Category Archives: Programming

Letsencrypt, Free, Automated SSL certificates for life!

Letsencrypt automated SSL
Letsencrypt automated SSL – No click SSL!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve fully automated our LetsEncrypt SSL installation process for all of our Managed VPS customers.

What does this mean?  This means that every Brownrice Managed VPS customer receives UNLIMITED FREE SSL certificates for every web site on any Managed Brownrice VPS.  Forever!

And the other great thing about this is that our SSL process is 100% seamless and 100% automated.  How seamless and automated you ask?

  1. Sign up for a Brownrice Managed SmartVPS ($9.95 w/ 1GB RAM & 40GB disk)
  2. Login to responsive, fantastic dashboard and set up new web site by clicking a few buttons.
  3. Point DNS to your new web site (i.e. make it live!) by clicking a couple more buttons.
  4. Wait 1 hour.
  5. Done. (SSL certificate issued and site secured without email verification.)

Repeat above steps 2 through 3 for as many sites and subdomains as you like.  Zero additional charges.

No hands SSL!

By the way this SSL certificate will be renewed every three months, automatically, without you touching a thing.

Want to start?  Sign up here and we’ll have your VPS up and running in minutes!

(More questions?  See our SSL FAQ.)

 

 

Announcing VPS Auto-Tune!

Brownrice Internet
Brownrice Internet VPSs

After a full year in development and testing Brownrice Internet has just released our revolutionary VPS Auto-Tune Service.

What is VPS Auto-Tune and why do you need it?

One of the secrets of hosting companies and systems administrators world-wide is that web and database servers that are left in their default configurations run horribly slow.

Continue reading Announcing VPS Auto-Tune!

This blog has seven days to get hacked

I’m speaking at Wordcamp Albuquerque 2013 a week from today.  My session is called Hacked!  How they hack it and how you clean it where I’ll dissect a real-life WordPress hack and show everyone how I suavely and bravely root out the hacker, sleuthily determine how he got into the site, and then kick him out and slam the door behind him.

However, there’s a problem.  I figured there would certainly be a WordPress hack on one of our hosted customer sites between when I signed up for the talk a few months ago and now.  I’ve waited and waited, and shockingly, all of our customers have listened to us and have been keeping up with their WordPress updates.   So we haven’t had a single WordPress hack to clean up.

So I need this blog to get hacked.  The sooner the better.

Oh, and to speed this thing along and I’ve reverted this blog’s WordPress code back to WordPress 3.0.  This blog currently has more vulnerabilities than a president asking congress to approve a bombing on a mideast country.

I’ll update this blog and our twitter account with daily updates on my situation.  Stay tuned.   This could get interesting.  Or embarrassing.

Hacker extraction – New personal best: 10 minutes!

Last night, just before turning off the lights and harassing my wife, I received a text message from our server monitoring software saying that the mail queue on one of our shared web servers had suddenly spiked.  Lots of emails being pumped out of a shared web server is almost always the sign of something bad.

10:25pm

Logged into machine and examined one of the emails in the mail queue.  Because we roll our own PHP its compiled with a patch that inserts the full path to the script that sent the email. Years ago, when we didn’t have this patch installed, determining which site and/or script sent an email could have taken hours – or be nearly impossible to figure out.   Here’s what the mail header looked like (note: the actual web site address has been modified to protect the client):

Continue reading Hacker extraction – New personal best: 10 minutes!