Author: Thomas Faddegon

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Howto: Configure cloudflare for wordpress

My web hosting company don’t support subdomain SSL certificates. And because Google’s Chrome in July is required HTTPS on all websites (otherwise you get an error your website isn’t safe) I had some deadline to make my blog HTTPS. Cloudflare is a nice reverse proxy solution and the basic plan is free to use also.

So what I did was create a cloudflare account and put my website behind it. After I did that I forced the HTTPS and voila my website was HTTPS. The steps you must take.

Note: this trick will also work if you want to use cloudflare as a reverse proxy to prevent DDoS, to optimize your site security, hide your hosting party backend and make your website a lot faster. If you use a raspbery Pi for example at your home location you can put cloudflare between the visitor and your home IP and save you a lot of trouble.

  • If you use the wordfence plugin also be sure your PHP version is higher than 5.6. Otherwise you get some errors and conflicts (more info)
  • Go to cloudflare an create an account
  • Configure your DNS

  • (temporary) disable your DNSSEC at you domain if that is enabled (cloudflare cannot succesfully transfer your DNS otherwise). For me I had to create a ticket with my domain register company
  • Cloudflare give you 2 new name servers. Ask your domain registry company to change these DNS name servers if you can change it by yourself

  • After a succesfull DNS nameserver change cloudflare shows in the portal everything is ok:

  • Optimize your cloudflare for wordpress in the cloudflare wordpress plugin and enable HTTPS rewrites

  • Now edit your url in the settings >general in your wordpress

  • And finaly go to cloudflare and enable always uses HTTPS under crypto

Now everything is done and your website is fully HTTPS at the frontend (with automatic HTTP > HTTPS URL rewrites). Because my backend don’t have an SSL certificate all the data between cloudflare and my hosting company is still unencrypted. So this is a nasty workaround but you don’t have any problem with Chrome HTTPS problems in the near future anymore.

Ubuntu Linux cannot ping FQDN

Because this is the fifth time I fixed this issue I write a blog about it…

Microsoft uses .local as the recommended root of internal domains, and serves them via unicast dns. Linux uses .local as the root of multicast dns. If you’re stuck on a broken MS network like this, reconfigure your linux multicast DNS to use a different domain like .alocal.

To do this, add a domain-name=.alocal line to the [server] section of /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf, then restart avahi-daemon: sudo service avahi-daemon restart.

[server]
domain-name=.alocal

You may need to flush the DNS, mDNS and resolver cache, as well as restart your web browsers to clear their internal cache.

Source: http://www.lowlevelmanager.com/2011/09/fix-linux-dns-issues-with-local.html

How to truncate Mirrored Database Log File

First backup your transaction logging:

  1. Tasks > Backup
  2. Select transactionlog backup en select a disk where to backup
  3. Now check the status with DBCC LOGINFO(DATABASENAME)
  4. Check if the last status record is 0 (zero)
  5. When the status is 2 make another backup
  6. When the status is 0 you can run: DBCC SHRINKFILE(2)

You can use this script also:
Backup LOG DBNAME
TO DISK = 'C:\SQL_TMP\transactionlog.trn'
WITH STATS
GO
DBCC LOGINFO(DBNAME)
DBCC SHRINKFILE(2)

Move a window when you don’t have any focus

Method #1
Won’t work with a maximized Window.

  • Alt-Tab or Click On the Window
  • Press “Alt & Space”
  • Press “M”
  • Use your arrow keys to move the Window
  • Press Enter to exit

Method #2
Will move your Window to the right or left half of the screen in the same manner as dragging a window to the right or left of the screen will.

  • Press the Windows Key & Right Arrow or Left Arrow
  • Move a Window with the Keyboard-right

Method #3
will move your Window one display to the right or left.

  • Press the Windows Key & Shift & Right Arrow or Left Arrow

This is an copy paste from a website. All credits to: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/77361-move-window-keyboard.html

Create a strong self-signed certificate for multiple years

If you follow these steps you can create a self signed certificate with the following specifications:

  • Wildcard certificate
  • SHA256 hash
  • 10 years
  • 2048 bits public key
  • Client and server verification
  • Sha1 fingerprint

Be aware that self-signed certificates can manipulate by a man-in-the-middle. You should not use this in critical production environments.

Please use windows 10 powershell in admin mode. Otherwise you will get errors

New-SelfSignedCertificate -certstorelocation cert:\localmachine\my -dnsname *.domain.local -NotBefore $([datetime]::now.AddDays(-15)) -NotAfter $([datetime]::now.AddDays(3560))

Now export the certificates. Before you copy/paste change the thumbprint with the thumbprint you get from the above command.

$CertPassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "YourPassword" -Force –AsPlainText
Export-PfxCertificate -Cert cert:\LocalMachine\My\C6B46CEB7D3A40DB08E78B19FEDD3A24EA7A7919  -FilePath C:\test.pfx -Password $CertPassword
Export-Certificate -Cert Cert:\LocalMachine\My\C6B46CEB7D3A40DB08E78B19FEDD3A24EA7A7919 -FilePath C:\tstcert.cer

Now you can import the PFX with IIS and bind the certificate in IIS.
And import the *.CER in your MMC > Certificates > Computer account > trusted root Certification authority > Certificates

Have fun with your certificate the next 10 years 😀

command-prompt-powershell

Inspiration

Spotify: Find a playlist based on a track

I know for sure you have a track in your spotify playlist and you want more like that kind of music. There is a way to find all the public spotify playlists based on fans like yourself. Spotify unfortunately don’t have a solution, ut with a smart google search you find what you need 😀

The google search you can try is:

site:spotify.com “track artist” playlist

Example:

site:spotify.com “do it rootkit” playlist

 

BSOD Domain Controller STOP: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start

Today our domain controller had a very bad day and had a bootloop after a reboot. I used recording software to capture the blue screen error: STOP: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start

Then we found a nice article to fix this issue. We had a second working domain controller so if you have the same setup you can use this how to, to fix this problem also. All the credits go to dbutch1976

  1. Restart the server and press F8 key, select Directory Services restore mode.
  2. Log in with the local administrator username and password (hope you remember what you set it to!).
  3. Type cd \windows\system32
  4. type NTDSUTIL
  5. type activate instance NTDS
  6. type files
  7. If you encounter an error stating that the Jet engine could not be initialized exit out of ntdsutil.
  8. type cd\
  9. type md backupad
  10. type cd \windows\ntds
  11. type copy ntds.dit c:\backupad
  12. type cd \windows\system32
  13. type esentutl /g c:\windows\ntds\ntds.dit
  14. This will perform an integrity check, (the results indicate that the jet database is corrupt)
  15. Type esentutl /p   c:\windows\ntds\ntds.dit
  16. Agree with the prompt
  17. type cd \windows\ntds
  18. type move *.log c:\backupad   (or just delete the log files)

This should complete the repair.  To verify that the repair has worked successfully:

  1. type cd \windows\system32
  2. type ntdsutil
  3. type activate instance ntds
  4. type files        (you should no longer get an error when you do this)
  5. type info       (file info should now appear correctly)

Source: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/771b97ad-4e1c-4e7c-8617-91601224dd7f/server-core-2008-r2-blue-screen?forum=winserverManagement

Windows IOPS and MB/s benchmarking

You have bought een new system and the first thing what you want to do is check the disk performance (ehhh that’s always the first thing I want to know 😛 )

There  is one tool I always use: ATTO Disk Benchmark

disk-benchmark

This is a very nice tool to quickly see how fast your troughput is of your new system.

But sometimes you want to check your IOPS. Then you can use another nice microsoft commandline benchmark tool DiskSpd

You can use this parameter to benchmark:

diskspd -b8K -d30 -o4 -t8 -h -r -w25 -L -Z1G -c20G testfile.dat

This example command line will run a 30 second random I/O test using a 20GB test file located on the T: drive, with a 25% write and 75% read ratio, with an 8K block size. It will use eight worker threads, each with four outstanding I/Os and a write entropy value seed of 1GB. It will save the results of the test to a text file called DiskSpeedResults.txt. This is a pretty good set of parameters for a SQL Server OLTP workload.

Example:

diskspd
Orginal article

If you get errors like:

Results for timespan 1:
*******************************************************************************
The test was interrupted before the measurements began. No results are displayed.
Error generating I/O requests

Or file creation errors like “Error opening file: testfile.dat” please try to replace the minus “-” characters with your keyboard. Sometimes your browser copy the wrong character.

Happy benchmarking 😀