I have been maintaining the website of a journalist friend of mine for a number of years now. It was a homegrown blog-like webpage that worked well, but lacked a number of features. As often is the case with custom software, adding new features over time becomes more difficult, and so finally, a few weeks …
In November 2014 it was announced, that Mozilla and the EFF (among others) were working on a project called Let’s Encrypt, which aimed at increasing the use of HTTPS encrypted connections. The plan was to set up a new CA that would issue free certificates and provide a client to automate the process of obtaining …
A few weeks back I wrote about my endeavour to reinstall a private server that I own using the configuration management tool Chef. One of the things that I wanted to revisit was the way I managed a test environment. I had basically manually set up a virtual machine and that I could use as …
For the last few years, all the projects I’ve been working on have made extensive use of a configuration management tool called Chef. It helps you define the configuration of the servers that you manage and enables you to rebuild a server easily. If you’re using Chef, you don’t change server configuration manually, everything gets …