As you’ll know by now, PostgreSQL 9.4 is out and it is better than ever. The most notable change is the new JSONB data type, where you can store ‘document type’ data in your relational database, basically allowing for supporting many use cases that previously required MongoDB or similar NoSQL solutions. A couple of functions […]
About the challenge About a week before Christmas I signed up for Neil Bowers 2015 CPAN Pull Request challenge. This is a challenge where each month you’d need to send a pull request to a module that would get assigned to you; and the idea is that you really need to make this one pull […]
In the last years we saw several cases of websites getting hacked and having the passwords of their users leaked. This happened for instance at LinkedIn in 2012. The user passwords were not stored in the database in plain text but hashed with SHA-1 and this algorithm is pretty weak nowadays meaning if a hacker […]
Fighting spam is more difficult than ever and many people let other parties handle their spam filtering. This is just one of the reasons products like Office365 and Google Apps for Work have become so successful. After all, there is not much glamor in running your own mail server. If you run your own mail […]
In this post I’m going to walk you through installing OTRS 4 on CentOS 7. The procedure will be very similar for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7 as this is binary compatible. Please note that there are some differences between CentOS 6 and CentOS 7: it now ships with systemd and with firewalld […]
A while ago I noticed someone in the OTRS community wrote a very simple but nice and useful plugin that allows you to export survey results to CSV files. I fixed some small issues with it with a pull request, about nine months ago. Last week someone contacted me because he upgraded his OTRS system […]
Many times I heard the question what OS would be best to install or setup OTRS on. In this post I’ll give an answer. Choose what fits you best Typically, the answer is simple: it should be the operating system you (or your organization) is most comfortable with. If your organization is full of debian-lovers, […]
I was reading up on the documentation for the newly released RHEL 7 beta the other night. The section Removed Packages showed that RHEL 7 no longer includes mod_perl as it is ‘Incompatible with HTTP 2.4‘ and mod_fcgid is recommended as its replacement. With ‘HTTP 2.4‘ the Red Hat folks actually mean the Apache Webserver […]
Vagrant is a very nice system for automating and standardizing your development environments. The standard documentation is geared towards Ubuntu but at $work we standardize on CentOS and RHEL 6. I created a base image for Vagrant based on CentOS 6.5 Minimal Install. Features: Default vagrant ‘insecure’ key root password is ‘vagrant Added EPEL repository […]