How to block outgoing URL calls with iptables on Linux

iptables is a command-line firewall utility that uses policy chains to allow or block traffic. When a connection tries to establish itself on your system, iptables looks for a rule in its list to match it to. If it doesn’t find one, it resorts to the default action. Oct 2021

How to fix slow WordPress admin!

One unusual causing factor that is rarely considered or even caught, are the inefficient/unnecessary API calls from within the installed and active plugins. Sep 2020

Fixing Chef cluster issues

Chef is a vital part of the infrastructure for many enterprises, as a configuration management tool to automate the provisioning of their IT infrastructure, with additional compliance capabilities. But in can get tricky when things stop working and not much specialised information is available. May 2018

Installing MongoDB on Ubuntu 15.04

Starting with ubuntu 15.04, Upstart has been replaced with systemd, and whilst installing MongoDB was no issue, there was no way of having it running as a service by default. Jan 2016

CSV UTF-8 encoding issues in Excel

There’s a bug which causes some accented characters to become corrupt before / during / after import or just document edit, when you use Microsoft Excel – this is a known Microsoft bug which has never been fixed. This frustrating csv UTF-8 encoding issue, occurs only with Microsoft Excel. Oct 2015

Marketing vanity URLs

Vanity URLs are simple but incredibly efficient redirects to help track marketing campaigns via Google Analytics, in this case, and help build reports or track their effectiveness. Jun 2015

git tips and tricks

Some git tips and tricks that I compiled over time. Do you have any to share? Feb 2014