass email sending, database scraping (to get your users’ personal info), and so on.

You really shouldn’t feel overly safe just because/if you run a relatively small website.

Hackers don’t discriminate.

DNS / Whois Record Lookup Tool

Here is yet another DNS / WHOIS record lookup tool. It’s quick and simple – just type the website’s URL and submit a form. You’ll get a result with all the DNS records and WHOIS information, all on one page.

The term DNS stands for Domain Name System, the largest digital database which contains all websites information on the internet. Every domain has authoritative DNS server which publishes information about that domain and the name server for the domain.

Our DNS / Whois record lookup tool will grab A, MX, SOA, NS, TXT and Whois records for a domain name.