Webtatic.com

Since my last post on using Nginx to cache proxied content, they have added proper cache handling via their proxy_cache* directives. These are much more suitable for use, as they capture the HTTP response headers and also use more advanced Cache-Control checks. To start, install the latest stable Nginx avaliable at http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxInstall. Next edit your [...]

mpm-itk is a fork of mpm-prefork (ironically in both process and project sense), which allows you to configure individual Apache vhosts to run as specified users and groups. This makes it extremely secure if used in a shared hosting environment. I have provided a CentOS RPM for this in the Webtatic yum repository. This should [...]

A few days ago, Facebook released XHP, a PHP extension, which allows defining XML directly in PHP blocks, allowing you to “use PHP as a stricter templating engine”. It seems a bit strange to be coding XML tags directly in PHP blocks, but it adds features such as automatic escaping, and the ability to manipuate [...]

My previous articles on installing PHP on CentOS dealt with installing PHP 5.2.6. I have found this to have some bugs that kill the process without error information. One bug I found, which was on an x86_64 server, was that converting an object to a string did this. So, I have compiled the latest PHP [...]

Recently, I wrote a mod_perl module for using a database backend for basic and digest authentication in Apache, however I found it to be much slower than mod_auth_mysql. This would be due to using mod_perl and DBI. So I have written a patch for mod_auth_mysql which performs the same, which means its as fast. The [...]

The HTTP protocol gives a standardised way to provide authentication. This is supported via two modes: Basic – transmit the username and password in a reversable base-64 encode Digest – transmits complex MD5 hash of the username, realm, password, a server generated nonce, request method and request uri Basic HTTP authentication suffers from a very [...]