Common Server issues – FAQs and answers from those in the know
Decoding the 22-char salt of a password (PHP/MySQLi)
7 May 2026 @ 3:24 pm
This is my current code:
if (!$row['is_verified']) {
$message = 'Verifiera din e-post först.';
} elseif (password_verify($postPass, base64_decode($row['PassPhrase1'])) {
This decodes the salt of the password using base64_decode (the salt is the 22-char long REMEMBER VARCHAR(22) of the password)
But it does not decrypt the actual hash that it is stored with, that was created using password_hash("Code_of_Conduct", PASSWORD_ARGON2ID);
Thanks in advance!
How do I get dnssec auto policy signing to output readable files?
7 May 2026 @ 1:37 pm
By default, dnssec automatic signing produces 'raw' files as output. These are unreadable binary files.
If I do not care about the couple of extra megabytes the normal text format output takes, and find the ease of use of being able to tell what's being broadcast by my DNS server by cat ing a file to the terminal rather than using complicated tools and online checkers makes the crazy complexity of dnssec a little less brain-mushifying. How do I get it to output a file that can be read by humans in the signed format?
I.e.: By default it does the automated 'semi-equivalent' (this command doesn't work, I don't know one that does*, the records are missing their values, but I hope I get the point across; I'm not interested in manually signing but I am interested in readable output) of
cd /var/named/run-root/var/
dnssec-signzone -O raw -S -K keys/site.com site.com Ksite.com.+014+37707.key
but I want the equivalent of:
Certificates for https [closed]
7 May 2026 @ 11:02 am
What is the best way to get certificates for https on Linux, nowadays?
I need free certificate for public web site (with API on sub domain).
It will be good to do not let root access for this tool.
Edited
Dear moderators, please, answer on my question before closing it.
That is rude.
Any IT question can be classified as product recommendation off-topic.
For example, if you ask about nginx, that is recommendation of nginx.
If you ask about apache, that is recommendation of apache.
=====
I'm asking about client and its setup on server to get free https certificate.
I want to know possible variants of this.
Not self-signed, free, with sub domain, with limited access on server.
Postfix trying to deliver mail using old MX entries
7 May 2026 @ 10:38 am
We switched some of our company mailboxes (one domain) to Outlook servers.
After that our emails are requiring up to 30 minutes to be delivered from our server to Outlook.
Checked logs and there is something strange - before delivering almost all of e-mail to outlook there are few tries which ending with "Connection timed out". When I was checking this IP with telnet on server or locally - this IP's are not active and I'm getting timeouts. Tried to force flush DNS cache every minute on server - it won't help. When I checked A records for MX it looks like outlook is giving 4 IP's which are changing very often.
So it looks like postfix is trying to send e-mails to servers which are somehow cached from previous attempts.
Is there any solution to force postfix to resolve MX/A before sending each mail?
AKS/K8S: Increase Windows container C: filesystem size
7 May 2026 @ 4:09 am
We are migrating a container workload to AKS which previously ran onprem under Docker Swarm.
The containers are spun up, process jobs from a queue, post their results to a service elsewhere on the network, then exit so the orchestrator can restart them as a clean slate for the next task. As part of the workload, each container generates a substantial amount of temporary data files that are intended to be discarded when the current operation completes, so are not mapped to any volume.
Of note here is that these are Windows containers rather than Linux; this particular workload is locked to running on the Windows platform, so changing OS is not viable.
What we are seeing inside the container is C#'s DriveInfo type reporting a freshly started container as having a C: sized at slightly less than 20GB, almost all of it "free" (clearly not counting the size of the running image). This is despite the host node having
windows GPO prevent alternate wifi when in range
6 May 2026 @ 10:40 pm
I'm trying to get our domain connected windows laptops to only connect to our wifi network when it is in range but I still want the users to be able to connect to other networks when away from site. Google has the option "restrict only if a managed Wi-Fi network is in range" that can accomplish this for chromebooks. Is there an option to accomplish this via Group policy?
Is there a way/tool to block an IP address in IIS based on a request path, at the server level?
6 May 2026 @ 6:04 pm
I recently implemented Filebeat on my IIS server to parse and send logs to an ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for tracking threats and monitoring performance on my server. I have found that a few times a day one or more of our domains will get flooded with hundreds of requests. They are most often GET or POST requests for various .php files.
I know there are official ways to configure temporary blocks based on floods of requests using dynamic blocking in IIS. There are times that some of my sites might legitimately receive a flood of requests, so I have been hesitant to do that.
None of my sites run php so what I would love to have would be a tool or configuration that, at the server level, can watch request paths for php files and just blackhole all future requests from that IP for some period of time. I already have my server set up to automatically return a 404 for any php file, or any of the other frequently scanned paths like wordpress, before calling
ASP.NET tempDirectory shared for multiple apps?
6 May 2026 @ 8:57 am
If we have multiple ASP.NET Framework 4.7.2 web apps deployed on the same IIS server, can we specify the same TempDirectory? Meaning the attribute TempDirectory of the web.config compilation section under system.web.
It looks like the system puts the actual files in some structure of sub folders, so it looks like there will be separation. But I'm not sure...
In case it matters, several of our web apps are the same code base, but with different configurations per site and virtual folder.
When will DSClosestFlag of the DC Locator be set to 1?
6 May 2026 @ 8:55 am
Imagine an environment with two sites, HQ and Branch. Both sites have a domain controller.
A client from Branch wants to locate the optimal domain controller, and it so happens that the first query is performed against a domain controller from HQ.
The most optimal domain controller should be the one from the Branch site. However HQ is the closest site to Branch. Will DSClosestFlag then be 1? Or does the domain controller know that there is a dedicated domain controller in Branch and therefore set it to 0?
If the flag is 1, this would lead to selection of a non-optimal domain controller? I have already checked the official Microsoft documentation, but with the wording it is not exactly clear to me, when the domain controller thinks it is closest or not.
Suspicious GET requests errors in Nginx log
6 May 2026 @ 12:28 am
I'm checking Nginx logs by tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log, the Nginx is running in docker container, and seeing below errors:
root@8cf99e6a536b:/# tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log
2026/05/05 17:00:21 [error] 177#177: *126041 open() "/var/www/html/public/xi-xing-ji-season-3-episode-18-subtitle-indonesia" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 47.141.29.68, server: server.com, request: "GET /xi-xing-ji-season-3-episode-18-subtitle-indonesia HTTP/1.1", host: "anichin.dev", referrer: "https://anichin.dev/"
2026/05/05 17:00:39 [error] 177#177: *126043 open() "/var/www/html/public/ads.txt" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 192.184.75.253, server: server.com, request: "GET /ads.txt HTTP/1.1", host: "server.com"
2026/05/05 17:03:35 [error] 176#176: *126049 open() "/var/www/html/public/ads.txt" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 192.184.75.253, server