Guido Flohr

The access control system of Nginx lacks an equivalent for Apache's group based access control. But it is easy to emulate this Apache feature with a little bit of scripting.

Content negotiation is a key concept for multi language web sites. For Nginx it is only available as a patch. But negotiating the language is a rather trivial task for most sites. Instead of patching the web server, a couple of lines of Perl code will also do the job.

After waiting years on my TODO list I recently decided to tackle the project "web site". Since I no longer work for Imperia I was looking for a light-weight alternative. I did not want to install PHP on my server, ruling out a lot of options. A colleague finally recommended Jekyll. Its simple semi-static approach reminded me of Imperia and I decided to give it a shot.

Most routers for home internet allow you to forward ports of your publicly visible IP address to internal IPs of your home network. In order to make that work, you first need to know your publicly visible IP. Most of the time, the router will fetch its IP from the ISP via DHCP, and the address is not constant. This is where countless dynamic IP services jump in, with the disadvantage that the names that they offer are mostly plain ugly (my-name.dynamic-ip-xyz.example.com) and most of the time they will make you pay for everything but the most basic services. If, however, you are the admin of the nameserver of your domain you can easily set up your own solution.

The utility tar should rather be renamed to vtar. Why the heck does almost everybody add the option v automatically? Is that in any way helpful? Or is it maybe even dangerous?