Author: Francisco Ros

From time to time you find companies, products, or services you cannot help to fall in love with. As soon as you get used to them, you cannot imagine how you could work without them. Folks, no doubt Cloudflare is one of those.

Employed by over 10 million domains, chances are that you’re already using Cloudflare. But maybe you haven’t had the time to check everything they do to build a faster web and a more secure Internet. In this post I summarize some ways you can take advantage of their free plan to speed up and secure your websites.

Certificate Transparency (CT) provides a means to detect certificates that are mistakenly or maliciously issued by a Certification Authority (CA). As a domain owner, you should care about this for two different reasons: i) You can detect if an attacker is issuing certificates to impersonate your websites; and ii) browsers like Chrome and Safari mark your website as “insecure” if your certificate doesn’t comply with their CT policy.

Want to know the details? Please keep reading 🙂

As you may know, you can connect Moss to your fresh Ubuntu 18.04 or 16.04 server – regardless the provider where such server is hosted. Moss also features native integrations with some cloud providers (Amazon, DigitalOcean, Google and Vultr as of this writing), but you can use Moss with any vps, cloud instance, or even physical server – not a common use case, but feasible anyway.

A few days ago a customer was having an issue when trying to connect an Ubuntu 18.04 instance (hosted on his provider of choice) to Moss. So I decided to create an account on such provider and investigate the problem. It turned out that the provider’s image had some “suboptimal” configurations and that the default solution for name resolution in Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic) has some related bugs. I think the problem is interesting enough to be shared, and it’ll also allow us to talk about systemd and, more specifically, systemd-resolved for name resolution.

We’ve wanted to start this blog for a long time, so that we can write about the web, systems administration, software development, security, good practices, products and services we love, and of course, about the latest Moss news (if you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe to the blog in the form below and we’ll notify you as we publish new content).

The world might not need a new blog (hehe), but we have two good reasons to write here. 1) We feel like doing it ?; and 2) we believe it can be useful to our customers and other web development professionals. We didn’t start it before because the entire team was focused on developing Moss – we couldn’t dedicate the required time to create quality content at a regular pace. Now the team’s grown, the time has come for us to start writing!