To admit it, I was inclined to title this post “from Europe/Russia with love”, but technology should not be seen national and nginx, Varnish and MonetDB are few of many products I am going to mention.
Here’s “nginx” pronounced like you would say “Jeanny”: “Jeannix”.
Let me turn tendencies into trends and provide me you with what I call the weather forecast of technology: Read more »
Just some days ago I’ve written about my problems proxying IIS by Apache, having ultimately used Squid. Having Squid in front of Exchange has worked for OWA, but users using Outlook to connect Exchange have been asked for their credentials over and over again. In other words, “Outlook does not stop asking for username and password”. (It should only ask every start.)
Therefore I’ve changed Apache to listen on another port for SSL (here 8443) and have let IIS/Exchange use port 443 exclusively. ISA would have changed that issue, but it was overhead as I’ve written.
But, you can to reverse proxy with IIS 7! Read more »
Having only one IP I had to share the HTTPS port so depending on the request’s host either the Linux VM or Exchange 2007 should be queried. Unfortunately, although Exchange can be configured to process requests on another port Outlook and Pocket PCs will not work that way.
Therefore I’ve first set up Apache’s mod_proxy on the Linux VM to proxy Exchange – which did not and does not and will not work due to RPC over HTTPS, which Microsoft is said to have created standards incompliant. Apache’s developers refuse to implement an exception [the bug report], and versions of httpd newer than 2.0.53 won’t work, including my 2.2.8.
Unlucky me I did not recogize this only testing access to OWA. Hence my apologizes here to all affected.
ISA 2006 does not work with Windows Server 2008, and the new version requires too much overhead for my taste. BTW, it is referred to as ‘Stirling’ and a beta can be found here.
Finally, I’ve decided to give Squid a try. And, after reading just a few example configurations (and this) I managed to get it working. It proxies successfully to MS Exchange, and by letting Apache bind to 127.0.0.1 for SSL even the host-based (“vhost”) relay works. Here you can grab my configuration file squid.conf for proxying/relaying between Exchange and other hosts.
If you know what to change to access Exchange by SQUID without SSL please let me know. (Altering cache_peer line will let squid access only Apache and thus break host-based relaying.)
I’ve found the WordPress plugin Trackback Validator being effective. It simply checks whether my blog entry is really referenced in the page trackbacking – that’s what you should expect in legitimate trackbacks and what spammers often don’t do. Trackbacks missing that reference are immediately marked as spam.
As I let myself notify about new comments and WordPress treats trackbacks as such, I receive emails with an excerpt of the spam-text. The plugin doesn’t surpress them. Annoying.
So, here’s a workaround for Apache to deny posting by clients with known User Agent strings:
BrowserMatch "^\-$" is_a_robot
BrowserMatch "^Jakarta" is_evil
BrowserMatch "^libghttp\/1" is_evil
<Directory />
<LimitExcept GET>
Order deny,allow
Deny from env=is_evil
Deny from env=is_a_robot
</LimitExcept>
</Directory>
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