Setup a website monitoring service on Synology® Diskstation NAS

Posted on by ztp

For the time being, I wanted a simple site monitoring service. I was looking around when I have remembered I have a Synology Diskstation in my LAN, which is always ON, of course. So why not put the service in there?

For now I do not intend to make the monitoring service available throughout the internet, so that will not be covered in this blog post.

Searched for a php monitor service and found PHP Server Monitor which seemed a good candidate. I managed to put it to work and did not need to telnet to the Diskstation even once.

This service allows to configure several servers to watch for and alerts using email and/or SMS, supporting several gateways. It has a web front end to configure and view and also allows for different users that can see different servers! Seemed perfect. It also has a feature to confirm that the site that is live is the one we expect by testing the returned HTML for a match of a string of characters or a regular expression.
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Implement client certificate authentication for FTP on IIS 8

Posted on by ztp

I wanted to increase security of the Microsoft IIS FTP service of my web server so I thought I restricted access to it to my IP. But since my IP is a dynamic IP I had to setup a dynamic domain service. With this I had to enable domain lookup on the IP filtering of the FTP service. The problem with this solution was that every time I accessed the server, the MSFTP service simple crashed and stopped. Searching the internet for a solution was not successful. So headed into another direction: SSL and certificates. I don’t really know if this is better than IP restriction (and I suspect it is an open ended discussion) but it would allow me to access the FTP on the road, where it would be an internet access different from the one where the dynamic domain service is configured.

So here is the task list:

  • Securing the FTP server with SSL
  • Use a client certificate to authenticate the user.

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“hello, world”

Posted on by ztp

Every programmer knows the first program one must accomplish when learning a new language. But it was only when I was about 16 that I’ve read the book “The C Programming Language”, by Brian W. Kerningham and Dennis Ritchie, where the first program was in fact:

#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
    printf("hello, worldn");
}

But my adventure in programming began some years before.

I was about eleven years-old and the ZX Spectrum was hype! I did not have one (yet!) but a school colleague had and so I borrow him the things’ manual. From there, I asked him to try some BASIC instructions that I’ve wrote in a sheet of paper. The next day he would bring me the screen output on the same paper. After studying that at home, I would ask him more tryouts… until he fed up.

After a while I convinced my parents that the ZX Spectrum was the future and they would like me to be in the future, right?
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