by Cesare Rocchi

Trying to avoid lock-in

While building my services I am trying to avoid lock-in as much as possible. I especially try avoiding to tie myself to a non portable technology. For example I could have used Heroku. I used it in the past, it’s very cool. But it doesn’t allow to upload files. I mean it does, but storage is not permanent. The suggested way is to upload files to S3. Another dependency. You see where this is going?

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Adventures with Servers attacked by Botnets

I have a toy VPS on Digital Ocean. It runs the backend of a very simple prototype for a demo that I had to run almost a year ago. The backend has a signup and login system but fortunately we didn’t use any sensitive data for the demo, just fake email addresses and a bunch of data about businesses like addresses and phone numbers, all publicly available stuff. At the time we were in a rush so I set up the machine without any particular protection.

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Monitoring a Server with the Telegram API

Some servers behind Podrover are just workers and do not run a web application, so I can’t use Pingdom and the like to monitor them. I could use some library like Monit but honestly I didn’t want to install one more thing on the server and I like to exploit push notifications when possible. I am already monitoring some behavior of my DB servers via Slack. When some key activity is performed a message is sent to a private Slack group, and I get a notification on my iPhone.

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