Since PHP 5.5 reached it’s end of life a while back I started upgrading my servers to PHP 5.6. This has caused some issues but the worst was:

error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

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I have recently acquired a Netgate RCC-VE 2440 which I intend to use as a router/firewall for my house. But I thought I might as well play with it a little before I do so. One of the things I wanted to test was the BSD Router Project to have in place of one of the routers we have here at work but I couldn’t get it to boot, it would always free with just a “\”.

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Quick one here, if you want to create an SCP only user on FreeBSD just do the following

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Update: I have since migrated to Hugo which seems to be better maintained and generally easier for me to update. I have also started using Texts more for editing Markdown

I haven’t been very active on this blog over the years, one of the reasons was Wordpress itself; As nice as it is, I grew sick of updates always breaking something. Another thing that always made me feel uneasy was the email I got every once and a while from my blog telling me it updated itself. True, this is good when people ignore their blogs but I didn’t feel in control of my own blog any more and sometimes I wouldn’t have enough time to debug any plugins that broke when the blog decided it was time for me to upgrade.

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I have recently faced an issue while migrating MySQL to a new server where non-English characters show up as gibberish. This was because UTF-8 text was saved in columns encoded as latin1. The solution is simple, convert the field into a BLOB and then back to text with the required type and encoding.

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Quick one here, to get real-time traffic stats on FreeBSD just run the following command

systat -ifstat

So I’ve been assisting a customer with their website and I was helping them with some data entry. Most of the content they sent me was in MS Word format. Copying the text directly to Drupal’s CKEditor had all formatting messed up so I was copying to notepad, copying from there to Drupal and then formatting manually. This turned out to be a nightmare when I had to copy 10 tables in a single page.

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So I’m currently working with a customer that requires Ubuntu 12.04 for their servers since their apps were built and tested on that version, so every new install I run into the following issue

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I used to be a big fan of Mandrill. I used to use it as an email gateway for my personal servers. It’s easy to use and it’s cheap (Or free if you send less than 12,000 emails per month). I liked not having to setup SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for my small setups. Even for smaller clients I wouldn’t bother with that and just use Mandrill. Emails just show up with the following sender

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Sometimes when you have a high number of outgoing messages services like Yahoo! and Gmail might block you. To prevent that you need to distribute your outgoing emails through a set of IPs. I used HAProxy for that along with a number of FreeBSD Jails. That solution is a bit tedious, even though after I started using Salt things became a bit easier it was still too complicated for my taste.

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