Random Notes

Viewing posts for December 2015.

Mebe Forked

Just noticed someone has forked Mebe into their own version. Haven’t looked at it more thoroughly, but looking at the feature list they have added lots of useful stuff and removed stuff that Mebe still has that is specific to my own blog (I’m working on removing them piece by piece). If interested, you should totally check it out on Github: https://github.com/nmqanh/geekpress.

This is the first project I have that has been forked by someone, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. 😊 Though also a bit embarrassed of all the things they have had to fix in the engine… Anyway, such a great motivator to see someone use something you have created.

More Mebe Benchmarks

You may remember that earlier this fall I found out just how much faster a 2048-bit HTTPS certificate is for the server to handle. Now that I got one from Let’s Encrypt, I decided to redo the performance tests with the new certificate all set up. Since I ran out of credits on my blitz.io free account, I did the new tests with loader.io’s free tier instead. That’s why the graphs are a bit different this time.

Before I go into the HTTPS results, I will bring some context. You might remember that last time I got about 730 requests per second served over HTTPS with a 2048-bit key, and about 1380 requests per second for plain HTTP. Quoting myself from that time: “So fast… 🚀”. Turns out I spoke too soon. By disabling some extraneous console logging, I was able to more than double the performance. Let’s see the latest results.

For reference: The server is an online.net Dedibox XC with an 8-core Intel Atom C2750 processor and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM.

Read more…

Let's Encrypt!

The identity of this website has been verified by Let’s Encrypt Authority X1.

That’s right! Let’s Encrypt, the new free, automated and open certificate authority, has moved to public beta and their client has improved enough that I was able to request a certificate for this blog! In the end it was criminally easy, basically a matter of running one command (after fiddling around a bit to find the correct command…):

letsencrypt-auto certonly --webroot -w /path/to/blog -d blog.nytsoi.net

This uses the Let’s Encrypt program to automatically validate my domain and request a certificate for it (with the default value being a 2048-bit one). The way it does the validation is by adding some files to the path I specified and then making an HTTP request for the domain, checking that the files are accessible. When the domain has been validated, it requests the certificate and saves it. The cool thing about it is that it creates a directory /etc/letsencrypt/live/blog.nytsoi.net/ that contains symlinks to the files required for using the certificate, such as the full chained certificate file and the private key. When I want to renew the certificate, I can run the Let’s Encrypt program with the same arguments again and it will update the symlinks. That means automating it is very easy (and indeed required since their certificates currently only last for 90 days). The program also contains plugins for Apache and nginx, but the nginx plugin is very experimental so I settled for the webroot method.

I’m really excited for Let’s Encrypt’s launch. I hope this will encourage more and more people to adopt HTTPS for their websites, especially those that deal with user logins or other sensitive data. There’s really no reason to not do it anymore. Encryption for everyone!