I’ve been a lighty user for many years now, having junked apache when it became obviously overweight for my target devices (the slugs in particular). Trivia is, of course, powered by lighty as are all my other websites.
Lighty’s configuration file syntax is reasonably simple to understand, and is well documented on the Redmine wiki. The guys at Calomel.org have also put together quite a nice introduction to lighty. If you haven’t tried it, and find that apache is becoming too much of a resource hog for you, I’d recommend that you give lighty a run.
I use lighty’s access control mechanisms to prevent random bots and bad guys from reaching trivia’s administrative functions and I do this in much the same way as I limit access to my ssh and openvpn daemons – I restrict access to the fixed IP address assigned to my router by my ISP. So in the lighty virtual host configuration file I use the following construct:
$HTTP[“remoteip”] != “12.34.56.78” {
$HTTP[“url”] =~ “^/wp-admin/” {
url.access-deny = (“”)
}
That says: if the remote IP address is not 12.34.56.78, then deny access to the wp-admin directory.
Now I have several virtual hosts running and I also protect several directories. I also use a similar construct to redirect all my own access to my websites to https on port 443 so that I can always be certain that my own connection is encrypted and my authentication credentials will be protected. This means, of course, that I have several entries of the form: “if this IP address, then take this action” dotted around my configuration files. Not good. A recent change of ISP meant that my IP address has changed and I needed to edit my configuration files or find myself locked out. The most important files to change were my iptables rules so that I could still get ssh access on all my VMs. This didn’t take long because I have all the important configuration details (ssh IP addresses and ports, openvpn port, DNS addresses etc.) defined at the head of the bash script. One change is all that is necessary and bash variable substitution takes care of the rest. But my lighty configuration files were a different matter and I had to check carefully to ensure that I didn’t miss an important change. That’s just daft. Surely lighty allows for variable assignment and substitution? And of course it does, I just hadn’t checked before now.
The syntax looks like this:
At the head of the configuration file make an entry of the form:
# set our fixed remote ip address used in access control
var.IP = “23.45.67.89”
and then change the earlier configuration lines to:
$HTTP[“remoteip”] != var.IP {
$HTTP[“url”] =~ “^/wp-admin/” {
url.access-deny = (“”)
}
Simple, and I feel a complete idiot for not noticing this before.