Problems with Jessie

Needs More Work, Our Side

We have run an evaluation of Debian for the live server and it broke our package manager and the install failed leaving Apache not running and the web server down so it seems some more testing needs to be done on our side.

This should be slated to happen within the next few weekends to run along side our new look which is coming along well an we have some parts of the website ported over and in our opinion are much better interfaces for our visitors.

It is to be expected because we have a highly customised installation with many config tweaks and such things.

I am sure with some more time and a better look at the big and small picture and we will have Jessie running as our default server OS.

New Debian Released

Hello Jessie

Debian have released their new version code named jessie ready for the early upgraders. We have recently moved back over to Debian for desktops due to the need for stability and I miss the system.

So now workstations use this version from now on and I will be upgrading my workstation at some point over the day.

There is the usual blog post about the new release which can be found here and there is a set of release notes about the new OS here.

It has taken 24 months of development time to get to this release and here is a list of what has been changed^[1]

• Apache 2.4.10
• Asterisk 11.13.1
• GIMP 2.8.14
• an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.14
• GNU Compiler Collection 4.9.2
• Icedove 31.6.0 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)
• Iceweasel 31.6.0esr (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)
• KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.11.13
• LibreOffice 4.3.3
• Linux 3.16.7-ctk9
• MariaDB 10.0.16 and MySQL 5.5.42
• Nagios 3.5.1
• OpenJDK 7u75
• Perl 5.20.2
• PHP 5.6.7
• PostgreSQL 9.4.1
• Python 2.7.9 and 3.4.2
• Samba 4.1.17
• Tomcat 7.0.56 and 8.0.14
• Xen Hypervisor 4.4.1
• the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment
• more than 43,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 20,100 source packages.

Including upgrading the workstations the server will be evaluated on the virtual machine to make sure the system works with our website and we have no problems with new software versions.

This will be slated for after the new look upgrade which is now half way and progressing well and it will allow our users to have a better experience and also have some eye candy.

[1] https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426

Busy Working on New Look

Coming Soon

We have been working hard on bringing a new look website online and we hope to have some fresh content and improvements all over the site.

Stay Tuned!!

New Articles

Some Reading

I thought it would be a good idea to write a little post on a new contributor who join up with us and they have author a few care related articles for the website.

They have been written by Anne Rickards and are a quality read if you have some time and are interested in the care sector.

Moving Into a Care Home Following Bereavement is the first contribution and then a following article Creating Cheerful Care Homes covering hens in care homes has been added.

We hope you enjoy reading these and we hope to bring some more quality articles for you to read.

Care and Nursing Articles

New Release: HTTPS Site Migration

Moving Over to a Secure Website

Our sysadmin has been very busy lately and has now completed the migration from http over to https which is more secure for our visitors with a secure connection being the default. The migration was quite simple because our code base does not use magic numbers or strings so all URL are references to a variable which is replace with the URL contained in the configuration.

Secure Website

Enabling a secure connection by default is the way forward so we decided to make the move over now. We use Apache SSL and SPDY as a module to help speed up connections from clients who support the protocol.

Testing has been accomplished by using a clone of the live server running inside a VM instance, we like to use Virtualbox for VMs although it is now owned by Oracle not Sun it is still open source and a great bit of software that I find very useful.

Setting Up Apache

We already have a setup for the secure site because it is used to process our payments securely although all other traffic is redirected to the non secure site.

We edited /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ssl.conf to configure the protocols we support and to disable ones which have vulnerabilities like POODLE. Here is a snipit of the configuration file.

SSLProtocol all -SSLv3 -SSLv2

SSLHonorCipherOrder on

SSLCipherSuite "EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM EECDH+ECDSA+SHA384 EECDH+ECDSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+SHA384 EECDH+aRSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+RC4 EECDH EDH+aRSA RC4 !aNULL !eNULL !LOW !3DES !MD5 !EXP !PSK !SRP !DSS"

Next we needed to install a copy of mod-spdy for any user agents who support it

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb
dpkg -i mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb

Our rewrite file on the non secure site looks like this now it just 301 redirects all requests to their secure equivalent.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

SPDY for Apache

Installing this has really improved our website response time and it just seems snappier than the non secure site we installed a mod-spdy package but SPDY only works with modern browser but we do not support old browsers any more so this is not a problem.

The source code for it and the packages are available and it has now been donated to the Apache foundation from Google. You can download the 64bit deb package here this is the one we used since we have 64bit Debian.

Site Config

This was simple and we only have two string representing the sites full URL one in the main PHP config file and another in the SiteConfig JavaScript class file. This approach also simplified when we moved over the domain name from www.ucarewecare.com to www.carehomes.net.

Conclusion

Porting our website code over to HTTPS has been quite a simple process in the end this was helped by us not using string literals as our URL and instead using a token which uses a value in the sites configuration so all we did was change one string and they all changed.

Remember to never use magic strings or numbers in your code and abstract away a bit because it does come in handy sometimes.