Plus the right way to setup PHP, the trouble with benchmarking, and when to choose NGiNX.

Links:

• Jim's Blog: Installing WordPress on Apache the modern way — It’s been bugging me for a while that there are no correct guides to be found about using modern Apache 2.4 or above with the Event or Worker MPMs. We’re going to go ahead and correct that lapse today, by walking through a brand-new WordPress install on a new Ubuntu 18.04 VM.
• Apache Performance Tuning — Apache 2.x is a general-purpose webserver, designed to provide a balance of flexibility, portability, and performance. Although it has not been designed specifically to set benchmark records, Apache 2.x is capable of high performance in many real-world situations.
• Tuning Your Apache Server
• worker - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 — This Multi-Processing Module (MPM) implements a hybrid multi-process multi-threaded server. By using threads to serve requests, it is able to serve a large number of requests with fewer system resources than a process-based server.
• event - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 — The event Multi-Processing Module (MPM) is designed to allow more requests to be served simultaneously by passing off some processing work to the listeners threads, freeing up the worker threads to serve new requests.
• PHP-FPM — PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.
• FastCGI overview — FastCGI is a way to have CGI scripts execute time-consuming code (like opening a database) only once, rather than every time the script is loaded. In technical terms, FastCGI is a language independent, scalable, open extension to CGI that provides high performance without the limitations of server specific APIs.
• Alexa Top 500 Global Sites
• What Is a CDN? How Does a CDN work? — A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
• W3 Total Cache – WordPress plugin — W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
• krakjoe/apcu: APCu - APC User Cache — APCu is an in-memory key-value store for PHP. Keys are of type string and values can be any PHP variables.
• PHP: APCu - Manual
• Introduction to Varnish — Varnish HTTP Cache — Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architectur
• ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool — ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.
• HTTP(S) Benchmark Tools
• jimsalterjrs/network-testing — This is a small collection of GPLv3-licensed tools to assist an intrepid researcher in testing the performance of networks, wired or wireless.

The history, the clients, and the from-the-field details you'll want to know.

Links:

• Let’s Encrypt and CertBot – JRS Systems
• Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) — The surprisingly readable IETF draft.
• How It Works - Let's Encrypt
• ACME Client Implementations
• Certbot — Certbot is EFF's tool to obtain certs from Let's Encrypt.
• acme-nginx: python acme client for nginx — A particularly simple client that is useful for understanding the protocol details.
• Caddy - The HTTP/2 Web Server with Automatic HTTPS
• mod_md: Let's Encrypt (ACME) support for Apache httpd
• Traefik - The Cloud Native Edge Router
• Looking Forward to 2019 - Let's Encrypt — We’re now serving more than 150 million websites while maintaining a stellar security and compliance track record. Most importantly though, the Web went from 67% encrypted page loads to 77% in 2018, according to statistics from Mozilla. This is an incredible rate of change!
• Let's Encrypt ACME v2 API Announcements — Now that the draft standard is in last-call and the pace of major changes has slowed, we’re able to release a “v2” API that is much closer to what will become the final ACME RFC.
• Let's Encrypt disables TLS-SNI-01 validation — The researcher noticed that "at least two" large hosting providers host many users on the same IP address and users are able to upload certificates for arbitrary names without proving they have control of a domain.
• A Technical Deep Dive on Using Certbot to Secure your Mailserver from the EFF — With the most recent release of Certbot v0.29.1, we’ve added some features which make it much easier to use with both Sendmail and Exim.

Plus the biggest stories out of Kubecon, and serverless gets serious.

Links:

• Everything that was announced at KubeCon
• CNCF to Host etcd — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept etcd as an incubation-level hosted project.
• Introduction to Knative — Knative is a framework from the folks at Google and Pivotal focused on “serverless” style event driven functions.
• IBM Embraces Knative to Drive Serverless Standardization — Knative is not the first open-source functions-as-a-service effort that IBM has backed. Back in 2016, IBM announced the OpenWhisk effort, which is now run as an open-source project at the Apache Software Found.
• How Google Is Improving Kubernetes Container Security — "We go beyond what's in open source and put additional restrictions in place to secure users"
• Demystifying Kubernetes CVE-2018-1002105 — With a specially crafted request, users that are authorized to establish a connection through the Kubernetes API server to a backend server can then send arbitrary requests over the same connection directly to that backend, authenticated with the Kubernetes API server’s TLS credentials used to establish the backend connection.
• The silent CVE in the heart of Kubernetes apiserver
• Crossplane: An Open Source Multicloud Control Plane
• security.christmas — This year we will prepare you for the Christmas celebration, by giving you small presents of knowledge every day, which will teach you about the world of security.
• Introducing the Helm Hub — This hub provides a means for you to find charts hosted in many distributed repositories hosted by numerous people and organizations.

Plus the latest router botnet, why you should never go full UPnP, and the benefits of building your own home router.

Special Guest: Jim Salter.

Links:

• Google goes down after major BGP mishap routes traffic through China — Google lost control of several million of its IP addresses for more than an hour on Monday in an event that intermittently made its search and other services unavailable to many users.
• Internet Vulnerability Takes Down Google
• China has been 'hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries'
• RPKI - The required cryptographic upgrade to BGP routing
• HTTP/3 — The protocol that's been called HTTP-over-QUIC for quite some time has now changed name and will officially become HTTP/3.
• HTTP/3: Come for the speed, stay for the security
• The Road to QUIC
• Botnet pwns 100,000 routers using ancient security flaw — Researchers have stumbled on another large botnet that’s been quietly hijacking home routers while nobody was paying attention
• BCMPUPnP_Hunter: A 100k Botnet Turns Home Routers to Email Spammers
• From Zero to ZeroDay Journey: Router Hacking
• The Ars guide to building a Linux router from scratch