SSL

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

In this post I provide you various HTTP to HTTPS redirection methods, for Windows Server IIS and Linux Apache. Use these examples to your advantage to secure the traffic between your visitors and your website.

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Monit monitoring on Ubuntu 14.04 VM on Hyper-V

In this post you’ll learn about setting 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.

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Check website availability with PHP and cURL

Here you’ll find a PHP script to check if your website is up and online available. It uses PHP and cURL. This script comes in handy because website uptime and availability is important, and you want your website to be always online available. If your website is down, it’ll send you an email to notify you about downtime.

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Send authenticated SMTP email over TLS from WordPress

How to configure TLS for SMTP email in WordPress. I was suprised WordPress is not able to send email using an SMTP server out-of-the-box. Not to mention using authenticated SMTP or TLS transport for security. A quick Google search showed me multiple plugins to handle this, but I wanted to create something myself. Here is how to override the wp-mail() function and send email using authenticated SMTP and StartTLS from WordPress.

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Send email with Ghost using SMTP authentication and TLS encryption

Ghost Publishing platform uses Nodemailer to send e-mails with Node.js. It can send e-mail using SMTP, sendmail or Amazon SES and is Unicode friendly. As you know, more and more web hosting providers require SMTP authentication (often abbreviated as SMTP AUTH) and a TLS encrypted connection to send email. Here you’ll find some script examples to Send secure SMTP email from your website.

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Test SMTP Authentication and StartTLS

This post shows you how to test a connection to an SMTP server, using telnet or openssl, to create base64 encoded logon information, to verify the authentication over an opportunistic TLS connection, and all that from the Linux and Windows command line. This comes in very handy when investigating SMTP authentication issues, particular those over TLS encrypted connections. Investigate SMTP authentication issues like a boss using telnet and OpenSSL.

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Don’t turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, fix your PHP configuration

An often heard solution to PHP cURL errors with SSL is to turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER. Please don’t turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, but fix your PHP config instead. This article provides you two solutions to solve CA certificate validation errors with PHP cURL and OpenSSL. For system administrators and end-users.

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