View the details of a certificate signing request with OpenSSL
Oct 29

Today I had the new to generate some new certs for a customer.  I wanted to see what I used previously for the values when I generated the CSR (Certificate Signing Request).  To view the details I used the following:

openssl req -noout -text -in server.csr

More SEO tricks using Apache rewrites
Sep 14

Another tip related to one of my previous blogs.  All websites have an index page (aka Home Page), but no matter whether it’s index.html or index.php or any other name, some search engines will view http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php as duplicate content.  So I use the following to redirect index.php to /

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [L,R=301]

New website: Cisco Sphere
Sep 14

I have setup a new website for people who use Cisco products called Cisco Sphere.  I’m hoping that it will grow to be a helpful website for those who need help with their Cisco products.

Make your domain more SEO friendly
Sep 11

A lot of SEO experts say that if you allow people to go to either domain.com or www.domain.com the search engines will index both URLs as if they are two totally different sites.  You might think that is bad news, but what ends up happening is the search engines will see the same content (duplicate) on both domain.com and www.domain.com and the search engines will demote your listing for having duplicate content on more than one domain.

The way to fix this is to either permanently redirect all traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com, or vice-verse.  If you’re using Apache there is a quick and easy way by using .htaccess files.  To redirect all domain.com to www.domain.com, you can do the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Or if you want all www.domain.com to forward to domain.com, use this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Linux Commands and WordPress
Aug 28

Thanks to one of the SysAdmin Valley reads who alerted me to a mistype in one of the blogs.  When you are typing in Linux commands into WordPress and it uses a double hyphen, you need to change the formatting to “Preformatted” for the text.  The reason it, WordPress converts the double hyphens into a single hyphen.   See the following example.

With double hyphens & normal formatting:

rpm –version

With double hyphens & preformatted formatting:

rpm --version