Abandoning StartSSL

After Mozilla’s devastating report, and both Chrome and Firefox’s decision to stop trusting StartSSL certificates issued after October 28, I had no choice but to replace the certificates I’d obtained through StartSSL.

The process took a few months, mainly due to the associated costs. While most of my StartSSL certificates were replaced with ones issued by Let’s Encrypt, there were a few cases where LE wasn’t appropriate. This primarily impacted domains that have many, many subdomains, however there were also a few cases where Let’s Encrypt’s three-month duration would’ve been burdensome. Ultimately I had to purchase three wildcard certificates, plus three single-domain certificates. With those installed, I’m now free of StartSSL/Wosign. After sixty days, I can rotate the pinned keys, impeding any further use of my legacy StartSSL certificates.

Preparing for PHP 7.1

I’ve been using PHP 7.0 for just over a year, and the 7.1 branch reached its first stable release last month, so I’ve begun thinking about what the switch will entail. Fortunately, my needs are fairly simple, so I only require two additional modules: Redis and GeoIP. I’ve made one hasty attempt to build 7.1 with support for these features, which failed spectacularly; fortunately, the chance that it was an error on my part is quite good, so things may just work when I try it again.

Sadly, I’m not yet able to drop PHP 5.6 support from my VPS as a few necessary applications still don’t work as expected under newer releases.

I love my CDN

KeyCDN is rather spectacular. I’ve used them for more than two years now, and their features-for-price are unmatched. Of greatest importance to me, they support custom SSL certificates as part of their basic offering. Given my obsession with HSTS and HPKP (see also), this was essential.

In the last six months, they’ve spared my VPS appreciable traffic:

I can’t recommend KeyCDN enough. I’m told that Brotli and IPv6 support are coming in the first quarter of 2017. 🎉

Flic controller for Home Assistant updated with breaking changes

While it’s no longer necessary because Home Assistant 0.35 introduced native support for Flic buttons, I’m still using the controller I released just before Home Assistant updated. In part, this is because I haven’t taken the time to switch the integrations over to Home Assistant automations. Also, having spent some time on the controller, I am not ready to abandon it.

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Adding Brotli support to nginx

Last year, Google released a successor to the deflate compression algorithm, Brotli. Chrome adopted it in version 51, and Firefox in version 44 (see Can I use…). That said, from the webserver side, nginx doesn’t support it natively, so Google provides the ngx_brotli module, making it just a matter of compiling nginx.

Continue reading Adding Brotli support to nginx