Turns out my VPS provider has had a major outage, which bodes pretty badly considering it’s my first month with them.  Service has been out for 24 hours now, with no real updates or any end in site.  This comes off the back of a week’s worth of random small outages and severe packet loss.

Nginx is a multi-purpose web server / reverse proxy which is commonly used to front busy websites.  It can also be used in reverse proxy mode to help secure websites from unexpected vulnerabilities.  It also allows you to do some pretty cool stuff with redirection and can serve up content all on its own.  In this example, we’ll just be using nginx to protect specific content.

In my previous post I outlined how you can create your own self-signed CA.  With that CA in hand, you should be able to deploy your CA public certificate in any place you want certificates signed by it to be trusted, and then create your own SSL certificates.

If you want to make your own CA, usually for the purposes of signing certificates internally for testing and such, you can do that pretty easily with CentOS.  On a secure box somewhere, you’ll need to create a CA certificate.

BackupPC with its default configuration will catch the MySQL databases, but I don’t consider that kind of backup to be particularly reliable.  Much safer is to do a mysqldump of any relevant databases and then capture that with BackupPC.

I’ve recently moved my blog across to a VPS service.  A VPS is akin to a chroot jail, where you have your own server, but you’re running a common Linux kernel.  This also means you don’t really have your own filesystem - so for the sakes of paranoia I don’t want the VPS to have any privileged data on it, and I don’t want the VPS to be able to remote back into my main infrastructure to back itself up.