[Tutorial] NGINX How to force SSL with WWW or without WWW, the clean way !

To force HTTPS without WWW you can use the following block in your server block :

        if ($host ~* www\.(.*)){
                set $host_without_www $1;
                return 301 https://$host_without_www$request_uri;
        }
        if ($scheme = http)
        {
                return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
        }

and to force HTTPS with WWW you can use the following block :

        if ($host !~* ^www\.){

                return 301 https://www.$host$request_uri;

        }

        if ($scheme = http)

        {

                return 301 https://www.$server_name$request_uri;

        }

One can save the above blocks in separate files (force_ssl.conf and force_ssl_www.conf) and simply include the conf files in their vhost servers whenever needed.

~ Mos

Installing the latest version of okular in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get build-dep okular

sudo apt-get install libpoppler-qt5-dev libzip-dev

mkdir -p ~/src

cd ~/src

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/okular

cd okular

mkdir build

cd build

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/okular ..

make

sudo make install

Disabling CSF Blocked IP alerts

You need to disable the following options in CSF to disable permanent block alerts:

LF_PERMBLOCK_ALERT = "0"

LF_NETBLOCK_ALERT = "0"

but CSF would continue to send you alerts ! This is a tricky one, had to look into the whole config file to figure out what was wrong, you should also disable the following option to get it working :

LF_EMAIL_ALERT = "0"

or do a search and replace to replace all _ALERT = "1" with _ALERT = "0" 

How to proxy EVERYTHING in LINUX / MacOS

I had setup my ubuntu box to use a socks / https proxy for all the traffic and it was working fine except for a few softwares such as Teamviewer for ubuntu , and teamviewer proxy settings was not functioning either ! So I had to either manually route teamviewer subnets to use a vpn adapter such as softether or find an easy way to REALLY forward all the traffic through a proxy server . sshuttle   was my friend here ! so could finally set a TRUE GLOBAL proxy by installing sshuttle :

pip install -y sshuttle

and proxying everything :

sshuttle -r ketab 0.0.0.0/0

where ketab is the name of the ssh connection in your ssh config file . One windows one can use Softether for such an incident to proxy everything through a vpn tunnel . To proxy a specific port, you can use the following command :

sshuttle -r ketab 0.0.0.0/0:5938

where 5938 is the port number

PowerDNS PIPE backend api python example

We recently needed a pipe backend to return a CNAME record for all requests on powerdns 3, so I started reading the docs and developing the backend. So:

yum install pdns pdns-backend-pipe -y

vi /etc/pdns/pdns.conf 
 
launch=bind,pipe
pipe-command=/etc/pdns/pdns-backend.py

Here is my final script (Thanks to Jan Spike for his blog post):

vi /etc/pdns/pdns-backend.py

#!/usr/bin/python -u

from sys import stdin, stdout
data = stdin.readline()
stdout.write("OK\tMy Backend\n")
stdout.flush()

cname='cname-value.com'

while True:
    data = stdin.readline().strip()
    kind, qname, qclass, qtype, id, ip = data.split('\t')
    if kind == 'Q' and qname not in cname:
 r="DATA\t"+qname+"\t"+qclass+"\t"+"SOA\t86400\t-1\tsupport"+qname+" ns1.domain.org 2008080300 1800 3600 604800 3600\n"
        if qtype == 'ANY' or qtype == 'CNAME':
            r += "DATA\t"+qname+"\t"+qclass+"\tCNAME\t86400\t"+id+"\t"+cname+"\n"
        stdout.write(r)
    stdout.write("END\n")
    stdout.flush()