Tag: Server

Maintaining Maintenance

Sometimes well-intentioned features have unintended side effects. Case in point: WordPress’ maintenance mode. Whenever you update plugins WP will automatically enter maintenance mode, which displays a nice message to your visitors that the site will be back online shortly. It will automatically go out of maintenance once the updates are done.

Well, sometimes unexpected things happen: you are stuck in maintenance mode. WP will effectively lock you out … even the admin section will not be accessible. *ugh* This is the moment you start panicking … luckily if you wait 10 minutes or delete the .maintenance file manually you’ll be able to access your site again. *phew*

Just went though that whole cycle. m(

Custom CAs everywhere

I recently finished introducing custom CA infrastructure in two instances. Each having two sub CAs, two Servers and a bunch of users. The “create your own CA” part was quite easy after I found  a dated but still accurate tutorial. In hindsight it is quite silly why I didn’t do this before.

On the server side I had to make it work on:

  • Apache
  • Nginx
  • Postfix
  • Cyrus
  • Dovecot

Each expecting its own Format/Packing of certificates, keys and certificate chains. :/

On the client side I had to produce installation and configuration howtos for Windows and OS X and a bunch of popular browsers and email clients. Then there is the “user education” part … this is still in progress, but its looking good.

All in all, I’m happy with the result. 🙂

Fixing Borked UTF-8 Data in MySQL

While updating ownCloud to version 4 it reencoded my already UTF-8-encoded data and left me with borked strings.

I thought about trying to do a bunch of find and replace operations, but I knew this was error prone.

A little internet research produced a very simple simple solution for fixing double-encoded data in MySQL:

mysqldump -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --opt --quote-names --skip-set-charset --default-character-set=latin1 DB_NAME > DB_NAME-latin1-dump.sql
mysql -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --default-character-set=utf8 DB_NAME < DB_NAME-latin1-dump.sql

Just replace DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_NAME with the appropriate values and your good to go. 😀

Howto Renew Your SSL Certificates

So my IMAP server certificate expired today … so I needed to renew it. I use self-signed certificates for services I run myself.

First you need your config file. If you don’t have this you will be prompted to do so. (the Ubuntu Wiki has a nice introduction)

[ req ]
default_bits = 2048
encrypt_key = yes
distinguished_name = req_dn
x509_extensions = cert_type
prompt = no

[ req_dn ]
C=DE
ST=HB
L=Bremen
O=IMAP-Server
OU=Automatically-generated IMAP SSL key
CN=imap.your-domain.tld
emailAddress=postmaster@yourdomain.tld

[ cert_type ]
nsCertType = server

Then you generate the new certificate (expiring in 365 days) using the config file from above (imapd.cnf) and have it save it into imapd.pem.

openssl req -x509 -days 365 -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -config imapd.cnf -keyout imapd.pem -out imapd.pem

Restart your service.

If you need to check the new key’s fingerprint you can get it with the following command.

openssl x509 -in imapd.pem -fingerprint