Jan Reilink, Author at Sysadmins of the North

Add a delay to your WordPress login form

This plugin adds a three second delay when logging into WordPress. This slows down brute-force attacks on your website. However, it is not recommended to use sleep(), because a heavy brute-force attack will let all those POST requests sleep for the given amount of time.

By Jan Reilink 10/07/2015Web application security

WordPress

My WordPress web.config

Do you host your WordPress website on Windows Server IIS? And are you having trouble with your web.config? I often receive questions about how to use a web.config file in WordPress on Windows Server, and which settings are important for a WordPress site. Maybe it's because I'm a WordPress on Windows Server IIS enthusiast, so here is my web.config for your convenience (really, it's not that special).

By Jan Reilink 22/06/2015WordPress

Windows Server

How to enable HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) on IIS

Learn how to enable HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) response header in Windows Server IIS 10 web servers.

By Jan Reilink 06/06/2015Windows Server

Windows Server

Tunnel RDP through SSH & PuTTY

Tunnel Remote Desktop (RDP) over ssh with PuTTY? Tunneling RDP over ssh comes in handy when the destination RDP port is blocked on a firewall and you need to perform remote administration on Windows Server. So here is how to set up a RDP SSH tunnel in Linux and Windows (with PuTTY).

By Jan Reilink 28/04/2015Windows Server

PowerShell

Monitor Windows services with PowerShell

How to monitor Windows Servers with PowerShell. As a Windows Server and IIS administrator, you want your Windows services to run at all times. One can monitor Windows services in many, many, ways. Some of our customers websites may depend on certain services, which may be hard to monitor externally. For those Windows services that need local monitoring, I like to schedule a PowerShell script. Here is one...

By Jan Reilink 10/04/2015PowerShell

PowerShell

PowerShell Get-FsrmQuota and Set-FsrmQuota

Learn how to get and set File Server Resource Manager NTFS directory quota using PowerShell‘s FileServerResourceManager cmdlets Get-FsrmQuota and Set-FsrmQuota.

By Jan Reilink 07/04/2015PowerShell

Application Pool Specific Time Interval recycle settings

Windows Server

Set IIS Application Pool recycle defaults to Specific Times, not Regular Time Interval

By default, an IIS application pool (or "AppPool") recycles on a regular time interval of 1740 minutes, or 29 hours. Sometimes you want to change this regular time interval to a specific time schedule. And when you try to configure this in IIS Manager, it gives you an error. Luckily, AppCmd and PowerShell come to the rescue!

By Jan Reilink 03/04/2015Windows Server

Web applications

PHP 5.6 default_charset change may break HTML output

An important note for everyone who's upgrading from PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 to PHP 5.6: the PHP default_charset in php.ini changed from "empty" to UTF-8, often breaking sites after upgradiong from PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 to PHP 5.6. UTF-8 encoding breaks when upgrading PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

By Jan Reilink 31/03/2015Web applications

GNU Linux

Turn off swap

Swapping is costly for disk I/O and not every Linux server needs to have a swap partition and to start swapping. For instance, MySQL servers all have more than enough RAM available to do their work. Yet, when a swap partition is enabled Linux starts swapping, and that degrades MySQL database performance.

By Jan Reilink 25/03/2015GNU Linux

GNU Linux Windows Server

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Various HTTP to HTTPS redirection methods, for Windows Server IIS and Linux Apache.

By Jan Reilink 13/03/2015GNU Linux, Windows Server

Windows Server

Software deployment through WDS

In my environment, I had to set up a new Windows Deployment Services (WDS) configuration for Windows 8.1 Enterprise. To roll out in our office (some 20+ workstations). I wanted to install some additional software at the same time, without using Microsoft Deployment Workbench (using FirstLogonCommands), because I find the interface too slow. The solution? Read on...

By Jan Reilink 04/03/2015Windows Server

MONIT - Barking at daemons. Monit is a small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

GNU Linux

Monit monitoring on Ubuntu 14.04 VM on Hyper-V

Set up a Monit monitoring service for your websites and services. Monit is a free and open source service monitoring application which can perform various event-based actions. Monit can send email notifications, restart a service or application, or take other responsive actions. We set Monit up on a Ubuntu 14.04 VM, built on Hyper-V. And we use Monit to monitor several websites, and send out notifications on downtime.

By Jan Reilink 15/02/2015GNU Linux

Code base

Convert PHP ext/mysql to MySQLi

Learn how to convert PHP mysql functions to PHP MySQLi extension. The old ext/mysql extension is deprecated as of PHP 5.5.0 and therefore it's a must to migrate away from using it and towards MySQLi or PHP Data Object (PDO). This post will show you how.

By Jan Reilink 04/02/2015Code base

GNU Linux

How to restore a deleted Open-Xchange context?

How-to restore, or recover, an accidentally deleted OX context. If you've accidentally deleted an Open-Xchange context (contextid), then that is bad... Here is how to recover a deleted OX context and filestore... Assuming you make Open-Xchange backups of course.

By Jan Reilink 21/01/2015GNU Linux

Windows Server

How to play old games on Windows with DOSBox

PC retrogaming how-to for 64-bit Windows - and Linux! We all love old games. It's a nostalgia thing from when we played those really old games on our 286 (or older, like an MSX) computer, either using floppy disks or cassettes/cartridges. There is nothing much sysadmin about this, it’s all about FUN! You all remember Airborne Ranger, Operation Wolf, Blues Brothers, Gunboat and The Lost Vikings, right?

By Jan Reilink 04/01/2015Windows Server