Encrypt Your DB Backups

I’m mostly putting this here for my reference. I do this in multiple projects and always seem to forget where my instructions are.

Generate Keys

From your user’s home directory:

openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 1000000 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout .ssh/backup_key.pem -out .ssh/backup_key.pem.pub

Fill out the questions appropriately. Or not. I don’t think it matters really.

That will create the public and private keys.

backup_key.pem - private key backup_key.pem.pub - public key

Binding Multiple Terminals

I am running on multiple servers all the time. And with DTAC doing testing of big data I obviously need to play with many servers at once. I used to do a lot of work on linux and loved the broadcast ability of the terminals. So when I moved onto mac I expected more.

I tried a few other terminal apps. Particularly iTerm2 that has some nice broadcasting. But I didn’t like having to deal with the tabs and keystrokes. I kinda liked having multiple windows and the ease of launching with csshX

TL;DR

OpenStack is a massive complicated ecosystem. It is only going to survive by the vendors that support it and probably not what you need.

Backstory

Let me begin by saying that given the proper talent pool, financial resources, and time; OpenStack probably isn’t bad for some people. For most institutions it is just wrong.

I will probably write another article that outlines all the questions that I should have asked before starting this. My assumptions were not all quite valid, but I did have a sneaking suspicion given a couple very relevant experiences.

Download the Entire Site with wget

If you don’t have homebrew please install it. It will make all our lives easier.

Howto

This was kinda simple but I wanted to post it here for reference.

On thing I would like to note is the wait and limit-rate. Make sure you don’t trip any throttles or piss off any website owners by leaving the pipes wide open.

wget \
     --recursive \
     --no-clobber \
     --page-requisites \
     --convert-links \
     --wait=5 --limit-rate=20K \
     --domains api.yoursite.com \
     --no-parent \
         http://api.yoursite.com/

Alternate you can run the mirror command

Laravel 5 - Enforcing HTTPS

I’ve used a lot of frameworks. Laravel is great.

Dealing with a load balancer

Most of us are on a scaled service and most of us need HTTPS. It is much easier to put the SSL certificate on the load balancer and then proxy the request over port 80 to the actual server. It saves on CPU processes as well since the decryption work doesn’t have to be performed on the slave boxes.