Monthly Archives: April 2014

Is your site patched against Heartbleed? (CVE-2014-0160)

I had the 'fun' experience of patching against this vulnerability today. Although, when I rebooted one of my primary servers, it failed to reboot and caused two hours of downtime. Sorry about that to anyone who couldn't access this site.

If you're wondering if you are vulnerable, check your site for Heartbleed vulnerability.

As far as actually patching, I only did it manually on some Ubuntu 12.04 systems. It was fairly simple. Just run

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

That should take care of it. If you want to learn more, go to Heartbleed.com.

Comic courtesy XKCD:

How To Remove Files from Git Repo Permanently

I ran into this issue in the past week. My .PACK file was enormous (many many gigabytes) because I committed a lot of files I shouldn't have in the past. Large binary files, backups and other things that don't belong in a Git repo.

I deleted the files and committed those, but Git is really good at making sure you never lose data. So despite having a small repo, I had a .PACK file that was 10 times the size of the repo.

I googled around a lot and the best post I could find on StackOverflow was completely remove files from git repo and github on remote. It didn't quite work for me though.

git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch "filename"' --prune-empty HEAD
rm -rf .git/refs/original/ && git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --aggressive --prune=now

I just had to add a few flags to get this working.

-f

and

--prune-empty

in the git filter-branch.

--expire=now

and

--prune=now

in the second line of commands.

Now you can run those two commands (replacing filename with a file name or directory) and it should permanently remove the file from the repo including the PACK file.

Be very careful when you run this command, I am not sure there is a way to undo this change.

Introducing WebSynthesis – Managed WordPress Hosting

WebSynthesis [Reviews] has been added to Review Signal recently. They were quietly published alongside our recent article Managed WordPress Hosting Showdown – Performance Benchmarks Comparison. If you aren't familiar with WebSynthesis, you may be familiar with one of their other products, the Gensis WordPress theme/framework. They are both owned by Copyblogger Media. WebSynthesis performed very well in our managed wordpress benchmarking being classified as one of the top tier managed WordPress hosting providers. They aren't slacking in the review department either, as I write this, WebSynthesis have an 83% overall rating. That is currently the highest overall rating of any company we track.

“Synthesis provides business class WordPress hosting and caching solutions for organizations ranging from SMB to the Enterprise.   Our unique VPS based offerings provide business customers the ultimate balance of managed services and configuration autonomy.” – Derick Schaefer, Creator of WebSynthesis

A huge congratulations goes out to Derick Schaefer and his team at WebSynthesis for their great work. I hope you guys keep it up!

Check Out WebSynthesis Reviews at Review Signal

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