Use AWS CLI to automate the removal and addition of instances in your ELB

Hello! Sometimes its necessary to automate the removal and addition of instances in your elastic load balancer. Perhaps for the purposes of auto scaling or deploying updates to your web application. Either way, there is many tools at the disposal of the systems administrator to automate this process. Below we will share some simple steps […]

https://www.stackstar.com/use-aws-cli-automate-removal-addition-instances-elb/ Use Varnish and Nginx to follow, hide and cache 301 / 302 redirects

Hello! Varnish is a robust, open source and stable caching solution that has been employed on many different high traffic environments with a significant amount of success. One of the things that we have come across, specifically with environments such as Amazon Web Services is that websites tend to spread their web stack across multiple […]

https://www.stackstar.com/use-varnish-nginx-follow-hide-cache-301-302-redirects/ Force SSL for your site with Varnish and Nginx

Hello! For those of you who depend on Varnish to offer robust caching and scaling potential to your web stack, hearing about Google’s prioritization (albeit arguably small, for now) of sites that force SSL may cause pause in how to implement. Varnish currently doesn’t have the ability to handle SSL certificates and encrypt requests as […]

https://www.stackstar.com/force-ssl-for-your-site-with-varnish-and-nginx/ Auto updating Atomicorp Mod Security Rules

Hello! If any of you use mod_security as a web application firewall, you might have enlisted the services of Atomicorp for regularly updating your mod_security ruleset with signatures to protect against constantly changing threats to web applications in general. One of the initial challenges, in a managed hosting environment, was to implement a system that […]

https://www.stackstar.com/auto-updating-atomicorp-mod-security-rules/ Web based system to purge multiple Varnish cache servers

Hello! We have been working with varnish for quite a while. And there is quite a lot of documentation out there already for the different methods for purging cache remotely via Curl, the varnish admin tool sets and other related methods. We deal with varnish in the Amazon Cloud as well as on dedicated servers. […]

https://www.stackstar.com/web-based-system-to-purge-multiple-varnish-cache-servers/ Web based system to push your GIT code

Hello! Since posting recently about our Web based SVN push system , we have decided to take what we did there one step further and implement a very similar system for GIT, but with more options! The web based GIT push system is, as mentioned, very similar to the web based SVN push system, with […]

https://www.stackstar.com/web-based-system-to-push-your-git-code/ Centralized Backup Script

Hello There! I thought I’d share a backup script that was written to consolidate backups onto one server instead of spreading the backup process across several servers. The advantages are somewhat obvious to consolidating the script onto one server, namely being that editing or making changes is much easier as you only have one script […]

https://www.stackstar.com/centralized-backup-script/ A Web based system to push your SVN code through development, staging and production environments

Note the files in this post are now on GitHub Hello there! In development, having a seamlessly integrated process where you can propagate your code through whatever QA, testing and development policy you have is invaluable and a definite time saver. We work with SVN as well as GIT code repository systems and have developed […]

https://www.stackstar.com/a-web-based-system-to-push-your-svn-code-through-development-staging-and-production-environments/ Add your Dynamic IPs to Apache HTACCESS files

Hello! We threw together a quick & simple script to dynamically update your .htaccess files within apache to add your dynamic IP address to the allow / deny fields. If you’re looking to password protect an admin area (for example) but your office only has a dynamic IP address, then this script might be handy […]

https://www.stackstar.com/add-your-dynamic-ips-to-apache-htaccess-files/ Massive Amazon Route53 API Bind Zone Import Script

Hello there, Occasionally some of our managed services work has us dealing directly with other cloud providers such as Amazon. One of our clients set a requirement to migrate over 5,000 domain’s to Amazon’s Route53 DNS service. There was little doubt that this could be automated, but since we have never done this massive of […]

https://www.stackstar.com/massive-amazon-route53-api-bind-zone-import-script/