Eighteen months as a freelancer
I've now been freelancing as a PHP developer and system administrator for eighteen months, the same amount of time I spent working at my previous employer. Whilst there have been…
Fixing slow and blocked SSH connections with UseDNS
In the configuration shipped with many Linux distributions, including Debian, OpenSSH will attempt to lookup the reverse DNS records for the source IP of all incoming connections. If a result is found,…
Canonical’s cloud certification policy
Canonical's recent announcement that they will be taking a stand against risky unofficial Ubuntu images has been causing a bit of a stir this week, most notably on Matthew Garrett's…
Checking why a restart is required on Ubuntu
All of the servers that I run for myself or clients have a small script installed which runs every night to download the list of packages and email me with…
FLOSS UK Spring 2017 call for papers
The annual FLOSS UK Spring conference will be held in Manchester next March and the call for papers is now open. I've attended this conference every year (bar one when…
BT approval for router firmware updates
Last week I posted about a firmware update for my Zyxel router which fixes IPv6 connectivity. I emailed my ISP to tell them in case any other users encountered the…
Training courses under development
About a month ago, I posted about the possibility of charging for training notes. Based on the feedback I received via Twitter, I've decided to make all future training notes…
IPv6 and the Zyxel VMG1312-B10D
This is a short and very specific post which I'm primarily making in the hopes that it shows up in search results for the next person who encounters this problem. I…
Migrating from Bytemark legacy VM to BigV
For the best part of a decade I've been happily hosting personal and business servers on the virtual machine platform at Bytemark. Whilst the legacy platform is still in use for…
LetsEncrypt DNS challenges with djbdns
Over the past few months I've been gradually rolling out TLS to the various domains and services that I run for myself and clients using the free certificate service LetsEncrypt.…