Autarchy of the Private Cave

So… You had finally built a nice LXC container for your web-facing application, and even configured Apache (Debian package version 2.14.18-1 in my case) to serve some static/web-only components.
From your client-side JavaScript UI you talk (in JSON) to the API, which is implemented as a separate node.js/Python/etc server – say, on port 8000 in the same LXC container.

The simplest solution to forward requests from the web-frontend to your API is by using mod_proxy.
If you want to forward any requests to /api/* to your custom back-end server on port 8000, you just add the following lines to your VirtualHost configuration:

ProxyPass “/api” “http://localhost:8000″
ProxyPassReverse “/api” “http://localhost:8000″

I’d suggest not wrapping this fragment with the classical IfModule: as your application will not really work without its API back-end, you actually want Apache to fail as soon as possible if mod_proxy is missing.

That was easy, right? What, it doesn’t work? Can’t be! It’s dead simple! No way you could make a mistake in 2 lines of configuration!!! :mad_rage:

Oh wait… I remember I had this problem before… Read the rest of this entry »

Phusion Passenger Apache users guide

Also as a PDF.

A nice report on the cost of bruteforcing variable-length and variable-complexity passwords using cloud computing services (e.g. Amazon’s EC). There’s a kind of a tutorial in their previous post.

Slow DoS attack with just 1 computer against a number of web servers, including Apache: slowloris. There is a solution for Apache, packaged for RedHat and also available for Debian.

Finally, there’s Go programming language. The most inspiring promise to me personally is the ease of execution parallelization with language’s built-in syntactic constructs. That is something highly desired. Also, I like that it is a compiled language. However, it might be 10%-20% slower than pure C. Let’s see how it grows.