Blue-Bag Ltd

06/03/2017

DrupalCamp London 2017 - Fortunate enough to be able to give a talk on Website insecurity at Drupal Camp London - Great event!

Common threats to web security with real world case studies of compromised sites, - A 'dissection' of a typical common exploit tool and how it operates, - Si…

03/11/2016

With a current very active set of web site threats doing the rounds I finally got around to posting on the subject of protecting sensitive files in a CMS - take note and make sure you are protected.

We have all done it at some point; a quick change in production to some settings in your CMS configuration, probably in a panic reacting to some ongoing issue, and made a temporary backup of wp-config.php or settings.php with a bak or similar extension. Tested the fix and then probably forgotten to…

04/10/2016

Decided to take the plunge and upgrade my MBA to Sierra - only a couple of SSH issues so far...

Upgrading to the latest macOS Sierra was relatively painless - but a few SSH issues arose. SSH now wants a passphrase or complains about an error in your ssh config file. These are common issues and the solutions are simple.

27/03/2015

How to tame lists in

In this article I look at a very simple example of how to convert complex variable structures to simple lists using Jinja2 filters within an Ansible task.

20/03/2015

Checkout the latest edition of Ansible Briefs!
Two of our articles featured this week!

Newsletter with the latest news from the Ansible open-source community.

19/03/2015

I go through the pain so you don't have to - hopefully!

Working on a long Ansible play today - I was tripped up by a hidden unicode character inadvertently entered in to a YAML file - resulting in a UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) slap in the face. Here is how to deal with that! - UnicodeD…

19/03/2015

http://www.blue-bag.com/blog/jinja-errors-when-running-ansible-tasks

One of the great things about Ansible is being able to use Jinja filters both in templates and in yaml files. I came across a not so great thing today though. Running a play I got the following error: "template error while templating string: expected token 'end of print statement', got ':'" But the…

19/03/2015

http://www.blue-bag.com/blog/testing-configuration-files-they-go-live-ansible

I came across a great Ansible tip recently that showed how to use the validate option of the template module in Ansible. A great solution for testing configuration before it goes live. However it doesn't work with Apache (apachectl -t -f) - you get a validation error like "Invalid command 'Order', p…

19/03/2015

Using Ansible to enforce security

I regularly encounter issues that arise from reviews of server security, log reviews etc that provide good examples of how Ansible can be used to respond to an issue. If you are using a utility like Logwatch to keep an eye on activity on your servers you may occasionally see an entry such as 'Connec…

19/03/2015

http://www.blue-bag.com/blog/apache-better-blocking-common-rules

This is a follow on post to the 'Using Apache to block Spammers' post. It shows how to use Includes in your Apache configuration to re-use useful rules.

09/06/2014

Support the development of Rules for Drupal 8