April 29, 2021

How to Configure a Webserver to Be Less Secure

This question sounds odd. Why would you want a less secure web server? Well, maybe you have to support older clients. e.g. IE 11 on Windows 8.1 or Java 7 (cough) cannot connect to a web server, which only uses modern and secure ciphers. From a Java application, which cannot be updated, but has to work, I got the following exception: Exception in thread "main" javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Received fatal alert: handshake_failure at sun....

July 15, 2020

How to Find Nginx Config File on a Nixos Vm

Nixos… hm, a dream for my web hosting company, but a nightmare as a casual user :-D Compared to other Linux distributions, there are so many differences. For a start… where the heck is my nginx.conf? Hint - it is not in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf systemctl cat nginx ... X-CheckConfigCmd=/nix/store/xxx-nginx-1.14.2/bin/nginx -t -c /nix/store/xxx-nginx.conf -p /var/spool/nginx X-ConfigFile=/nix/store/xxx-nginx.conf In order to show the configuration, FlyingCircus (my hosting company) created a custom command nginx-show-config | less ....

July 13, 2020

How to Access Name Based Servers in Development Setup

The problem You run a web application via nginx and you dispatch the requests based on the server name. And maybe the server name header only gets set via a proxy or an URL, which is currently or permanent not available in your dev setup. The solution curl -- header "Host: example.com" http://localhost Further information Blog post by the maintainer of curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/04/05/curl-another-host/