Great South Run weekend is here! Today we had the 5k run which Laura, Anne and Des took part in and all did very well, and Abi's 1.5k Mini Run - even Jessica was enjoying running on the race track they had there and is keen to do the mini run next time round.

Now all that's left is my one tomorrow - I'm going to be running the 10 mile Great South Run for the first time to raise money for gain. If the technology works you should be able to watch live at http://runkeeper.com/user/rickymoorhouse and you can sponsor me at http://justgiving.com/rickymoorhouse . I'll update this again tomorrow after the race!

My run went well - I really enjoyed it and there was a fantastic atmosphere around the course.  I managed to beat my target and come in with a time of 1:59:42

With POODLE the time has come to disable SSLv3 everywhere. There will be clients that break and need fixing but it needs doing. You can read more details and background on the vulnerability.

Here's a few useful snippets from my experience with it this week:

Apache

Make sure the combination you have for the SSLProtocol line disables SSLv2 and v3 - something like: SSLProtocol All -SSLv2 -SSLv3

DataPower

Ensure your crypto profiles have SSLv2 and v3 disabled in the options line:

[code lang=text] switch co crypto profile option-string OpenSSL-default+Disable-SSLv2+Disable-SSLv3 exit exit write mem [/code]

Java

If you have problems with handshakes from Java client process force the protocols to use with -Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1

nginx

Make sure the ssl_protocols line in your SSL configuration doesn't have SSLv3 in it. ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;

nodejs

Make sure you don't have secureProtocol:SSLv3_method anywhere in https options - use TLSv1_method instead if it's really needed.

Websphere

See Security bulletin

Using my Raspberry Pi, Piglow and the traffic API feeds I have created a script to give me a visual representation of the journey time to work. This gives me an idea of the traffic before I leave the house in the morning, or so that when I'm working at home I can look at it and see how glad I am that I'm not sitting in traffic on the way to work :)

https://github.com/rickymoorhouse/trafficpi

Elasticsearch Server Second Edition is a good book to read if you're getting started with Elasticsearch or considering using it. It goes through all the main areas of getting your data indexed and then searching and analysing it.

The book is well written and easy to read through and serves well as a reference guide to refer back to later. It has helped me get an overview of some of the features of Elasticseach that I've not yet used, some of which I hope to explore in further depth following on from the examples in the book. All of the chapters in the book include useful references to sources for further information on the topic covered and for more in-depth coverage the authors recommend going on to read their other book, Mastering Elasticsearch which I hope to read as well as a follow on.

1. Boot from Live CD / USB

2. Decrypt the filesystem

<code class="markdown">cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 <span class="emphasis">*hostname*</span>
</code>

3. Mount filesystems

<code class="sql">mount /dev/dm-2 /mnt
mount /dev/dm-3 /mnt/home
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
mount <span class="comment">--bind /dev /mnt/dev</span>
mount <span class="comment">--bind /sys /mnt/sys</span>
mount <span class="comment">--bind /proc /mnt/proc</span>
</code>

4. Enter chroot chroot /mnt

/etc/crypttab should have: sda5_crypt UUID=sda5_uuid

Jessica on her first day at school

A while back I had an e-mail from my web hosting company saying they were increasing the price for the package I was using. This got me thinking about whether the route I'd taken for hosting was the best option and if I'm getting my money's worth there. For reference I had a reseller hosting package, hosting a few sites for family members using not very much disk space or bandwidth - certainly not near the allowance on the package. So I started thinking about what I would do if it was just my site, and this is my thinking out loud/somewhere to document my ideas/findings:

Requirements

• Host a blog

• Easy to update

• Ability to experiment with styling

• Use my existing URLs

After considering a few options including wordpress.com, github pages, Scriptogr.am, my Raspberry Pi and various static site generators - I decided to move my sites to run on a Droplet at DigitalOcean which gives me the flexibility I want for my site, whilst still being able to host the other sites in the same place.

Currently I'm still using WordPress for my blog, but I'm experimenting with a static site generator for the next round of changes :)