Recently, I had to configure some security headers in GitLab. GitLab uses Nginx as its web server, and it allows for easy configuration changes for some settings. For instance, enabling HTTP to HTTPS redirection can be done simply by setting nginx['redirect_http_to_https'] = true in the gitlab.rb configuration file.

However …

The nginx http_limit_conn module to limit http connections works as advertised. It limits the number of connections an ip-address (or other directives) can make to the nginx.

Also: the Ansible hardening-role for nginx as a default limit of 5 connections (see).

This bit me hard: One website I host makes …

UPDATE: Google no longer supports spdy. Instead it focuses on http/2. This blog-post is no longer up-to-date.

Today I tested nginx with Google’s spdy implementation.I already tested pagespeed separatly in a different post that showed the speed-boost gained from it. Now to add the security for you …

When I initially set up my server for this blog and my small photography-website I didn’t really think about securing it against attacks. But one day I looked into the “secure”-logfile of my server and was greeted with this:

Apr 24 04:38:23 vps9533 sshd[21882]: pam_unix …

Today I tested the new plugin for nginx developed Google: ngx_pagespeed. It’s the equivalent for nginx to apache’s mod_pagespeed.

Installation

Just go to the github page for ngx_pagespeed and the follow the instructions there.I used the alpha-r2748-build.

Sidenote: With it I ran into a problem with the …